Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you configure your Auto Scaling group with multiple launch templates when you use a MixedInstancesPolicy and specify multiple instance types. After EC2 Auto Scaling released support for multiple instance types within a single Auto Scaling group, customers have been looking for ways to launch different instance types using different Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) so that instances with incompatible CPU architectures can exist in the same Auto Scaling group. With this enhancement you can now specify a launch template alongside the instance type in the overrides of your MixedInstancesPolicy, and that launch template will be used whenever launching instances of its corresponding instance type. 

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that makes it easy to extract printed text, handwriting, and data from virtually any document. Today, we are pleased to announce that Amazon Textract supports encryption of its asynchronous API output stored in your Amazon S3 buckets using your own AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Customer Master Keys (CMKs). With this feature, you have the flexibility to manage which encryption keys are used to protect your data and text extracted by Amazon Textract. For more information on how to accomplish this, please read our newest blog post .  

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now introduces new policy defaults for passwords of IAM users. This policy improves the default security for all AWS customers by ensuring customers set stronger passwords for IAM users in their AWS accounts. 

AWS Backup now supports cross-account backup, enabling AWS customers to securely copy backups across accounts within their AWS Organizations.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are available in Europe (London) and Canada (Central) regions. Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances deliver up to 40% better price/performance over comparable x86-based instances for a broad spectrum of workloads, including application servers, micro-services, high-performance computing, CPU-based machine learning inference, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and in-memory caches.

Amazon Cognito is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) and Europe (Paris) Regions. Amazon Cognito is the easiest way to add authentication, authorization, and user management to your web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect. 

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, now supports automated, multi-region replication of your directory. Now you can deploy and use a single AWS Managed Microsoft AD (Enterprise Edition) directory across multiple AWS Regions. This makes it easier and more cost-effective for you to deploy and manage your Microsoft Windows and Linux workloads globally. With the automated multi-region replication capability you get higher resiliency, while your applications use a local directory for optimal performance. 

AWS Service Catalog administrators can now add Service Catalog governance to their existing AWS CloudFormation stacks. Once imported into Service Catalog, administrators can manage stack updates, govern parameters, and enforce tagging. With this new feature, long-running stacks can be governed while leaving the underlying resources untouched.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports the ability to reload dictionary files without reindexing your data. Elasticsearch uses analyzers to convert string data into terms or tokens that power its search capabilities. These analyzers can do things like remove white space and stop words, perform stemming, handle compound words, and add synonyms. Previously, on Amazon Elasticsearch Service these analyzers could only process data as it was indexed. If you wanted to add some additional synonyms at a later time, you had to reindex your data with the new dictionary file.