AWS Chatbot now supports running AWS commands and actions from Slack. You can retrieve diagnostic information, invoke Lambda functions and create AWS Support cases right from your Slack channels, so your team can collaborate and respond to events faster. AWS Chatbot supports commands using the already familiar AWS Command Line Interface syntax that you can use from Slack on desktop or mobile devices. In addition to running commands, you can also retrieve Amazon CloudWatch logs by simply clicking the “Show logs” button on CloudWatch Alarms notifications in Slack. AWS Chatbot supports actions for displaying logs for AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway.

Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights, now available in preview, analyzes time-series data to provide a view of the top contributors influencing system performance. Once set up, Contributor Insights runs continuously without needing additional user intervention. This helps developers and operators more quickly isolate, diagnose, and remediate issues during an operational event.  

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to monitor application endpoints more easily. With this new feature, CloudWatch now collects canary traffic, which can continually verify your customer experience even when you don’t have any customer traffic on your applications, enabling you to discover issues before your customers do. CloudWatch Synthetics supports monitoring of your REST APIs, URLs, and website content, checking for unauthorized changes from phishing, code injection and cross-site scripting. CloudWatch Synthetics runs tests on your endpoints every minute, 24×7, and alerts you when your application endpoints don’t behave as expected. These tests can be customized to check for availability, latency, transactions, broken or dead links, step by step task completions, page load errors, load latencies for UI assets, complex wizard flows, or checkout flows in your applications. You can also use CloudWatch Synthetics to isolate alarming application endpoints and map them back to underlying infrastructure issues to reduce mean time to resolution.  

You can now enable your Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Java applications to access resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). This feature enables you to use your streaming applications to read and write data from resources within your VPCs like Amazon Elasticsearch Service clusters, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon Redshift data warehouses, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters, and more.  

AWS DataSync is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. In June 2019 we also announced that DataSync is available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. DataSync is an online data transfer service that automates and accelerates copying data between Network File System (NFS) or Server Message Block (SMB) file servers, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems. Customers use DataSync to migrate data to AWS, to transfer data to the cloud for analysis and processing, and to replicate data to AWS for archiving or business continuity.  

AWS Glue now supports running the FindMatches ML Transform in ETL scripts running on Spark 2.4.3 (Glue version 1.0). Previously, you were only able to use the FindMatches ML Transform in Spark 2.2.1 (Glue Version 0.9). 

Starting today, a number of Amazon Aurora features like invoking an AWS Lambda function synchronously, hot row contention, Backtrack, and hash joins, will now be available on the MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Aurora to improve performance and manageability. The MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora already offers enhancements such as JSON support, spatial indexes, and generated columns. 

Today, AWS Service Catalog announces the AWS Service Catalog Connector for Jira Service Desk (JSD) version 1.0.4. With this connector, administrators can use existing AWS Service Catalog configurations, including curated products, portfolios, constraints, and tagging, and expose them to JSD administrators and users. This new connector simplifies AWS product provisioning and provides administrators with governance and oversight over their AWS resources. 

Amazon Redshift Spectrum is now available in five additional AWS regions: EU (Paris, Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

Amazon QuickSight now allows you to add themes and customizations to match your corporate branding or application look and feel. Themes allow authors of QuickSight dashboards to customize their preferred background, text, data, and gradient colors as well as spacing and borders of visuals. See here to learn more.