With v2.0.0 of the Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose Producer for Apache Flink, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now enables Apache Flink applications to send data directly to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The new version adds support for the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Assume Role credentials provider, includes bug fixes, and updates the AWS SDK and other dependencies.  

Amazon Redshift launched native spatial data processing support in November 2019, with a polymorphic data type GEOMETRY, and more than 40 SQL spatial functions. This capability enables you to store, retrieve, and process spatial data so you can enhance your business insights by integrating spatial data into your analytical queries. Now, Amazon Redshift supports over 30 new spatial functions such as validation, simplification of geometries, new spatial relationships like “Crosses” and “ContainsProperly”. Furthermore, Amazon Redshift enhanced the spatial functionality with multiple capabilities such as ODBC/JDBC support for GEOMETRY data, support for importing spatial data in Shapefile format, and spatial join performance improvements. 

AWS Systems Manager Explorer now supports new service customizations to help you easily discover and personalize operational data sources based on their business needs. Systems Manager Explorer is an operations dashboard that provides a view of your operations data across your AWS accounts and Regions, helping you see where you may need to investigate and remediate operational issues. 

Amazon Personalize is now available in Europe (Frankfurt). Amazon Personalize is a machine learning service which enables you to personalize your website, app, ads, emails, and more, with custom machine learning models which can be created in Amazon Personalize, with no prior machine learning experience.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports streaming applications built using Apache Beam Java SDK version 2.23. Apache Beam is an open-source, unified model for defining streaming and batch data processing applications that can be executed across multiple execution engines. This release allows you to build Apache Beam streaming applications in Java and run them using Apache Flink 1.8 on Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, Apache Spark running on-premises, and other execution engines supported by Apache.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Lex now supports British English. Starting today, you can build a conversational interface in British English and deploy it across a variety of use cases such as interactive voice response systems, self-service chatbots, and application bots.

AWS Organizations added new capabilities to its existing support for tagging AWS accounts in your organization. Now you can attach tags, or user-defined attributes, to Organizational Units (OUs) , the organization’s root and policies thus enabling you to easily identify, classify, or categorize resources in your organization. You can also tag these resources as you create them, giving you a convenient way to ensure that all your AWS Organizations resources are always tagged.  

HIPAA Eligible AWS Services deployed in AWS Wavelength can now be used to process Protected Health Information. If you have an executed Business Associate Addendum (BAA) with AWS, you can use HIPAA Eligible AWS Services deployed in AWS Wavelength to process encrypted Protected Health Information (PHI). For more information, please visit our page on HIPAA compliance. If you plan to process, store, or transmit PHI and do not have an executed BAA from AWS, please contact us for more information.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs for Snapshots are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Using Amazon EBS direct APIs, customers can create snapshots of their block storage data, regardless of where it resides, including data on-premises. This enables customers to achieve business continuity in AWS at a lower cost and use the existing Fast Snapshot Restore feature to quickly recover this data into Amazon EBS volumes for use cases like disaster recovery.

Available on Coursera, the new Real-World Product Management series is a collection of four digital courses developed by Advancing Women in Product (AWIP) and sponsored by AWS. Designed for current or aspiring PMs, this series dives into product-management skills desired by top employers.