AWS Deep Learning Containers (AWS DL Containers) are Docker images pre-installed with deep learning frameworks to make it easy to deploy custom machine learning environments quickly. AWS DL Containers support TensorFlow and Apache MXNet, with PyTorch coming soon.

AWS Fargate and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now support external deployment controllers for ECS services with the launch of task set management APIs. Task sets are a new primitive to allow controlled management of application revision within a single ECS service. You now have new APIs to manage multiple revisions of your application and transitioning from one revision to another.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) to run Windows Server workloads as part of a developer preview. The preview allows you to take advantage of the latest Kubernetes functionality and start validating performance and stability of containerized Windows applications managed by Amazon EKS.

You can now use a new set of open source tools to test your applications locally before deploying to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS).  

The AWS Toolkit for the IntelliJ IDEA, an open source plug-in that makes it easier to create, step-through debug, build, and deploy Java applications on AWS, is now Generally Available. The toolkit had previously been in developer preview. The toolkit provides deep support for serverless applications at launch with support across other AWS services planned for the future.

We are excited to announce Alexa for Business Blueprints, enabling any Alexa for Business customer to create engaging voice experiences for their organization within minutes and without writing a single line of code. Skill Blueprints are so easy to use, people have used them extensively to create Alexa skills for their households. Now anyone at the office can do the same for their workplace by using one of dozens of easy-to-use Skill Blueprints, generating a private skill in minutes. Alexa private skills are voice-powered capabilities that enhance the Alexa experience, while remaining private to members of an Alexa for Business organization. IT administrators can then review and enable those skills for the company’s users and managed Alexa-enabled devices.

Application Load Balancers now support request routing based on standard or custom HTTP headers and methods, query parameters, and source IP addresses. This launch extends the existing support for Host header and path-based routing rules in Application Load Balancers to more fields from HTTP request messages. This richer set of routing criteria enables you to further simplify your application architecture by offloading routing functionality to the load balancer. It can also be used to block unwanted traffic at the load balancer.

Vertical farm is using tunable Signify LED technology to optimize lettuce, spinach, and coriander for the convenience chain.

Much of China is taking SSL lessons from New York’s Times Square or Las Vegas in lighting the exteriors of metropolitan buildings, but Signify has supplied more sedate tunable-white LED lighting for historic buildings in the Shanghai Bund.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add a speech-to-text capability to your applications. Amazon Transcribe now supports transcription of audio in the following new languages: German and Korean. These languages expand upon the existing languages already available in Amazon Transcribe: US English, British English, Australian English, US Spanish, Canadian French, French, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.