AWS customers can now access Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints, without using public IPs, and without needing to traverse the public internet. VPC endpoints for Amazon SQS are powered by AWS PrivateLink, a highly available, scalable technology that enables you to privately connect your VPC to supported AWS services.

You can now use AWS Shield Advanced to get higher levels of DDoS protections for your applications running on the recently announced AWS Global Accelerator. Simply enable AWS Shield Advanced protection on your Accelerator. AWS Shield Advanced will automatically detect the type of AWS resource behind the Accelerator and apply the relevant advanced DDoS protections. 

Amazon Connect now provides a new contact API that lets you programmatically retrieve contact attributes for a given contact. Contact attributes are key-value pairs of data about a contact, such as the name of the caller, why they called, or the quality of service they received. Contact attributes can be stored using contact flow blocks or by API. For example, for a given contact, you might choose to set contact attributes to indicate why the customer was calling or how their issue was resolved. If the customer calls back, you can now use the new contact API to load the attributes associated with their previous contact in order to personalize the IVR experience or route them to an appropriate queue.

You can now use Amazon Neptune in applications that are subject to PCI compliance or require ISO certification. Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully-managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) now performs managed, in-place cluster upgrades for Kubernetes versions. Additionally, Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.11.5.

AWS Systems Manager now enables customers to use Automation at scale using a pay-per-use model. The existing limit of 25,000 basic steps will be increased to a new free tier of 100,000 basic steps per account per month.

Amazon Neptune is now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region.

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in 8 additional AWS Regions in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific: Canada (Central), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Paris), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).

AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. As you grow the number of workloads in AWS across multiple accounts, you need to scale your networks, control your connectivity policies better, and monitor your network effectively. Today, you can connect pairs of Amazon VPCs using VPC peering. However, managing point-to-point connectivity across large number of Amazon VPCs, without centrally managing connectivity and routing policies, can be operationally costly and cumbersome. This solution can be hard to manage hundreds of Amazon VPCs.

With AWS Transit Gateway, you only have to create and manage a single connection from a central gateway to each Amazon VPC, on premises data center, or remote office. AWS Transit Gateway acts as a hub where traffic is routed to all the connected networks, the spokes. This hub and spoke model significantly simplifies management and reduces operational costs because each network only has to connect to the AWS Transit Gateway. With effective routing policies on the Transit Gateway, you have centralized control over how your Amazon VPCs and on-premises networks connect to each other. This connectivity model makes it easy and simple for you to scale and monitor your networks over time.

With this announcement, AWS Transit Gateway is now available in a total of 14 AWS Regions around the world. For more information, see the AWS Transit Gateway product page and documentation .

AWS Step Functions is now available in the EU (Paris) region. AWS Step Functions is a workflow automation service that allows you to build and update applications quickly.