Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. Starting today, you can assign AWS resource tags to Spot Instance requests on creation, in addition to the tags for each individual, launched Spot Instance.. Use tags in your Spot Instance requests to more easily identify their purpose. For example, you can use tags to identify all Spot Instance requests used by a particular department, project, or application. 

Amazon EMR now supports Managed Scaling , a new feature that automatically resizes your EMR cluster for best performance at the lowest possible cost, without the need to specify scaling policies. You can reduce up to 60% cost compared with fixed-size clusters by setting the minimum and maximum compute resource limits for a cluster. 

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can use AWS PrivateLink to access Amazon Kendra from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs or requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet. AWS PrivateLink provides secure connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network. 

Amazon Connect enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s latest US-English neural voice , Kevin. Built on Amazon Polly’s neural text-to-speech technology , this new voice delivers groundbreaking improvements in speech quality, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo.  

AWS Storage Gateway simplifies cache management for File Gateway by enabling you to create multiple file shares for a single Amazon S3 bucket and synchronize the gateway’s local cache with an Amazon S3 bucket based on frequency of directory access. These enhancements simplify the management of your gateway by providing flexibility when configuring new file shares and streamlining the cache refresh process.  

Amazon EMR now supports encrypting log files using Customer-managed Customer master keys (CMKs) stored in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Amazon EMR automatically upload log files to Amazon S3 when logging and debugging is enabled With this new feature, you can associate Customer managed CMKs in AWS KMS when launching a cluster. Amazon EMR will automatically encrypt logs using the Customer managed CMKs in AWS KMS. Previously you could only encrypt log files written to S3 using Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3). Click here to learn more about encrypting log files please see the documentation .

With this release, Amplify CLI makes it easy to use Lambda layers to share code & assets across various Lambda functions. Amplify CLI provides a guided creation, update, and deployment process for Lambda layers designed for Node.js, and Python runtimes.  

Amazon FSx for Lustre now enables you to use the world’s most popular high-performance file system from Amazon EC2 instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. This capability makes it easier and even more cost-effective to run workloads where speed matters, such as machine learning, gaming, electronic design automation, high-performance computing, video processing, and financial modeling. 

AWS Storage Gateway now supports a local cache of up to 64 TB for File Gateway, improving performance for your on-premises applications by providing you with low-latency access to larger working data sets. Now, you can easily scale your gateway’s local cache to manage more of your application data closer to your on-premises applications and users.  

Starting today, AWS Marketplace offers integrated third-party software solutions for AWS Control Tower. Built by independent software vendors, these solutions help solve infrastructure and operational use cases such as security for a multi-account environment, with tools including centralized networking, operational intelligence, and Security and Information Event Management (SIEM).