You can now use Systems Manager Automation to build and share standardized operational playbooks to ensure consistency across users, accounts, and AWS Regions. With the ability to now execute scripts and add wiki-style documentation, you can reduce errors and eliminate manual steps such as navigating written procedures in wikis and running terminal commands. 

You can now assign tags to Amazon Connect users to better organize or manage access to them via API. Tags are key value pairs which enable you to control access to Amazon Connect users who are tagged by team, role, or other criteria. For example, you can grant API access to all agents, to only agents tagged to a given line of business (LOB), or if you use third-party outsources, to only agents tagged as their employees.

You can now pass variables from one action to another in your pipeline. Previously, there was no first-class support for passing metadata between actions during an execution. You can now dynamically configure your actions with variables that will be evaluated at execution time.

Amazon CloudSearch now lets you configure your domains to require that all traffic be submitted over HTTPS so that you can ensure that communications between your clients and your domain are encrypted. You can also configure the minimum required TLS version to accept, with TLS 1.0 as the default. This option helps ensure that your clients are configured correctly. For information on enabling this feature, see the documentation.

Amazon Transcribe now supports transcription for audio and video in Irish English, Scottish English, Welsh English, Dutch, Farsi, Indonesian, Portuguese, and Tamil languages.

Today, AWS CloudFormation is announcing resource import which allows you to bring existing AWS application resources into CloudFormation. With this launch, you can start managing existing resources such as Amazon S3 Buckets or DynamoDB Tables with all the benefits of CloudFormation, regardless of how they were created or managed previously. You can now leverage automation at scale with these resources instead of relying on manual processes or maintaining custom scripts. 

Amazon CloudWatch Metric Math now supports sort, slice, remove empty and conditional statements. With CloudWatch Metric Math, you can aggregate and transform metrics to create custom visualizations of your health and performance metrics. The new functions announced today allow you to sort metrics by performance indicators, slice the results to retrieve the highest or lowest values, and apply conditional logic using IF/AND/OR statements. All the new functions can be used to define alarms that take actions like sending notifications and auto scaling your service.  

As of today, you can create 20 global secondary indexes per Amazon DynamoDB table in AWS GovCloud (US) . If you need more than 20 global secondary indexes, you can request an increase .

Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports counter metrics on Amazon RDS for SQL Server. With counter metrics, you can customize the RDS Performance Insights dashboard to include up to 10 additional graphs that show a selection from dozens of operating system and database performance metrics. Counter metrics provide additional information that can be correlated with the database load chart to help identify performance issues and analyze performance. 

AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over a daily or monthly granularity. The solution also lets you dive deeper using granular billing dimensions such as usage type and tags. Starting today, you can access your data with further granularity by enabling hourly and resource level granularity.