Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of all Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices in the Canada (Central) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) Regions. You can now synthesize all NTTS voices in this Region, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to synthesize over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

AWS License Manager automated discovery now allows customers to exclude instances that do not need license payment per a customer’s licensing agreements. AWS License Manager automatically tracks instances across AWS and on-premises environments based on customer defined rules. While configuring automated discovery, administrators can now define exclusion rules using custom defined tags or AWS Account IDs to identify instances that should not count towards license usage. It helps automated discovery exclude instances that matches these rules and thus further simplifies the management of software licenses.

AWS IoT Core now enables customers to customize the behavior of their data endpoints, making it simpler to onboard IoT applications with existing devices in the field. Customers can now configure their data endpoints with custom domain names and associated server certificates stored in AWS Certificate Manager. They can also attach custom authorizers , and create multiple data endpoints for their account.

AWS Backup, a cost-effective, fully managed, policy-based service that further simplifies data protection at scale, is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. With AWS Backup, you can centralize and automate data protection across AWS services and accounts, to support your regulatory compliance obligations and meet your business continuity goals.

Today Amazon Lookout for Metrics is generally available to all AWS customers. Lookout for Metrics is a machine learning (ML) service that detects anomalies or unexpected changes in your metrics, helping you proactively monitor the health of your business, diagnose issues and find opportunities quickly – with no ML experience required.

AWS Security Hub is now integrated with Amazon Macie to automatically ingest sensitive data findings from Macie. Security Hub previously ingested policy findings from Macie, and this integration adds sensitive data findings. All of Security Hub’s findings are automatically normalized using the AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF), enabling you to more easily search, correlate, and operationalize them. To get started, visit the Settings page in the Macie console and select Security Hub as a publish destination for sensitive data findings. You can also learn more about how to discover sensitive data in the Macie documentation .

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) One Zone is now available in the Asia (Osaka) Region, reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes, while maintaining the Amazon EFS capabilities that customers love.

We are excited to announce the launch of the updated Advanced Architecting on AWS course. This instructor-led training course is designed for cloud architects who want to extend their baseline knowledge of AWS services. An expert AWS instructor will help you learn advanced architecting topics such as hybrid connectivity and hybrid AWS devices, networking with a focus on AWS Transit Gateway connectivity, AWS Container services, automation tools for CI/CD, security options, and much more.

Now you can use AWS CloudTrail to log data-plane API activity to monitor, alarm, and archive item-level activity in your Amazon DynamoDB tables. You can use this information about item-level activity as part of an audit, to help address compliance requirements, and monitor which AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, roles, and permissions are being used to access your table data. 

With this new release of the AWS Toolkit for VS Code, customers can use federated credentials, MFA and AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) to connect Visual Studio Code to AWS. Using AWS SSO, users can sign in to their organization’s Active Directory, a built-in AWS SSO directory, or another external identity provider (IdP) connected to AWS SSO. Regardless of which IdP you use, AWS SSO abstracts those distinctions away, and they all work with the AWS Toolkit, as explained in this short blog post .