Today we are announcing the launch of a second Local Zone in Los Angeles (LA), California. You can now design your applications to run in both Local Zones in LA to achieve high availability and even greater fault-tolerance. Both Local Zones in LA are interconnected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, over fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber providing high-throughput, low-latency networking between them. 

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now has launched an open-source Extended Client Library for Java that enables you to publish and deliver messages with payloads up to 2GB. Previously, message payloads were supported up to 256KB. Using the Extended Client Library, you can store the message payloads larger than 256KB in an S3 bucket and use SNS to publish and deliver a reference to the payload location.  

Distributor, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, allows you to select from available popular third-party agents to install and manage on your instances. With this launch, you can select to install the pre-built Dynatrace OneAgent directly from Distributor without having to create or maintain any software packages. AWS will continue to seek opportunities to offer many other popular security and monitoring agents.  

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in just a few clicks, now supports Amazon EventBridge as a destination.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2019 CU5 for Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise Editions on the Windows operating systems. You can now leverage SQL Server 2019 features such as accelerated database recovery (ADR), Intelligent Query Processing (IQP), intelligent performance features, and resumable index rebuilds on your Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instances. 

New Elastic Block Store (EBS) Provisioned IOPS volume, io2, features higher durability of 99.999%, and supports provisioning 500 IOPS for every provisioned GB. This means that with io2, customers get 100x better volume durability and a 10x higher IOPS to storage ratio – all at the same price as io1. io2 is ideal for performance intensive, business critical applications such as SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 that will benefit from higher uptime.

We are pleased to announce the first blockchain course from AWS Training and Certification. This new course, Introduction to Blockchain , is a free, on-demand, 60-minute digital course for both technical and non-technical learners.

CloudTrail Insights now helps you correlate user identities, user agents, and error codes associated with unusual levels of API activity. Now, you can identify the IAM users and roles with the highest levels of API activity during both periods of anomalous activity, and normal activity. This capability helps you analyze and act on anomalies without manually searching through a large number of CloudTrail events.

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the availability of StackSets to AWS GovCloud (US-East), EU (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong). StackSets allows you to centrally manage deployments of resources to multiple accounts and regions in a single operation enabling you to easily deploy a baseline level of functionality to your accounts before they are actively used. StackSets is also integrated with AWS Organizations so you can take advantage of automatic deployments whenever an account enters an Organization.

Starting September 21, 2020, the price of sending SMS messages to India will be updated from $0.00223 to $0.00303 per message. This price increase is driven by Indian regulatory and carrier changes affecting all SMS messages sent to India.