AWS Step Functions now supports payload sizes up to 256KB. Previously, the limit was 32,768 characters. Now, you can pass larger payloads in your standard and express workflows, allowing Step Functions to seamlessly coordinate multiple services like AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS that already support larger payloads. 

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL version 11.8, 10.13 and 9.6.16 in all regions. This release contains bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community, and improved TLS support from PG12.

Starting today, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL supports the RDKit extension. The RDKit extension allows cheminformatics to deal with manipulation of chemical structures, fingerprinting search functions and molecular structure matching. Using PostgreSQL as a datastore, you can interact with several built-in functions to compare, manipulate and identify molecular structures via standard SQL.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). For a full list of the Regions where AWS SSO is available, see the AWS Region Table. 

We’re pleased to announce a free new digital course from AWS Training and Certification: Amazon FSx for Lustre Primer. This course explains how to get started with Amazon FSx for Lustre, a fully managed file system service for machine learning, high performance computing, and other workloads.

AWS Storage Gateway increases performance for reading data from Amazon S3 for File Gateway, providing you 4x faster access to data managed through the gateway.  

The AWS Streaming Data Solution for Amazon Kinesis is an AWS Solutions Implementation that provides an automated configuration of the AWS services necessary to easily capture, store, process, and deliver streaming data. This solution helps you solve for several real-time streaming use cases like capturing high volume application logs, analyzing clickstream data, continuously delivering to a data lake to name a few. To provide flexibility to adapt to different use cases and business needs, this solution offers two deployment options. Developers can use this solution to test new service combinations as the basis for their production environment, or to improve an existing application they have already implemented.

Patch Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to deploy patches automatically to instances running any current versions of Ubuntu. Until now, Patch Manager supported current versions of Ubuntu up to 18.04. With this release, Patch Manager now supports Ubuntu’s latest version – Ubuntu 20.04.  

Starting today, AWS customers can use AWS PrivateLink to access Amazon Textract from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the Internet. Amazon Textract is a fully managed machine learning service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents and goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR), to identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without leaving the AWS network.