You can now hibernate newly-launched EBS-backed Amazon EC2 I3, M5ad, and R5ad instances. Hibernation provides you with the convenience of pausing your workloads and resuming them later from the saved state. Hibernation is just like closing and opening your laptop lid — your application will start right from where it left off. By using hibernation, you can maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances that can get to a productive state faster without modifying your existing applications.  

AWS Global Accelerator announces the ability to override the destination ports used to route traffic to an application endpoint. This allows you to map a list of external destination ports — that your users send traffic to — to a list of internal destination ports that you want an application endpoint to receive traffic on. By default, an accelerator routes user traffic to endpoints in AWS Regions using the protocol and port ranges that you specify when you create a listener. For example, if you define a listener that accepts TCP traffic on ports 80 and 443, the accelerator routes traffic to those ports on an endpoint.  

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. AWS App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and ensuring high-availability for your applications. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in the US West (California) AWS region.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.6.0 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.6.0 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some key features include native APIs to manage client quotas (KIP-546 ) and explicit rebalance triggering to enable advanced consumer usecases (KIP-568 ). For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.6.0 .

You can now add connection time metrics to your reporting in Amazon Connect. This enables you to understand the time from when Connect sends a contact to an agent to when they accept and are connected to the phone call or chat. 

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in 3 additional AWS Regions including US West (N. California), Europe (Paris), and Europe (Stockholm). This regional expansion is particularly useful for organizations where data residency considerations previously made it difficult for customers to use Amazon SES. 

Port forwarding sessions created using Session Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now support multiple simultaneous connections over the session. This improvement reduces the rendering latency and improves load times for applications that load data using multiple concurrent connections, when delivering such applications over a port forwarding session.

Amazon CloudFront announces Origin Shield, a centralized caching layer that helps increase your cache hit ratio to reduce the load on your origin. Origin Shield also decreases your origin operating costs by collapsing requests across regions so as few as one request goes to your origin per object. You can also use Lambda@Edge with Origin Shield to enable advanced serverless logic like dynamic origin load balancing. Customers using Origin Shield for live streaming, image handling, or multi-CDN workloads have reported up to a 57% reduction in their origin’s load.

You can now filter automation executions by resource groups in Systems Manager Automation. This allows you to group and view the automation executions specific to your applications or environments.