AWS Training and Certification launched a new course entitled AWS Cloud Technical Essentials. Available for free on Coursera and edX, this course uses video lectures and demonstrations to teach the technical fundamentals of AWS. Upon course completion, learners will be able to make an informed decision about when and how to apply core AWS services for compute, storage, and database to different use cases.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL now offers rollback protection for major version upgrades.

The Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Instance Refresh feature enables customers to update the EC2 instances in their Auto Scaling groups on a rolling basis. Now, Instance Refresh gives customers more control over the update process by letting them configure Instance Refresh checkpoints to phase their deployments. An Instance Refresh checkpoint specifies what percent of the Auto Scaling group’s instances should be replaced and how long to wait before continuing with the rolling update. This gives customers time to perform any necessary validation or testing steps at various checkpoints.

Amazon Comprehend now supports identification of text documents that contain personally identifiable information (PII). You can use Amazon Comprehend’s Contains PII API synchronously to discover documents that contain PII, to set up alarms and control access on documents with sensitive information. Amazon Comprehend’s machine learning models find documents that contain PII information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and email addresses and allow you to target the PII of your choice.

Amazon Connect analytics users can now define queue service levels to measure the percentage of customer contacts answered by an agent between 1 second and 7 days for both real-time and historical metrics.  

Starting today, you can use AWS Elemental MediaConnect to transport live video using the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol. With the addition of SRT, you have more flexibility and compatibility for creating highly reliable, low-latency live video transport workflows.

The new AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) app, found in the Azure Active Directory app gallery, makes it easier to use your Azure AD identities for sign-in across multiple AWS accounts and AWS SSO integrated applications. Customers who want a centralized way to manage Azure AD users and groups across AWS can use the app to connect Azure AD to AWS SSO once. Customers can then manage permissions to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable users to sign in using Azure AD to access assigned AWS accounts and applications, such as Amazon SageMaker Studio Notebooks.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of an update to Amazon GameLift, which increases global coverage for developers, while providing seamless, low-latency gameplay experiences for players worldwide. Trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Gungho and Ubisoft, GameLift deploys, operates, and scales dedicated servers for multiplayer games. With this update, you as a game developer can now tap into six new regions (from 15 to 21), while also getting up and running faster from simpler fleet management.  

AWS introduces the Developer Preview of its opinionated deployment tool for .NET cloud-native applications. Using this tool, developers can now deploy their .NET applications in just a few easy steps from the .NET CLI.  

Today, AWS X-Ray launches Insights in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. X-Ray Insights helps customers proactively discover issues in applications by using anomaly detection. it also enables developers and DevOps engineers to detect anomalies in fault rate for an application and then notify their teams on these issues and why it occurred.