You can now use Amazon Lex chatbots in the Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS regions. 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 Container Registry (ECR) now supports manifest lists to increase choice of different CPU architectures and operating systems you can use in container applications, for example by adding AWS Graviton ARM instances to existing clusters. Using manifest lists, you can store image variants for different hardware architectures such as x86 and ARM, and operating systems such as Linux and Windows as a single container image in ECR. Clients like docker can then automatically pull the right image variant for each architecture and operating system when starting containers. This helps simplify your build and deploy workflow as you use a single image and tag instead of embedding per-architecture image references throughout your CI/CD scripts.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now enables customers to connect an Amazon SES SMTP endpoint to a virtual private cloud (VPC) through a VPC endpoint powered by AWS PrivateLink. With this feature, customers can access the Amazon SES SMTP endpoint securely without requiring an Internet Gateway in a VPC. 

AWS WAF now provides a simple way to migrate your WAF rules from AWS WAF Classic. The migration wizard will parse through your web ACL and generate a CloudFormation template into your S3 bucket. By deploying that CloudFormation template you can create an equivalent web ACL for the new AWS WAF.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Amazon SES is a reliable, cost-effective, cloud-based email service designed to help digital marketers and application developers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails. 

AWS Storage Gateway now supports Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering as a storage class for File Gateway, enabling you to optimize storage costs automatically when data access patterns change, without impacting performance or incurring operational overhead. This eliminates the challenge of needing to have a deep understanding of your on-premises users and applications’ data access patterns.  

You can now copy up to 20 Amazon EBS snapshots concurrently to a single destination region per account, an increase from the previous limit of 5 concurrent copies per destination region per account. 

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in the Northern California, São Paulo, and Singapore Regions. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against AWS architectural best practices, and provides guidance on improving your cloud architectures. 

Amazon Connect, an easy to use contact center service, has decreased outbound telephony rates for calling to six countries.  

AWS License Manager now allows customers in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to manage licenses across all the AWS accounts in an organization. Customers gain control and visibility of their licenses used across all of their AWS accounts with License Manager’s built-in dashboard and thus reduce the risk of non-compliance, misreporting, and additional costs due to licensing overages.