The CDK Explorer, a new preview feature in the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, allows developers to visualize CDK applications. AWS CDK, launched GA in July this year, is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. CDK apps are composed of building blocks known as Constructs, which include definitions for your cloud stacks and resources within. Check out the CDK developer guide or the CDK Workshop to learn more about the CDK.  

Amazon Comprehend now supports real time Custom Classification. You can use the real time Custom Classification to understand, label and route information based on your own business rules in real time. For example, you can instantly categorize the content of support requests and route them to the proper support team. Or you can automatically moderate website comments as they’re flowing in. Prior to this launch, customers used Custom Classification with their business-specific labels to categorize documents asynchronously. Now, customers can choose real time or asynchronous Custom Classification depending on their use case. 

AWS IoT is announcing a new feature for AWS IoT Core called Fleet Provisioning, which makes it easy for customers to onboard large volumes of manufactured devices, like vacuum cleaners or construction excavators, to the cloud. For many customers, particularly those manufacturing large volumes of devices like OEM’s, the process of uniquely configuring and connecting IoT devices to the cloud (e.g. bootstrapping and provisioning) remains manual and time-consuming step in their IoT implementation process.

You can now set time based retention policies on Data Lifecycle Manager. With this launch, DLM allows you to set snapshot retention period in the following interval units: days, weeks, months and years.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now offers support for 8K UHD video encoding, which gives video providers the ability to create and monetize premium experiences for viewers and to support the latest consumer display devices. 8K encoding is available in the MediaConvert on-demand, professional tier, in resolutions up to 8192 x 4320 with HEVC encoding, 10-bit, including HDR. This capability also allows for the creation of square video at resolutions up to 4320 x 4320, a format commonly used for VR (Virtual Reality) or AR (Augmented Reality) content. For detailed information on 8K encoding pricing, please visit the MediaConvert pricing page.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) now enables you to create and use asymmetric customer master keys (CMKs) and data key pairs. With this feature, you can perform digital signing operations using RSA and Elliptic Curve (ECC) keys. You can also perform public key encryption operations using RSA keys. The public portion of the key pairs can be used outside of the service. You can share public keys with your customers and partners so they can encrypt data or verify signatures without making a request to AWS KMS. As with all other AWS KMS APIs, asymmetric key usage is logged in AWS CloudTrail to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs.

AWS Lambda now supports Parallelization Factor , a feature that allows you to process one shard of a Kinesis or DynamoDB data stream with more than one Lambda invocation simultaneously. This new feature allows you to build more agile stream processing applications on volatile data traffic.  

Starting today, Amazon EC2 is introducing the ability for customers to choose an Unlimited mode preference using CLI and SDK at the account level for T3, T3a, and T2 instance types. The new API will enable customers to perform a one time action of setting Unlimited or Standard mode as the default preference for all T3, T3a, and T2 instance launches.

AWS Lambda now supports two new features to provide developers additional controls on how to process asynchronous invocations: Maximum Event Age and Maximum Retry Attempts . When you invoke a function asynchronously, Lambda sends the event to a queue. A separate process reads events from the queue and runs your function. These two new features provide ways to control how events are retried and how long they can remain in the queue.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate is now available in six new regions – US West (Northern California), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).