You can now use Cruise Control to more easily scale and balance I/O in your Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters. Cruise Control is a popular tool among Apache Kafka users because it drastically simplifies partition management. Cruise Control can also be used to monitor the state and health of clusters using an optional user interface dashboard.

Amazon Connect now provides an API to programmatically create and manage user hierarchies. User hierarchies are a way for you to organize users into groups such as what location they work in or which department they are a part of. With this launch, you can now programmatically mirror your organization’s hierarchy in Amazon Connect as changes are made in your internal systems of record, such as HR systems. Additionally, you can extract all hierarchy and agent data as a point-in-time snapshot and copy it into a different instance. To learn more, see the API documentation .

To provide enhanced performance and read scalability, Amazon RDS on VMware adds support for read replicas across Custom Availability Zones for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. You can create cross-custom-availability-zone read replicas of a DB instance to serve read traffic in one region, thereby increasing aggregate read throughput. A read replica can also be promoted to become a standalone DB instance if the source DB instance fails.  

The AWS Snowcone service is now available for order for customers in the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region. With this launch, Snowcone is now available for order in EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices. Snowcone is portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and able to withstand harsh environments. Customers use Snowcone to deploy applications at the edge, and to collect data, process it locally, and move it to AWS either offline (by shipping the device to AWS) or online (by using AWS DataSync on Snowcone to send the data to AWS over the network).

AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS Network Firewall, making it easy for security administrators to centrally configure and deploy Network Firewall rules across their organization. AWS recently launched AWS Network Firewall, a highly available, managed firewall service that gives customers enhanced control and visibility of all traffic leaving and entering their network. With Firewall Manager support, customers can centrally manage the deployment of Network Firewall rules across accounts, organizational units (OUs), and Amazon virtual private clouds (VPCs) in their organization.

AWS IQ has released two new features to support firms: Project Manager role and group chat. The project manager role allows any US based individual in a firm to view requests, speak with customers, submit proposals, and request payments, without requiring an AWS Certification. Project Managers can then add an AWS Certified expert to the conversation to complete the hands on work in the customer’s account.  

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports customizing the default launch settings on the Chrome browser with a new minor runtime version, syn-nodejs-2.1. This allows for more flexibility in the canary launched browser settings such as viewport, setting chromium flags, and handling errors. With syn-nodejs-2.1, you can also configure canary scripts to not take screenshots on a canary step, thereby reducing costs, and avoiding screenshots for sensitive data. 

AWS CloudFormation is extending change sets to support applications modeled with nested stacks, enhancing the predictability of update operations. With this launch, you can now preview the changes to your application and infrastructure resources across the entire nested stack hierarchy and proceed with the update only when you confirm that all the changes are as intended.  

The Amazon Chime SDK is a service that makes it easy for developers to add real-time audio, video, and screen sharing capabilities to their applications. Starting today, the service connects to the global phone network so that attendees can dial into an Amazon Chime SDK meeting using a telephone. The feature also lets you programmatically place an outbound call to a phone number and connect the call to a meeting session. Previously, attendees were able to join Amazon Chime SDK meeting audio using voice over IP (VoIP) in mobile and web applications.

Starting today, you can launch R5, C5, and T3 instance types when using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to migrate your databases. You can easily scale up to these new instance classes by modifying your existing replication instance through the AWS DMS, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK.