AWS Snow Family now supports the Amazon Linux 2 operating system, enabling you to run your Amazon Linux 2-based workloads at the edge on AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized, and AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices. Amazon Linux 2 provides a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise applications. With Amazon Linux 2 , you get an application environment that offers long term support with access to the latest innovations in the Linux ecosystem. Amazon Linux 2 is provided at no additional charge.

AWS Pricing Calculator now supports Windows Server and SQL Server workload compute cost estimates. The workload estimate now accounts for Microsoft licensing. The Windows Server and SQL Server on Amazon EC2 calculator provides a selection of licensing options such as AWS-provided licenses with License Included (LI) offerings and customers’ existing licenses with bring your own license (BYOL) offerings for optimal cost savings. It also identifies suitable cloud tenancy and a cost-saving pricing model, based on licensing and infrastructure inputs.

You can now send attachments directly through Amazon Connect Chat, making it easier than ever to resolve your customers’ support needs. For example, an agent can send a copy of a recent hotel invoice or a customer can share a photo of a damaged product. Attachments are included in the chat transcript, to help ensure the full context from the conversation is available if a contact is transferred to another agent. The files are also stored in your S3 bucket to allow access from other systems such as customer relationship management or case management systems. You can turn attachments on in the AWS console with a couple of clicks.

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce v5.9 now supports automatically adding transcripts and insights from Contact Lens for Amazon Connect to customer records and cases in Salesforce Service Cloud. Amazon Connect customers have enjoyed being able to gain valuable insights from their call recordings such as customer sentiment, agent sentiment, sentiment change, key phrase detection, categorization tagging, and more simply by enabling Contact Lens in their contact flows. With the v5.9 release of the Amazon Connect CTI adapter for Salesforce, Connect users can now deliver those same insights, including the full call transcript, directly to the end-customer’s record or case history in Salesforce. There are no technical skills required, users of the CTI adapter simply make the configuration choice to enable this feature and a transcript and insights will be delivered to the customer’s Salesforce environment every time a call is completed and the recording is analyzed by Contact Lens.

Amazon Corretto11 on ARM32 for Linux Platforms and x86 (32-bit) on Windows are now Generally Available. With our ARM32 build, you can run Corretto 11 on Linux distributions on 32bit ARMv7 hardware. Our x86 on Windows build will run on the same supported versions of Windows and will allow usage of 32-bit libraries. These are full-featured, fully supported JDK11 builds. You can report any issues on our GitHub repo at https://github.com/corretto.

Customers can now join Amazon Chime meetings on Echo Show 8. We recommend customers simply link their calendar using the Alexa app. Once linked, customers can say, “Alexa, join the Amazon Chime meeting” or “Alexa, join the meeting” at the time of the meeting to enjoy the meeting experience on their Echo Show 8. If customers do not wish to link their calendars, they can also speak the Amazon Chime meeting ID at the time of the meeting to join the meeting.  

Starting today, Echo Show 8 customers can use Alexa to join Zoom meetings on a dedicated device, by simply saying “Alexa, join my Zoom meeting.” No setup is required. Alexa will ask for the meeting ID and Passcode. You can also join a meeting more seamlessly by linking your Microsoft, Google, or Apple calendar account via the Alexa app . After saying “Join my Zoom meeting” Alexa will confirm the meeting title if details are included in the invite and then join the meeting. Alexa won’t ask for additional information.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6gn instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and featuring up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth are generally available. Amazon EC2 C6gn instances deliver up to 40% better price-performance over C5n instances for applications requiring high network bandwidth such as high performance computing (HPC), network appliances, data lakes and data analytics.

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the availability of StackSets to Africa (Cape Town), EU (Milan), and Middle East (Bahrain). StackSets is a CloudFormation feature that allows you to centrally manage deployment of cloud resources to multiple AWS accounts and Regions in a single operation. StackSets is also integrated with AWS Organizations so you can take advantage of automatic deployments whenever an account enters an organization. 

Distributed Load Testing on AWS helps you easily simulate thousands of users connecting to your application so that you can better understand your application performance under load. The solution launches and configures containers on AWS Fargate to generate a specified number of transactions per second without having to provision servers.