You can now use AWS Device Farm for manual tasks like debugging new functionality, running manual tests, and reproducing customer issues. Simply choose an Android device and swipe, gesture, and interact with it from your web browser. 

Amazon Kinesis Streams enables you to build custom applications that process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs. Today we are adding two new features, time-based shard iterators and shard-level metrics, to make it easy to replay and manage your Amazon Kinesis streams. 

You can now choose to have your AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments automatically update to the latest version of the underlying platform running your application during a specified maintenance window. Elastic Beanstalk regularly releases new versions of supported platforms (i.e., Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, .NET, Go, and Docker) with operating system, web & application server, and language & framework updates. Previously, you had to manually initiate updates to your Elastic Beanstalk environments using the Elastic Beanstalk console, command line interface (CLI), or API. Now, you can simply select a weekly maintenance window and have Elastic Beanstalk automatically update the platform version of your environment during that window.

Today we’re excited to announce that Amazon Inspector has exited preview and is now generally available to all customers. Amazon Inspector is a security vulnerability assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on Amazon EC2. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices, and then produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity. Amazon Inspector includes a knowledge base of hundreds of rules mapped to common security standards and vulnerability definitions that are regularly updated by AWS security researchers.

We’re pleased to announce Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, a faster way to move data into your Amazon S3 bucket over the internet. Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration is designed to maximize transfer speeds when you need to move data over long distances, for instance across countries or continents to your Amazon S3 bucket. It works by carrying HTTP and HTTPS traffic over a highly optimized network bridge that runs between the AWS Edge Location nearest to your clients and your Amazon S3 bucket. There are no gateway servers to manage, no firewalls to open, no special protocols or clients to integrate with, or upfront fees to pay. You simply change the S3 endpoint that your application uses to transfer data, and acceleration is automatically applied. When moving GBs or TBs of data over long distances, it can save hours (or even days) in transfer time. You can try the Transfer Acceleration speed comparison tool to get a preview of the performance benefits.

We are pleased to announce the 80 TB Snowball appliance, a larger capacity Snowball that enables more data to be securely moved in or out of AWS with fewer jobs. Since first launching Snowball at Re:Invent 2015, customers have successfully migrated petabytes of data to AWS using the 50TB Snowball and avoided challenges typically associated with large-scale data transfers such as high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. With the new 80 TB Snowball, customers can move 60% more data with a single job, thereby requiring fewer jobs to move large amounts of data, reducing per-job fees and shipping costs, and enabling faster migration of data. 

AWS Application Discovery Service helps Systems Integrators quickly and reliably plan application migration projects by automatically identifying applications running in on-premises data centers, their associated dependencies, and their performance profile. Planning data center migrations can involve thousands of workloads that are often deeply interdependent. Application discovery and dependency mapping are important early first steps in the migration process, but difficult to perform at scale due to the lack of automated tools. AWS Application Discovery Service automatically collects configuration and usage data from servers, storage and networking equipment to develop a list of applications, how they perform, and how they are interdependent. This information is securely retained in an AWS Application Discovery Service database which you can export as a CSV or XML file into your preferred visualization tool or cloud migration solution to help reduce the complexity and time in planning your cloud migration.

AWS Application Discovery Service will be available soon. To learn more and request access to use the AWS Application Discovery Service visit http://aws.amazon.com/application-discovery

Brian Quinlan has joined the corporation as Vice President and East Area Manager in its Construction business unit.

John V. Ballun, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer will succeed Mr. Makowan as President and CEO.

NSF International and ASPE will work together to support plumbing professionals to benefit public health, sustainability and a safer environment.