Starting today, you can queue purchases of Savings Plans by specifying a time of your choosing in the future to execute those purchases.

AWS has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances to Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore), and South America (São Paulo). Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips, which AWS custom-designed to provide high performance and lowest cost machine learning inference in the cloud.  

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics enhances its debugging capability by embedding AWS X-Ray traces to help you trace ‘ canary runs’ and determine the root cause of the failure. When a canary has tracing enabled, traces are sent for calls made by the canary. Canaries with tracing enabled appear on the service map in both CloudWatch ServiceLens and in AWS X-Ray, even when they don’t send requests to other services or applications that have tracing enabled.

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that enables customers to automatically extract text and data, including from tables and forms within scanned documents and images. As a fully managed service, Textract delivers continuous improvement over time. Today, we are pleased to announce a few quality enhancements to both our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature and the forms recognition feature. The new OCR model detects the degree symbol (°) and the currency symbols of Chinese Yuan (CNY ¥), Japanese Yen (JPY ¥), Indian Rupee (₹), British Pound (£), and the US Dollar ($) more precisely than before.

AWS Training and Certification has launched a new course with three programming language options: Building Modern Java Applications on AWS, Building Modern Node.js Applications on AWS, and Building Modern Python Applications on AWS.

AWS Graviton2-based database instances in preview for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now support more database versions. Graviton2 M6g and R6g database instances deliver better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based database instances. You can launch these database instances when using Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. With this launch, Graviton2 is now supported on RDS MySQL versions 8.0.17, 8.0.19, and 8.0.20 and RDS PostgreSQL 12.3, and 12.4. Support for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS for MariaDB is coming soon.

AWS Security Hub has released 14 new automated security controls for the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard related to AWS EC2 (EC2.7 and EC2.8), Amazon EMR (EMR.1), AWS KMS (KMS.1 and KMS.2), Amazon RDS (RDS.4, RDS.5, RDS.6, RDS.7, and RDS.8), Amazon S3 (S3.6), and AWS Secrets Manager (SecretsManager.1 and SecretsManager.2). Security Hub now supports 90 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.  

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces expansion of AWS Ground Station to the Africa (Cape Town) region. This is now the seventh region within the AWS Global Infrastructure Network and the second region in the Southern hemisphere to offer AWS Ground Station.  

You can use Amazon DynamoDB backup and restore to create on-demand and continuous backups of your DynamoDB tables—and then restore from those backups. You also can restore DynamoDB table backups as new tables in other AWS Regions. Starting today, you can restore table backups as new tables in the Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Europe (Milan), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions. 

You can now use AWS Lake Formation in the Europe (Milan) region.