Amazon Elastic Inference has introduced new Elastic Inference Accelerators called EIA2, with up to 8GB of GPU memory. Customers can now use Amazon Elastic Inference on larger models or models that have larger input sizes for image processing, object detection, image classification, automated speech processing and natural language processing and other deep learning use cases.

AWS Single Sign-on (AWS SSO) now enables you to increase security by enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) with authenticator applications, such as Authy and Google Authenticator that generate time-based one-time passcodes (TOTP). You can now configure AWS SSO to require users to enter an authenticator-generated TOTP code in addition to their password. MFA improves security by requiring people to know something (their password) and have something (their authenticator) before they can sign in.

AWS Managed Services is excited to announce support for 29 new AWS services. With this release, the total number of services supported by AMS is almost doubled to 61, including AWS Lambda, a much requested service. In addition to running these services within secure and operated AMS managed accounts, several can be self provisioned and configured directly in the AWS Console or the APIs. With this release, AMS is also introducing a second pricing tier that is lower for certain groups of AWS services where more of the day-to-day operations is handled by the service itself. Contact your sales representative for more details on AMS pricing.

Customers in the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) region can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets such as database passwords and API keys needed to access their applications, services, and IT resources.  

Amazon Connect now provides new APIs that enable you to programmatically list resources such as queues, phone numbers, contact flows, and hours of operations in an Amazon Connect instance. For example, now you can use the List Queues API to retrieve queue IDs at run time and use them with the queue metrics API to filter the data returned.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) announces support for AWS Landing Zone (ALZ), a multi-account architecture recommended for enterprises looking for a scalable design for the configurations of their AWS accounts. With this release, new AMS customers will be able to choose either ALZ or the current AMS landing zone design based on their needs.

AWS has updated the Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework, a solution that provides secure equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. The solution now supports equipment that uses the Mitsubishi Seamless Messaging Protocol (SLMP). SLMP is a unified protocol for achieving seamless communication between applications without awareness of network hierarchy or boundaries and general-purpose Ethernet devices.

Starting today, you can now specify allocation strategies in AWS Batch, allowing customers to choose two additional methods for AWS Batch to allocate compute resources. These strategies allow customers to factor in throughput as well as price when deciding how AWS Batch should scale instances on their behalf.  

Amazon Chime Voice Connector, a SIP trunking service that lets you save over 50% on voice calling costs from your on-premises phone system, now supports real-time audio streaming. The feature automatically sends audio from your business phone calls to Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, where it can be accessed by applications that you build. Previously, you had to integrate and deploy multi-vendor on-premises hardware and software platforms that were expensive and required disruptive changes to your enterprise voice network.

Amazon FreeRTOS is now available in the AWS Middle East (Bahrain), and AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), regions. Amazon FreeRTOS is an IoT operating system for microcontrollers that extends the FreeRTOS kernel with software libraries for security, connectivity, and updateability to make small, low-powered edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage. Amazon FreeRTOS is open source, free to download and use, and provides everything you need to easily program connected microcontroller-based devices and collect data from them for IoT applications, and helps you scale those applications across millions of devices.