Starting today, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory , also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, enables you to share a single directory with multiple AWS accounts. This makes it easier and cost-effective for you to deploy your directory-aware workloads on Amazon EC2 instances by reducing the manual configuration to domain join your instances and, the need to deploy directories in each account and VPC. Amazon EC2 instances can now seamlessly join to a single directory from any AWS account and any Amazon VPC within an AWS Region.

AWS Systems Manager Automation now supports conditional branching to other steps within the Automation enabling customers to create dynamic workflows.

AWS IoT Device Management is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region.

Germany’s TÜV Rheinland approves the smart lighting specialist for cloud services, reviewing it for products.

Amazon Connect now provides a queue metrics API. You can now programmatically access real-time metrics for queues in your contact center, as well as near-real-time historical metrics from the preceding 24 hours. For example, you could use the queue metrics API to extend a custom dashboard with real-time data showing the number of contacts or available agents in a given queue. You could also use this API to retrieve historical queue metrics for use in a custom reporting platform or workforce management solutions. To get started, see the API documentation for GetCurrentMetricData for real-time queue metrics, and GetMetricData for near-real-time queue metrics.

On-premises applications can now securely access AWS PrivateLink endpoints over AWS VPN. AWS PrivateLink allows you to privately access services hosted on AWS, in a highly available and scalable manner, without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet.

Previously, access to PrivateLink endpoints from on-premise networks was only available over AWS Direct Connect. With this release, you can also use AWS VPN to access your PrivateLink endpoints.

AWS PrivateLink is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (London), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Paris), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and South America (São Paulo) AWS Regions. To learn more, visit the AWS PrivateLink documentation .

Network Load Balancers support connections from clients and to its targets over AWS managed VPN.

Previously, access to Network Load Balancer from on-premises networks was only available over AWS Direct Connect. With this launch, you can access NLB over AWS VPN tunnel.

This support on Network Load Balancers is available in all AWS Regions. To learn more, visit the Network Load Balancer guide .

Amazon Linux 2 now supports 32-bit libraries and compatibility packages, which enables customers to run 32-bit applications on Amazon Linux 2.  

Starting today, Amazon EC2 F1 instances are available with a new instance size, f1.4xlarge. The new f1.4xlarge size has two Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGAs in order to provide a new price/performance option between existing instance sizes f1.2xlarge which has a single FPGA and f1.16xlarge which has eight FPGAs.

Now, you can allow easy authentication for your users by enabling YubiKey security key as your users’ MFA device. You can enable a single YubiKey security key (manufactured by Yubico , a third party provider) for multiple IAM and root users across AWS accounts making it easier to manage your MFA devices for access to multiple users. You can also use your existing YubiKey, which you use to authenticate to other third-party applications such as GitHub or Dropbox, to sign in to the AWS Management Console .