Port forwarding sessions created using Session Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now support multiple simultaneous connections over the session. This improvement reduces the rendering latency and improves load times for applications that load data using multiple concurrent connections, when delivering such applications over a port forwarding session.

Amazon CloudFront announces Origin Shield, a centralized caching layer that helps increase your cache hit ratio to reduce the load on your origin. Origin Shield also decreases your origin operating costs by collapsing requests across regions so as few as one request goes to your origin per object. You can also use Lambda@Edge with Origin Shield to enable advanced serverless logic like dynamic origin load balancing. Customers using Origin Shield for live streaming, image handling, or multi-CDN workloads have reported up to a 57% reduction in their origin’s load.

You can now filter automation executions by resource groups in Systems Manager Automation. This allows you to group and view the automation executions specific to your applications or environments.  

AWS Lambda now supports AWS PrivateLink. With this feature you can manage and invoke Lambda functions from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without exposing your traffic to the public internet. PrivateLink provides private connectivity between your VPCs and AWS services, like Lambda, on the private AWS network.

You can now process multiple Amazon Kinesis data streams with a single Kinesis Client Library (KCL) based consumer application. Previously, each KCL based application processes a single Kinesis data stream. With this new capability, you can update the list of streams at runtime for multi-stream processing in a scalable KCL application without redeploying the application. This reduces operational overhead of maintaining multiple KCL applications.

AWS Batch now allows users to configure retry strategies based on defined exit codes. Customers can now determine whether their AWS Batch jobs retry based on specified events such as infrastructure failure or application failure. This allows customers to tightly control the actions taken on job failure – resulting in lower costs and faster throughput by retrying only when necessary.

Amazon Redshift now allows users to modify the compression encoding of existing columns with a single statement. This new capability makes it easier to maintain the optimal compression encodings in Amazon Redshift to achieve high performance and reduce the storage utilization.  

Porting Assistant for .NET is now open source. Users can now extend the data set with new recommendations for assessment and use the extended data set to scan their project for incompatibilities. Users can also review and offer suggestions on exiting data sets. Users can actively participate in the development process and bring their experience and expert knowledge to the tool. They can review open issues in GitHub, comment on any of the issues that they are familiar with, make suggestions, ask questions, or open new issues if they like to start a new conversation. Source code for compatibility analysis component, assessment APIs and the data set used for the assessment are released under Apache 2.0 license 

Amazon Textract is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Canada (Central) regions. Amazon Textract is a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. 

AWS DataSync now offers a simplified agent setup using the agent’s local console. This enables you to set up your agent faster, and test network connectivity between your on-premises storage and AWS within minutes.