We are delighted to announce that Amazon Lex now supports Japanese. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text and natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities to recognize the intent of the text, enabling you to build applications with lifelike conversational interactions. Now you can deliver a robust and localized conversational experience that understands Japanese. You can also respond to users with natural sounding Amazon Polly Japanese voices and provide a fully localized, voice experience.

AWS Batch customers can now specify EFS file systems in their AWS Batch job definitions. AWS Batch jobs using EFS will automatically mount the file systems specified by the customer in the job definition and make them available to the jobs, across Availability Zones. This enables persistent, shared storage to be defined and used at the job level.

AWS WAF announces the launch of AWS WAF Bot Control, which gives you visibility and control over common and pervasive bots that consume excess resources, skew metrics, cause downtime, or perform other undesired activities. With Bot Control, you can easily monitor, block, or rate-limit pervasive bots, such as scrapers, scanners, and crawlers, or you can allow common bots, such as status monitors and search engines. You can add the Bot Control managed rule group alongside other Managed Rules for WAF or your own custom WAF rules to protect your applications.

AWS Firewall Manager now supports Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, making it easy for security administrators to identify the set of DNS Firewall rules they wish to use and deploy across their organization, from a central place. AWS recently launched Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, a managed firewall feature that enables customers to block DNS queries made for known malicious domains and to allow queries for trusted domains. DNS Firewall provides more granular control over the DNS querying behavior of resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). Now that Firewall Manager supports DNS Firewall, you can identify the set of DNS Firewall rules you wish to use and deploy them across multiple accounts, organizational units (OUs), and VPCs, all from a single central security administrator account.

Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g and R6g instances with EMR Versions 6.1.0, 5.31.0 and later in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors that are custom designed by AWS utilizing 64-bit ArmNeoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. Please read our blog for more information.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs now makes it easier to query VPC flow logs using Amazon Athena. With a few clicks, you can now automate the integration between Athena and your VPC flow logs delivered to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). You can also choose from a set of predefined Athena queries to derive actionable insight such as the total egress traffic from your VPCs, identify the top talkers in your subnets, or troubleshoot anomalies in your VPC traffic.

You can now configure budgets actions to enforce budget limits for your AWS Budgets resources in your AWS CloudFormation templates, stacks, and StackSets. With budget actions, you can define the action you want to take in your account when a budget exceeds the threshold you defined (actual or forecasted amounts). This level of control will allow you to reduce unintentional overspending in your account. You can choose among three action types: Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy, Service Control policy (SCPs), or target running instances (EC2 or RDS). For example, you can choose to apply a custom “Deny EC2 Run Instances” IAM policy to a user, group, or role in your account, once your monthly budget for EC2 has been exceeded. With the same budget threshold, you can configure a second action that shuts down specific EC2 instances within a particular AWS Region.

Patches 1.9.1 / 2.7.1 / 3.4.1 / 4.0.1 now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. For detailed release notes visit our version documentation . You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API. For detailed instructions, please see our technical documentation .

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters running in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions are now compliant with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High baseline.

AWS Firewall Manager now enables security administrators to deploy the recently launched AWS WAF Bot Control across accounts in their organization, from a central administrator account. AWS WAF Bot Control is a new managed rule group that gives you visibility and control over common and pervasive bot traffic to your applications. You can use Bot Control to protect your web applications from automated bots that consume excess resources, skew metrics, cause downtime, or perform other malicious activities.