Continuing our collaboration with edX, we are excited to announce AWS IoT: Developing and Deploying an Internet of Things . This new intermediate-level course is available exclusively on edX and provides skills in building and deploying IoT solutions for commercial or consumer applications. Using videos and hands-on exercises, a variety of AWS services are explored, including IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, Amazon FreeRTOS, and AWS DeepLens.

Customers in the EU (Stockholm) 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.

You can now launch an EMR cluster with three master nodes and support high availability of applications like YARN Resource Manager, HDFS Name Node, Spark, Hive, and Ganglia. Amazon EMR automatically fails over to a standby master node if the primary master node fails or if critical processes, like Resource Manager or Name Node, crash. Since the master node is no longer a potential single point of failure with this feature, you can run your long-lived EMR clusters without interruption. In the event of a failover, Amazon EMR automatically replaces the failed master node with a new master node with the same configuration and boot-strap actions.

Please visit Plan and Configure Master nodes to learn more about this feature.

This feature is now available from EMR release 5.23.0 in all supported regions for Amazon EMR .

You can stay up to date on EMR releases by subscribing to the feed for EMR release notes. Use the RSS at the top of the EMR Release Guide to link the feed URL directly to your favorite feed reader.

Amazon Neptune is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region.

Starting today, developers of all skill levels can join the AWS DeepRacer League from anywhere in the world via the AWS DeepRacer console . Developers can put their skills to the test by competing in the Virtual Circuit World Tour, on virtual tracks inspired by famous raceways to be revealed each month. They will race for prizes and glory and a chance to win an expenses paid trip to the AWS DeepRacer Championship Cup at re:Invent 2019 .

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now has support for AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. AWS PrivateLink is a networking technology designed to enable access to AWS services in a highly available and scalable manner, while keeping all the network traffic within the AWS network. When you create a AWS PrivateLink endpoint for Amazon ECR, the service endpoints appear as elastic network interfaces with a private IP address in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Customers who need to run Amazon EC2 workloads on AWS Snowball Edge devices can now attach multiple persistent block storage volumes to their Amazon EC2 instances. With both block and object storage options on Snowball Edge, you have flexibility to deploy a wider set of applications in rugged, temporary or mobile environments that have limited or no network connectivity.

Starting today, AWS IoT Analytics customers can now refresh their SQL data sets in customizable intervals as low as one minute. Prior to this capability, customers could only refresh their SQL data sets with a minimum interval of 15 minutes, which enabled a plethora of batched analysis operations but limited their ability to do near real-time analysis. With this new feature, customers can address their need for more timely analyses such as getting minute updates to operational dashboards or deriving more actionable insights on customer usage trends and equipment telemetry using their IoT data.

Today, we are excited to announce the new VMware Cloud on AWS Navigate track. 

Together, VMware Cloud on AWS delivers a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud solution that extends on-premises VMware environments to AWS elastic, bare-metal infrastructure that is fully integrated as part of the AWS. VMware Cloud on AWS will bring the capabilities of VMware’s enterprise class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) technologies to the AWS Cloud, and enable customers to run any application across vSphere-based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.

The VMware Cloud on AWS Navigate track creates a prescriptive journey for APN Partners who want to build expertise in supporting AWS Customer projects for VMware Cloud solutions on AWS.

Learn more about the AWS Navigate Program, and all the AWS Navigate tracks available on the APN blog . 

AWS has updated AWS WAF Security Automations, a solution that automatically deploys a single web access control list (web ACL) with a set of AWS WAF rules designed to filter common web-based attacks.