We’re excited to announce a free new digital training series on AWS Snowball Edge, a petabyte-scale data transport device with on-board storage and compute capabilities. This three-course series is designed to teach you how to use the device and help you decide if it’s appropriate for your data transport needs.

You can now proactively manage your quotas with Amazon CloudWatch Usage Metrics and Service Quotas Integration. Usage Metrics provide visibility into resource and API utilization for your AWS services. A new Metric Math function allows you to retrieve your most up-to-date quotas from Service Quotas. With these capabilities you have greater visibility into your service usage, and you can start to proactively manage your quotas.

You can now use Environment Variables with your AWS Lambda functions in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

You can now monitor, isolate, and diagnose performance impacting your Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) container instances . This new feature available with CloudWatch Container Insights, automates the collection of fifteen new CloudWatch custom metrics such as CPU, memory, and file system and network utilization of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The feature also summarizes these metrics in an ECS Instances dashboard to improve cluster performance, improve app resilience and availability, and troubleshoot issues from your ECS clusters faster.

You can now use Amazon Lex for use cases that are subject to Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance. Amazon Lex is SOC 1, 2, and 3 compliant, allowing you to get deep insight into the security processes and controls that protect customer data. AWS maintains SOC compliance through extensive third-party audits of AWS controls. These audits ensure that the appropriate safeguards and procedures are in place to protect against security risks that may affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer and company data. The results of these third-party audits are made available on the AWS SOC Compliance site, where auditors can view the published reports to get more information about the controls established to support AWS operations and compliance.

We’re excited to announce three new courses specifically designed to help APN Partners use AWS solutions to better help their customers and differentiate their organizations. These courses provide a technical understanding of how machine learning (ML), VMware and containers work in the AWS Cloud.

Application Load Balancers now support Weighted Target Groups routing. With this launch you will be able to do weighted routing of the traffic forwarded by a rule to multiple target groups. This enables various use cases like blue-green, canary and hybrid deployments without the need for multiple load balancers. It even enables zero-downtime migration between on-premises and cloud or between different compute types like EC2 and Lambda.  

Starting today, you can launch builds on three new compute types, ARM, GPU and X-Large, when using AWS CodeBuild.

AWS CodeBuild’s support for ARM-based workload allows you to build and test your software updates natively, without needing to emulate or cross-compile. You can get started by creating or updating a CodeBuild Project, and selecting “ARM_CONTAINER” as the environment type and “BUILD_GENERAL1_LARGE” as the compute type. A new managed image, “aws/codebuild/amazonlinux2-aarch64-standard” , based on Amazon Linux is now available for you to use as the build environment for these builds.

Today, AWS announces Systems Manager Explorer, an operations dashboard providing you with an at-a-glance graphical view of relevant operations data, such as EC2 instance summaries and their patch compliance. With Explorer, you can view your operations data across your AWS accounts and Regions to see where attention, investigation, and remediation may be required. 

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server db.m5 and db.r5 instance classes are available in 8xlarge and 16xlarge sizes. With support for these new instance sizes, customers who are currently using either m4.10xlarge, m4.16xlarge, r4.8xlarge, or r4.16xlarge now have an easy upgrade path to the latest generation of instances.