Starting today, you can access custom Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations based on your Amazon EC2 usage via AWS Cost Explorer. These recommendations are calculated based on your past usage and indicate opportunities for cost savings. 

AWS CodeCommit now supports pull requests, which provide a mechanism to request code reviews and discuss code with collaborators. Previously, you had to use tools outside of CodeCommit to request code reviews, which made it difficult to track input and ensure all updates were incorporated. Now, you can use pull requests to enable a workflow where you can request code reviews, reviewers can view the commits and comment on the code, and you can merge code once you have final approval.

Amazon Connect now allows you to automatically make calls to customers, using the outbound contact API. You can schedule automated calls for appointment reminders or notification calls in response to business events, such as credit card fraud. Enterprise applications like CRM systems can use the outbound contact API when triggered by an event, such as a service outage, to initiate an outbound call using a predetermined contact flow. The contact flow will determine if an agent interaction is required, or if the call is routed to an Amazon Lex chatbot. 

Amazon Lex now supports integration with the Kik messaging platform.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) now supports Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) enabled EBS snapshots for Windows Server AMIs. VSS is a Microsoft technology that allows application data to be backed up while applications are still running, by coordinating between user applications that update data on disk and those that back up applications. With this launch, you can now take VSS-enabled EBS snapshots of your running Windows instances without the need to create custom scripts, or shutting down the instances. To read more about this capability go to the AWS documentation .

You can now call a lambda function in the SQL statement of your rule by calling it in the SELECT statement to enrich IoT message data with external services like weather, geo-location, and maps. You can also call a lambda function from the WHERE clause to evaluate a condition with context from external services. For example, you can evaluate if the reported device position lies inside or outside a geographic area by calling an external geo-fencing endpoint like HERE maps (sample ) and then triggering an SNS Action if it lies outside the area.

As part of our one-year anniversary, we’re pleased to bring a number of new features to QuickSight . Starting today, you can visualize geospatial data using maps, create tabular reports using flat tables in your dashboards, and perform run-time calculations for SPICE data sets in analysis. For high cardinality data, we’ve added an “Others” bucket feature so you can combine the long tails of values into a single category. You can also now create data sets in QuickSight with up to 1000 columns to support wide-table use cases.

You can now use deep learning framework Apache MXNet (0.12.0), GPU instance types P3 and P2 , and the AWS Glue Data Catalog with Presto on Amazon EMR release 5.10.0. Apache MXNet is a scalable deep learning framework that allows you to define, train, and deploy deep neural networks. Furthermore, you can preinstall custom machine learning and deep learning libraries on an Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and create your Amazon EMR clusters with that AMI. Additionally, Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 P3 and P2 instances, EC2 compute-optimized GPU instances, for deep learning and machine learning workloads. Also, you can now use the AWS Glue Data Catalog to store external table metadata for Presto instead of utilizing an on-cluster or self-managed Hive metastore.  

AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. This is done via an intuitive interface that enables you to quickly create custom reports (including charts and tabular data) and analyses of your cost and usage data, both at a high level and for highly-specific requests. Starting today, you can directly access the Cost Explorer API, the low-latency ad-hoc query service that powers the Cost Explorer web application. 

Purchase of the Georgetown Water System adds approximately 1,300 customers to the company’s customer base, which represents a population of approximately 3,500 residents.