You can now use Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud configurations in the Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan) Regions.

Docker and Amazon Web Services have announced a simplified developer experience to deploy and manage containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) directly from Docker tools. Now, customers can use Docker Desktop and Docker Compose to deploy containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) using the AWS Fargate launch type. After customers build and test containers locally using Docker Desktop and Docker Compose, they can now deploy them to Fargate on ECS through the same CLI.  

Starting today, AWS Firewall Manager is available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and Middle East (Bahrain), extending the total to 18 AWS Regions and all Amazon CloudFront edge locations.

You can now use AWS Organizations to manage the use of your content by some AWS machine learning services. Certain services (Amazon CodeGuru Profiler, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Translate) may use content to improve the service. Previously, you could opt out of this use by contacting AWS Support. This new feature allows you to configure an organizational policy to opt out, without the need to contact AWS Support, and to have your configuration applied to all accounts within an organization. 

AWS now offers the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Storage. MAP for Storage provides services, best practices, and tools to help our customers save costs, accelerate their migrations, and modernize their storage workloads on AWS.

AWS Direct Connect is now live at MedOne in Haifa, Israel. This is the first AWS Direct Connect location in Israel. Customers in Israel can now locally establish a dedicated network connection from their on-premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections. With global access for AWS Direct Connect, you can reach AWS resources in any global AWS region from any AWS Direct Connect locations using global public virtual interface(s) and Direct Connect gateway. When connecting to any AWS region, your data will not hairpin via the associated AWS region for the location if it is not in the shortest path to your desired AWS region. 

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. Starting today, you can assign AWS resource tags to Spot Instance requests on creation, in addition to the tags for each individual, launched Spot Instance.. Use tags in your Spot Instance requests to more easily identify their purpose. For example, you can use tags to identify all Spot Instance requests used by a particular department, project, or application. 

AWS Firewall Manager has introduced new pre-configured rules to help customers audit their VPC security groups and get detailed reports of non-compliance from a central administrator account. This feature makes it easier for customers to centrally audit their security groups using pre-configured rules they can readily enable out of box across their accounts and resources, taking away the heavy-lifting of configuring custom audit checks manually.  

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can use AWS PrivateLink to access Amazon Kendra from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs or requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet. AWS PrivateLink provides secure connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network. 

Amazon EMR now supports Managed Scaling , a new feature that automatically resizes your EMR cluster for best performance at the lowest possible cost, without the need to specify scaling policies. You can reduce up to 60% cost compared with fixed-size clusters by setting the minimum and maximum compute resource limits for a cluster.