Today, we announced the AWS Retail Competency for retail customers looking for highly specialized APN Partners offering retail technology on AWS. The AWS Retail Competency saves our customers time and takes the validation process out of the equation as it takes care of the heavy lifting of identifying, vetting, and highlighting industry specialized APN Partners who have proven success and deep technical capabilities when it comes to retail.

Today, the AWS Partner Network (APN) announced AWS Service Ready Program, a new way for AWS customers to identify if a tool or application will integrate with AWS services running in their cloud environment. The AWS Service Ready Program identifies and validates products from APN Technology Partners that integrate with specific AWS services to help companies find products compatible with specific AWS services. AWS Service Ready provides a way for companies globally to identify and adopt AWS service integrated tools.

AWS Customers can quickly identify top-tier APN Consulting Partners who identify, build, and implement technology offerings aimed at improving organizational capacity to prepare, respond, and recover from emergencies and disasters, globally. APN Partners who achieve the AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Competency have demonstrated deep technical experience to implement innovative solutions addressing complex, dynamic, and sensitive operating environments, including leveraging the AWS cloud in areas where Internet access is degraded or completely destroyed.

AWS Immersion Day workshops provide a customizable AWS experience delivered by AWS Solution Architects and Account Managers to AWS customers. In order to help AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners provide the same experience to their customers, today, we launched APN Immersion Days. APN Immersion Days provides APN Partners a repeatable model, reusable content, and automated tools for a set of technical workshops that have been shown to be a valuable customer engagement motion with our own commercial teams.

Amazon Neptune now offers a workbench, an in-console experience to query your graph. The workbench lets you quickly and easily query your Neptune databases with Jupyter notebooks – a fully managed, interactive development environment with live code and narrative text.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports Windows group Managed Service Account (gMSA), a new capability that allows ECS customers to authenticate and authorize their Windows containers with network resources using an Active Directory (AD). Customers can now easily use Integrated Windows Authentication with their Windows containers on ECS to secure services.

The Amplify Framework  is an open source project for building cloud-enabled mobile and web applications, consisting of libraries, UI components, and a CLI toolchain.

The Amazon EKS developer preview for Amazon EC2 A1 instances has been updated with support for the latest Kubernetes versions, global AMI availability, and bug fixes. 

AWS Amplify announces Amplify DataStore: a queryable, on-device data store for web, IoT, and mobile developers using iOS, Android, and React Native. Amplify DataStore provides a programming model for leveraging shared and distributed data without writing additional code for offline and online scenarios, which makes working with distributed, cross-user data just as simple as working with local-only data – allowing developers to create rich app experiences.

Amazon API Gateway announced HTTP APIs, enabling customers to quickly build high performance RESTful APIs that are up to 71% cheaper than REST APIs also available from API Gateway. HTTP APIs are optimized for building APIs that proxy to AWS Lambda functions or HTTP backends, making them ideal for serverless workloads.