The Amazon Redshift cluster elastic resize operation can now be automated using a scheduler that allows you to automatically resize clusters to accommodate changes in workloads that occur on a regular basis. For example, you can now automatically expand a cluster to accommodate heavier workloads as well as shrink a cluster to accommodate lighter workloads at specific times of day. This will allow you to automate cluster resizing to balance price and performance when using Redshift.

Amazon Cognito now supports recovery method prioritization, making it easier for developers to customize the flow users experience when they forget their passwords. Developers can specify whether they prefer that users receive a recovery code via SMS or email, and whether they would like to fall back to SMS or email if a verified phone number or email address is not available. This feature is available now in Amazon Cognito User Pools at no additional cost. 

An Amazon Aurora Global Database is a single database that spans multiple AWS regions, enabling low latency global reads and disaster recovery from region-wide outages. With today’s launch, you can convert an existing single-region Aurora database to a global one, simply by adding another region to it.

Amazon Aurora zero-downtime patching (ZDP), which attempts to preserve client connections through an engine patch, is now supported on Aurora MySQL engine release 2.07 and above. When ZDP executes successfully, application sessions are preserved and the database engine restarts while patching. Read the Aurora documentation to learn more. 

An Amazon Aurora Global Database is a single database that spans multiple AWS regions, enabling low latency global reads and disaster recovery from region-wide outages. With today’s launch, you can add as many as five secondary regions to your global cluster, expanding the reach of your database worldwide.

Tag Policies is a new feature that allows you to define rules on how tags can be used on AWS resources in your accounts in AWS Organizations. You can use Tag Policies to easily adopt a standardized approach for tagging AWS resources.

Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions are now compliant with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High baseline, which includes over 400 security controls. 

AWS Lambda now supports Destinations for asynchronous invocations , a new feature that allows you to gain visibility to asynchronous invocation result and route the result to an AWS service without writing code

Starting today, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports Cross-region Read Replicas with Oracle Active Data Guard. Amazon RDS for Oracle makes it easy to create physical standby DB instances in different AWS Regions from the primary DB instance. It fully manages the configuration of Active Data Guard, and replicates data over secured network connections between a primary DB instance and its replicas running across regions. 

Authors who publish serverless applications to the AWS Serverless Application Repository (SAR) and share them publicly can now receive Verified Author badges, enabling consumers to quickly and reliably know who you are. The Verified Author badge will appear next to your author name on your application’s detail card and detail page, and will deep-link to your Github profile.