You can now create configurable, rule-based events for notifications and automated actions based on AWS Trusted Advisor’s library of best-practice checks using Amazon CloudWatch Events. With this new integration, you can now more easily build workflows and processes that are triggered by the status of individual Trusted Advisor checks. 

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to stitch together two or more input clips to create a longer clip in the desired output format(s). You can do this by specifying multiple inputs when creating a transcode job on Amazon Elastic Transcoder. Clips are stitched together in the order that they are specified in the job request. For each input, you can specify a Start Time and a Duration, which allows you to stitch together only the parts of each input that you want included in the output. You can leverage clip stitching to create highlight clips or add bumpers and trailers to your videos as part of the transcode process. 

Amazon GameLift is a fully managed service that makes it simple and cost-effective to deploy, operate, and scale session-based multiplayer game servers in the cloud. GameLift has launched a new feature, remote instance access. This feature enables game developers to access fleets and instances in real time to debug their game or better understand player behavior. 

We are excited to announce a new edge location in Hong Kong for Amazon CloudFront. Hong Kong now has three edge locations which brings the total number of worldwide edge locations to 65. 

These latest Quick Starts automatically deploy two products from Informatica, Big Data Management and PowerCenter, on the AWS Cloud. Informatica is an advanced AWS technology partner that provides data integration software and services. The Quick Starts were created by AWS solutions architects in partnership with the Informatica Big Data Management and PowerCenter teams, to integrate solutions and services from both companies. 

You can now set environment variables for your Lambda functions, making it easy for you to configure your code for development, test, and production without having to change the function’s implementation. You can provide key-value pairs as part of your function configuration and access them easily within your function code at execution time simply by reading environment variables. You can easily create and modify environment variables from the AWS Lambda Console, CLI or SDKs.  

The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM, previously known as Project Flourish) extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified way of defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables needed by your serverless application.

You can now configure policies to automatically add (scale out) and terminate (scale in) nodes in your Amazon EMR cluster. Amazon EMR can programmatically scale out applications like Apache Spark and Apache Hive to utilize additional nodes for increased performance and scale in the number of nodes in your cluster to save costs when utilization is low. Your cluster can scale based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics provided by Amazon EMR , including YARN utilization metrics.

You can now provision and manage resources for AWS Lambda-based applications using AWS CloudFormation and the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM). SAM helps you more effectively model, package, and deploy “serverless” applications which use services like AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon API Gateway. SAM is a specification for describing Lambda-based applications and offers a syntax designed specifically for expressing serverless resources. Learn more about SAM here.

You can now access your Amazon WorkSpaces through Chrome and Firefox web browsers, using a new feature called Amazon WorkSpaces Web Access. Web Access establishes a secure connection to your Amazon WorkSpace from the browser, giving you safe access to your cloud desktop from almost anywhere you can connect to the public internet, all without having to install a client.