When using CloudWatch Synthetics, you can now get a snapshot of the canary health with a prebuilt monitoring dashboard. The new monitoring dashboard provides canary data trends over time for latency, availability, and error counts. The dashboard also provides expected latency based on historical data of the previous canary runs. This helps you spot anomalies sooner which in turn allows you to respond faster to ensure a better end user experience.  

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). With a single click, data scientists and developers can quickly spin up SageMaker Studio Notebooks for exploring datasets and building models. Starting today, you can choose to launch SageMaker Studio in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for fine-grained control on network access and internet connectivity of SageMaker Studio Notebooks. You can choose to completely disable public internet access for notebooks to add an additional layer of security.  

Distributed Load Testing on AWS helps you easily simulate thousands of users connecting to your application so that you can better understand your application performance under load. The solution launches and configures containers on AWS Fargate to generate a specified number of transactions per second without having to provision servers. 

Customers that use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send text messages (SMS) to mobile users can now host their application in the US East (Ohio), South America (Sao Paulo), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Paris), and Middle East (Bahrain) regions. Using Amazon SNS, customers can send a message directly to one phone number , or multiple phone numbers at once by subscribing those phone numbers to a topic and sending messages to the topic. Customers can send SMS text messages directly to mobile phone numbers in more than 200 countries.

You can now configure your Amazon Lex chat bot to improve engagement with customers who speak British English. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that can be used with Amazon Connect to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments. Pre-defined resources (‘slots ’), such as regional names and cities, are localized to the British English dialect to improve accuracy when capturing information, so customers can say things like “Book a hotel in London” and the Amazon Lex bot will recognize the city.  

You can now configure your Amazon Lex chat bot to improve engagement with customers who speak Australian English. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that can be used with Amazon Connect to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments. Pre-defined resources (‘slots ’), such as regional names and cities, are localized to the Australian English dialect to improve accuracy when capturing information, so customers can say things like “Book a hotel in Perth” and the Amazon Lex bot will recognize the city.  

You can now use Amazon Lex chatbots in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS region. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that turn your Amazon Connect contact flows into natural conversations. These can be used to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers connecting to your Amazon Connect contact center can interact with an Amazon Lex chatbot to perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports a configurable Kubernetes service IP address range. This enables customers with clusters running in a peered or direct connected network environment to ensure that their pods can communicate with external applications on networks outside the cluster.  

AWS has repositioned Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Java to Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink to emphasize our continued support for Apache Flink.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, now supports the option of upserting records in destinations, in addition to already supported option of inserting records. This feature is now available when Salesforce is selected as the destination. The upsert operation updates existing records in Salesforce if they exist; otherwise, it inserts the data as new records. Customers can now insert, or upsert up to 500 MB of data in Salesforce in a single flow run.