AWS Lambda now supports AWS PrivateLink. With this feature you can manage and invoke Lambda functions from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without exposing your traffic to the public internet. PrivateLink provides private connectivity between your VPCs and AWS services, like Lambda, on the private AWS network.

You can now process multiple Amazon Kinesis data streams with a single Kinesis Client Library (KCL) based consumer application. Previously, each KCL based application processes a single Kinesis data stream. With this new capability, you can update the list of streams at runtime for multi-stream processing in a scalable KCL application without redeploying the application. This reduces operational overhead of maintaining multiple KCL applications.

AWS Batch now allows users to configure retry strategies based on defined exit codes. Customers can now determine whether their AWS Batch jobs retry based on specified events such as infrastructure failure or application failure. This allows customers to tightly control the actions taken on job failure – resulting in lower costs and faster throughput by retrying only when necessary.

Amazon Redshift now allows users to modify the compression encoding of existing columns with a single statement. This new capability makes it easier to maintain the optimal compression encodings in Amazon Redshift to achieve high performance and reduce the storage utilization.  

Porting Assistant for .NET is now open source. Users can now extend the data set with new recommendations for assessment and use the extended data set to scan their project for incompatibilities. Users can also review and offer suggestions on exiting data sets. Users can actively participate in the development process and bring their experience and expert knowledge to the tool. They can review open issues in GitHub, comment on any of the issues that they are familiar with, make suggestions, ask questions, or open new issues if they like to start a new conversation. Source code for compatibility analysis component, assessment APIs and the data set used for the assessment are released under Apache 2.0 license 

Amazon Textract is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Canada (Central) regions. Amazon Textract is a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. 

AWS DataSync now offers a simplified agent setup using the agent’s local console. This enables you to set up your agent faster, and test network connectivity between your on-premises storage and AWS within minutes. 

AWS IQ is a professional services marketplace that connects AWS customers with AWS Certified freelancers and consulting firms with deep AWS expertise. IQ allows you to connect with experts within minutes, easily grant access to your AWS account and pay through your AWS bill when work is complete. 

Amazon Connect now enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s Neural Text-to-Speech Voices (NTTS) within their contact center across four new regions. These new voices deliver improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo. You can now use 14 NTTS voices in the London, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo regions, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to use the over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

You now can manage access to Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, by using temporary security credentials for the Python, Go, and Node.js Cassandra drivers.