Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Amazon Timestream can now be used for workloads that are subject to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

We are excited to announce that all Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types now receive CloudWatch metrics with 1-minute granularity at no additional cost. You can use CloudWatch metrics to monitor the performance and status of your Amazon EBS volumes. Additionally, you can use CloudWatch alarms to automatically perform actions or send SNS Topics based on CloudWatch Metrics.

AWS Direct Connect is now live at Equinix ML2, Milano, Italy. This is the second Direct Connect location in Italy. Equinix ML2 compliments the existing CDLAN Srl in Via Caldera 21, Milano, Italy Direct Connect location. Customers in Italy can use both Milan locations to deploy location-redundant connectivity.

The AWS Shield Advanced dashboard now displays additional mitigation metrics and network traffic timeline details for events detected on protected resources. This also includes details about the actions automatically taken to mitigate DDoS attacks. You can use this information to more easily evaluate your applications when an unexpected increase in traffic is detected by Shield Advanced and better understand the actions taken by Shield Advanced to protect your availability.

Amazon Redshift, the most widely used cloud data warehouse, doubles the managed storage capacity for RA3.16XL and RA3.4XL node-types to 128 TB per node. If your data is growing rapidly, doubling the managed storage quota will help you analyze even more data without increasing your compute cost or changing your workload.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) , a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, now supports JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) syntax to help you read and write data from other systems more easily. 

Starting today, customers can use Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs to create EBS snapshots in the Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) Region directly from any block storage data, including on-premises data. With a set of API calls, customers can use EBS snapshots to store data in AWS, regardless of where it resides. This enables customers to achieve business continuity in AWS at a lower cost.

Starting today, the latest generation of burstable, general purpose Amazon EC2 T4g instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney), Europe (London), North Amreicas (Canada Central, San Francisco), and South Americas (Sao Paulo) regions. These instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. The T4g instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. They offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads, including large scale micro-services, caching servers, search engine indexing, e-commerce platforms, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, and business-critical applications.  

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application. Today, Amazon Lex launches an enhanced, V2 management console and APIs that make it easier to build, deploy and manage bots. With the Lex V2 console and revised APIs, you can expedite your process in building virtual agents, conversational IVR system, self-service chatbots, or informational bots.

In a conversation, we often pause to lookup information or interrupt a speaker with an answer before they finish asking a question. Today we are launching streaming conversation APIs, so you can easily configure your bot to handle such pauses and interruptions that might occur in a conversation. With streaming capabilities, bot builders can quickly enhance the ability of virtual contact center agents and smart assistants.