AWS VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin version 1.5 is now the default CNI for new Kubernetes clusters launched by Amazon EKS.

AWS Direct Connect is now live at Equinix NY5, Secaucus, NJ. This location offers logical redundancy over a single virtual interface (VIF) on a Direct Connect connection. Logical redundancy can reduce downtime when a BGP peering session goes down due to a device failure or maintenance activity on the AWS side. With global access for AWS Direct Connect, you can reach AWS resources in any global AWS region using global public VIFs and Direct Connect gateway. When connecting to any AWS region, your data will not hairpin via the home region if it is not in the shortest path to your desired AWS region.

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, an open source plug-in that makes it easier to create, step-through debug, build, and deploy applications, is now Generally Available. The toolkit supports .NET, node.js and Python applications and provides deep support for serverless applications at launch with other AWS services planned for the future. The toolkit had previously been in developer preview. 

New AWS Public Datasets Available from Facebook, Yale, Allen Institute for Brain Science, NOAA, and others. 

AWS Resource Groups, a service that makes it easier to manage and automate tasks on large numbers of AWS resources at one time, is now a Service Organization Control (SOC) compliant service. This compliance certification applies to all AWS Regions where AWS Resource Groups is available.

AWS Cloud Map is now available in the AWS South America (São Paulo) Region. 

The open source ecs-cli tool now has improved capabilities for testing ECS task definitions locally. Using the ecs-cli, you can run ECS task definitions in a local development environment, such as a laptop or virtual machine.

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is now generally available in TypeScript and Python. AWS CDK is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. With AWS CDK, you can define your infrastructure as code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation. AWS CDK is also available in Java and C# in developer preview.

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications together using data from your own applications, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services. EventBridge delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources, such Zendesk, Datadog, or Pagerduty, and routes that data to targets like AWS Lambda. You can set up routing rules to determine where to send your data to build application architectures that react in real time to all of your data sources. EventBridge allows you to build event-driven architectures, which are loosely coupled and distributed. This improves developer agility as well as application resiliency. EventBridge makes it easy to build event-driven applications because it takes care of event ingestion and delivery, security, authorization, and error-handling for you. EventBridge leverages the CloudWatch Events API, so CloudWatch Events users can access their existing default bus, rules, and events in the new EventBridge console, as well as in the CloudWatch Events console.

You can now choose from four Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Lifecycle Management policies to automatically move files into the EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA) storage class and save up to 85% as your access patterns change. Additionally, you can now enable Lifecycle Management for all EFS file systems.