Amazon QuickSight now supports Waterfall charts. Waterfall charts show how any metric is affected positively or negatively by a series of contributing factors. Dashboard authors can create a waterfall chart by choosing this new visual type from the visuals menu. See here for more details.  

AWS RoboMaker WorldForge now supports tag-on-create for 3D simulation worlds, world generation jobs, and world export jobs. RoboMaker WorldForge is a capability that makes it faster, easier, and less expensive to create a multitude of 3D simulation worlds for testing and training robots. By tagging worlds at the time of creation, you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after world creation, which can save time and make it easier to manage simulation worlds.  

Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin version 1.7 is now the default for newly created Amazon EKS clusters.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the launch of the updated AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials digital course. If you’re new to the cloud—whether you’re in a technical or nontechnical role—this course will help you understand the fundamental concepts of the AWS Cloud. As a result, you can build your skills and confidence while contributing to your organization’s cloud initiatives.  

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Today, we are launching support for French, Spanish, Italian and Canadian French. With these new languages, you can build and expand your conversational experiences to better understand and engage your customer base. Amazon Lex can be applied to a diverse set of use cases such as virtual agents, conversational IVR systems, self-service chatbots, or application bots.  

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs now offer Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS) compliant endpoints in the US Commercial and Canada (Central) AWS Regions. FIPS 140-2 is a U.S. and Canadian government standard that specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information.

You can now create custom endpoints for Amazon Neptune to access your workload. Custom endpoints allow you to distribute your workload across a designated set of instances within a Neptune cluster.

Amazon Lightsail now provides you with the ability to run containerized workloads on the cloud with little-to-no prior cloud experience. With this native service, called Lightsail Containers, you can now deploy containerized applications to the cloud using the Docker images directly from your desktop or from the ones in public registries like DockerHub – with just a few clicks, through an easy to use interface. Lightsail takes care of all the infrastructure management complexities and allows you to focus on your application code. Lightsail Containers come with the same predictable pricing as its other offerings with prices starting at $7/month for a Container Service.

Amazon Personalize now allows you to apply business rules to your recommendations on the fly; without any extra cost. Dynamic filters save you time by removing the need to define all possible permutations of your business rules in advance and enable you to use your most recent information to filter recommendations. You control the recommendations for your users in real-time while responding to their individual needs, preferences, and changing behavior to improve engagement and conversion. Based on over 20 years of personalization experience, Amazon Personalize enables you to improve customer engagement by powering personalized product and content recommendations, and targeted marketing promotions.

Amazon QuickSight has added a powerful new data governance feature: Column Level Security (CLS). This feature compliments the existing Row Level Security (RLS) feature and, in combination, gives authors control over who can access what data within their visualizations. CLS enables dataset owners to apply restrictions on a per column basis. This ensures that users only see columns that they are allowed to see. For example, a dataset owner could set up their dataset so that only members of a Human Resources group could see salary information, while everyone can see less sensitive information, like first and last name. CLS can be configured on a dataset through the QuickSight interface and through APIs. See here to learn more.