Amazon MSK is now available in Middle East (Bahrain)

You can now connect your Apache Kafka applications to [Amazon MSK](/msk/) in the Middle East (Bahrain) [AWS Region](/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/). Amazon MSK is a fully managed service for Apache Kafka that makes it easy for you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka as a data store. Amazon MSK is 100% compatible with Apache Kafka, which enables you to quickly migrate your existing Apache Kafka workloads to Amazon MSK with confidence or build new ones from scratch. With Amazon MSK, you spend more time innovating on applications and less time managing clusters. To learn how to get started, see the [Amazon MSK Developer Guide](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/what-is-msk.html). **Recent Announcements** [Support for Kafka 2.3.1](/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-msk-adds-support-for-apache-kafka-version-2-3-1/) [Monitor your MSK cluster using Open Monitoring with Prometheus](/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-open-monitoring-with-prometheus-for-amazon-msk/) [Run fully managed Apache Flink applications with Amazon MSK](/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/you-can-now-run-fully-managed-apache-flink-applications-with-apache-kafka/) [Dynamically Expand your MSK Cluster](/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/now-expand-your-amazon-msk-clusters-and-deploy-new-clusters-across-2-azs/) [Deploy clusters across 2 Availability Zones instead of the default 3](/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/now-expand-your-amazon-msk-clusters-and-deploy-new-clusters-across-2-azs/)