Today, AWS is announcing a new feature that enables customers to copy AWS Marketplace products directly into AWS Service Catalog. This simplifies the process by which customers can organize and control access to software they have procured or fulfilled through AWS Marketplace.

Today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) added support for service-linked roles, a new type of role that gives you an easier and more secure way to delegate permissions to AWS services. You can start by using service-linked roles with Amazon Lex, a service that enables you to build conversational interfaces in any application using voice and text.

AWS Mobile Hub integration with Amazon Lex previously announced in preview is now generally available (GA).

AWS CodeStar enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS.

You can now add a whispered speech effect in your Text-to-Speech output with Amazon Polly, and synchronize speech with visual animation using Speech Marks. To create voices with a whispered effect, you simply use the SSML tag “whispered” to mark the text input to be spoken in a hushed or whispered voice. This tag can be applied to any of the 47 voices in Amazon Polly’s Text-to-Speech portfolio. Visit the Amazon Polly documentation for more information on how to use the new “whispered” SSML tag.

You can now use AWS X-Ray to trace requests made to your serverless applications built using AWS Lambda. This enables you to gain insights into the performance of serverless applications, allowing you to pinpoint the root cause of issues so that you can address them. This feature is available now in Preview.

Amazon Rekognition can now detect explicit and suggestive adult content in images, enabling you to protect users from inappropriate content. Beyond flagging an image based on presence of adult content, Image Moderation also returns a hierarchical list of labels with confidence scores. These labels indicate specific categories of adult content, thus providing more granular control to developers to filter and manage large volumes of user generated content (UGC).

Amazon EC2 F1 is a compute instance with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that you can program to create custom hardware accelerations for your application. F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code, including an FPGA Developer AMI and Hardware Developer Kit (HDK). Once your FPGA design is complete, you can register it as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and deploy it to your F1 instance in just a few clicks. You can reuse your AFIs as many times, and across as many F1 instances as you like. You can offer AFIs you develop on the AWS Marketplace for other customers to purchase.

Amazon EC2 F1 instances are now available in two different instance sizes that include up to eight FPGAs per instance. F1 instances include the latest 16 nm Xilinx UltraScale Plus FPGA with local 64 GiB DDR4 ECC protected memory, with a dedicated PCI-e x16 connection to the instance. For F1.16xlarge instances, the dedicated PCI-e fabric lets the FPGAs share the same memory space and communicate with each other across the fabric at up to 12 GBps in each direction. The FPGAs within the F1.16xlarge share access to a 400 Gbps bidirectional ring for low-latency, high bandwidth communication.

F1 instances are available now with the following specifications:

Amazon Aurora is a fully managed relational database that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. In November 2016, we announced a limited preview of the PostgreSQL-compatible version. Since then, we’ve received valuable feedback from early adopters.

Today we announced the general availability of Amazon Redshift Spectrum, a new feature that allows you to run SQL queries against exabytes of data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). With Redshift Spectrum, you can extend the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond data stored on local disks in your data warehouse to query vast amounts of unstructured data in your Amazon S3 “data lake” — without having to load or transform any data. Redshift Spectrum applies sophisticated query optimization, scaling processing across thousands of nodes so results are fast – even with large data sets and complex queries.