Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs customers can now use the AWS::EC2::FlowLog resource to create custom format VPC flow logs with enriched metadata fields and publish them to either CloudWatch Logs or S3, capture VPC flow logs at shorter aggregation intervals of up to 1-minute for quicker and more granular network visibility, and tag existing or new VPC flow log subscriptions, all directly through AWS CloudFormation.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for local printer redirection with the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. With local printer redirection, AppStream 2.0 users can redirect print jobs from their streaming application to a printer that is connected to their local computer. No printer driver needs to be installed on the AppStream 2.0 streaming instance to enable users to print documents during their streaming sessions.  

IoT Foundations is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via consulting engagement from Trek10, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner with the AWS DevOps, AWS IoT Consulting and AWS SaaS Consulting Competencies. IoT Foundations is intended for those that want to create and connect devices to an AWS IoT infrastructure. Devices can be conceptual, pre-production, or ready to go to market – regardless of the device stage, IoT Foundations can scale and provide benefits. 

AWS Glue version 2.0 featuring 10x faster Spark ETL job start times, is now generally available. With Glue version 2.0, job startup is faster and more consistent. In addition, AWS Glue version 2.0 Spark jobs will be billed in 1-second increments with a 1-minute minimum rather than a 10 minute minimum. As a result, customers can now run micro-batch, deadline sensitive, and interactive workloads more cost effectively. Customers can run micro-batch jobs to quickly load data lakes, data warehouses, and databases and enable real-time analytics. With faster job start times, customers can run SLA driven data pipelines more reliably. Faster job start times also enable interactive data exploration and experimentation. 

You can now govern the virtual private cloud (VPC) settings for your Lambda functions using IAM condition keys. Using these condition keys, you can enforce that users only deploy functions that are connected to a VPC. VPC-enabled functions send all traffic through your VPC and abide by your VPC’s network controls. You can use these network controls to define where your functions can connect. You can also restrict access to network locations, including the public internet.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) announced the availability of additional network metrics for containers using the EC2 launch type in either bridge or awsvpc networking modes. You can now measure the rate of network traffic to and from your containers in both ECS Container Insights in Amazon CloudWatch or the ECS task metadata endpoint. This lets you measure bytes transmitted or received per second to see whether your containers are processing requests from the internet or other applications. Additionally on the task metadata endpoint, you can measure packets received, transmitted, or lost for containers using awsvpc mode and EC2 launch type.

Customers can use wildcard custom domain names to easily create multiple URLs that route to one Amazon API Gateway HTTP API. This update extends API Gateway’s current support for wildcard custom domain names to include HTTP APIs. 

VPC-In-A-Box℠ is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer, delivered via a consulting engagement from Foghorn, an AWS DevOps and AWS Security Competency Partner. VPC-In-A-Box℠ demystifies, simplifies, and accelerates Amazon VPC creation, configuration, and optimization, to seamlessly connect to AWS Availability Zones within AWS Regions around the world. Customers that request this consulting offer will take part in a three-step engagement that delivers a custom Amazon VPC configuration.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Today, we are launching natural language understanding improvements and confidence scores on Amazon Lex. We continuously improve the service based on customer feedback and advances in research. The natural language understanding improvements enable better intent classification accuracy. Confidence scores indicate the likelihood of a certain intent and can be used to enhance conversation design.

Amazon EC2 is now available through VPC endpoints in the Europe (Milan) and Africa (Cape Town) regions, allowing you to access Amazon EC2 from within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without traversing the internet.