Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, you can quickly and easily build conversational bots (“chatbots”), virtual agents, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Today, we are excited to announce support for conditional branching capability so you can easily design conversations for your users. Instead of implementing custom code, you can add simple conditions directly to your Lex bot, and manage the conversation path dynamically based on user input and business knowledge.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now makes it easier for customers to understand how their Amazon EC2 costs are driven by individual EKS clusters. Customers who choose to use multiple EKS clusters to segment their workloads to improve their resilience and/or security posture now get breakdowns of their EC2 costs by EKS cluster using AWS Cost and Usage reporting with minimal additional effort.

AWS Lambda now supports custom Consumer Group IDs when using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) or Self-Managed Kafka as an event source. Kafka uses Consumer Group IDs to identify consumer membership and record consumer checkpoints. Using a custom Consumer Group ID is ideal for customers with workloads that require disaster recovery or fail‑over support.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces expansion of wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency (DigIF) support for Software Defined Radios (SDRs) to enable customers to downlink more data in less time and reduce costs. AWS Ground Station regions Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) join the Middle East (Bahrain) region to offer customers a total of four locations where expanded support for SDRs is now available in Preview.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas now enables faster onboarding allowing users to import data from their local disk automatically, without additional steps. SageMaker Canvas is a visual point-and-click interface that enables business analysts to generate accurate ML predictions on their own — without requiring any machine learning experience or having to write a single line of code. SageMaker Canvas makes it easy to access and combine data from a variety of sources, automatically clean data, and build ML models to generate accurate predictions with a few clicks.

AWS App Mesh adds support for multiple listeners, allowing you to run applications with several open ports in a mesh. This enables you to control and secure inbound and outbound traffic for different application ports, as well as to collect port-specific metrics for this traffic. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easier for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. AWS App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and options to tune for high-availability of your applications.

AWS App Mesh introduces support for customizable Envoy access log format for Virtual Nodes and Virtual Gateways. It enables you to diagnose your services with customized logging focusing on specific aspects that are important to you. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easier for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. AWS App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and options to tune for high-availability of your applications.

Amazon OpenSearch Service now provides improved visibility into validation failures during domain updates. You can monitor the progress of a domain update, which could involve a blue/green deployment, from the OpenSearch Service console, or through the configuration APIs. OpenSearch Service will publish any validation failure events to Amazon EventBridge. You can also view these validation events in the Notifications tab of the OpenSearch Service console.

Amazon Aurora now offers customers the option to use Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses in their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on new and existing Amazon Aurora instances. Customers moving to IPv6 can simplify their network stack by running their databases on a network that supports both IPv4 and IPv6.

AWS is excited to announce that the AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud. The AWS Well-Architected Tool is used to help customers review the state of their applications and workloads against architectural best practices, and improve decision-making, minimize risks, and reduce costs. With this Region expansion, customers with specific regulatory and compliance requirements and AWS Partners in both the public and commercial sectors can now conduct self-service Well-Architected Reviews.