Amazon Connect enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s latest US-English neural voice , Kevin. Built on Amazon Polly’s neural text-to-speech technology , this new voice delivers groundbreaking improvements in speech quality, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo.  

With this release, Amplify CLI makes it easy to use Lambda layers to share code & assets across various Lambda functions. Amplify CLI provides a guided creation, update, and deployment process for Lambda layers designed for Node.js, and Python runtimes.  

Amazon EMR now supports encrypting log files using Customer-managed Customer master keys (CMKs) stored in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Amazon EMR automatically upload log files to Amazon S3 when logging and debugging is enabled With this new feature, you can associate Customer managed CMKs in AWS KMS when launching a cluster. Amazon EMR will automatically encrypt logs using the Customer managed CMKs in AWS KMS. Previously you could only encrypt log files written to S3 using Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3). Click here to learn more about encrypting log files please see the documentation .

AWS Storage Gateway simplifies cache management for File Gateway by enabling you to create multiple file shares for a single Amazon S3 bucket and synchronize the gateway’s local cache with an Amazon S3 bucket based on frequency of directory access. These enhancements simplify the management of your gateway by providing flexibility when configuring new file shares and streamlining the cache refresh process.  

AWS Storage Gateway now supports a local cache of up to 64 TB for File Gateway, improving performance for your on-premises applications by providing you with low-latency access to larger working data sets. Now, you can easily scale your gateway’s local cache to manage more of your application data closer to your on-premises applications and users.  

Amazon FSx for Lustre now enables you to use the world’s most popular high-performance file system from Amazon EC2 instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. This capability makes it easier and even more cost-effective to run workloads where speed matters, such as machine learning, gaming, electronic design automation, high-performance computing, video processing, and financial modeling. 

Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning (ML) to generate accurate forecasts without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast can be used in a wide variety of use cases, including product demand forecasting, inventory planning, workforce planning and cloud infrastructure usage forecasting.

Starting today, AWS customers can enable Spot Instances for AWS Marketplace Amazon Machine Image (AMI) products while launching new instances through the EC2 console Launch Instance Wizard (LIW). With this launch, you can reduce costs on the EC2 instances you need to run your third-party software on AWS. Spot Instances enable you to request unused EC2 instances at steep discounts- up to 90% compared to On-Demand prices- so you can lower your Amazon EC2 costs. Spot Instances are a cost-effective choice if have flexibility with running your third-party applications and if your applications are fault-tolerant. Customers—including Salesforce, Lyft, Zillow, Novartis and Autodesk—use Spot Instances to reduce costs and get faster results. For example, Salesforce saved over 80% vs On-Demand Instance pricing, and doubled the speed of processing machine learning and ETL workloads with Spot Instances. 

Starting today, AWS Marketplace offers integrated third-party software solutions for AWS Control Tower. Built by independent software vendors, these solutions help solve infrastructure and operational use cases such as security for a multi-account environment, with tools including centralized networking, operational intelligence, and Security and Information Event Management (SIEM). 

Amazon RDS for MariaDB has been updated to support release 10.3.23 and release 10.4.13 of the MariaDB database. These releases include a number of bug fixes as well as functionality improvements.