You can now use AWS X-Ray to trace requests made to your serverless applications built using AWS Lambda. This enables you to gain insights into the performance of serverless applications, allowing you to pinpoint the root cause of issues so that you can address them. This feature is available now in Preview.

Amazon Rekognition can now detect explicit and suggestive adult content in images, enabling you to protect users from inappropriate content. Beyond flagging an image based on presence of adult content, Image Moderation also returns a hierarchical list of labels with confidence scores. These labels indicate specific categories of adult content, thus providing more granular control to developers to filter and manage large volumes of user generated content (UGC).

Amazon EC2 F1 is a compute instance with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that you can program to create custom hardware accelerations for your application. F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code, including an FPGA Developer AMI and Hardware Developer Kit (HDK). Once your FPGA design is complete, you can register it as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and deploy it to your F1 instance in just a few clicks. You can reuse your AFIs as many times, and across as many F1 instances as you like. You can offer AFIs you develop on the AWS Marketplace for other customers to purchase.

Amazon EC2 F1 instances are now available in two different instance sizes that include up to eight FPGAs per instance. F1 instances include the latest 16 nm Xilinx UltraScale Plus FPGA with local 64 GiB DDR4 ECC protected memory, with a dedicated PCI-e x16 connection to the instance. For F1.16xlarge instances, the dedicated PCI-e fabric lets the FPGAs share the same memory space and communicate with each other across the fabric at up to 12 GBps in each direction. The FPGAs within the F1.16xlarge share access to a 400 Gbps bidirectional ring for low-latency, high bandwidth communication.

F1 instances are available now with the following specifications:

Amazon Aurora is a fully managed relational database that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. In November 2016, we announced a limited preview of the PostgreSQL-compatible version. Since then, we’ve received valuable feedback from early adopters.

Today we announced the general availability of Amazon Redshift Spectrum, a new feature that allows you to run SQL queries against exabytes of data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). With Redshift Spectrum, you can extend the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond data stored on local disks in your data warehouse to query vast amounts of unstructured data in your Amazon S3 “data lake” — without having to load or transform any data. Redshift Spectrum applies sophisticated query optimization, scaling processing across thousands of nodes so results are fast – even with large data sets and complex queries.

Amazon Lex is now generally available for all customers. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into your application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are now available to developers, enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language conversational bots.

AWS X-Ray is now available for all customers. AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. You can use X-Ray to analyze both applications in development and in production, from simple three-tier applications to complex microservices applications consisting of thousands of services.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to a 10x performance improvement – from milliseconds to microseconds – even at millions of requests per second. DAX does all the heavy lifting required to add in-memory acceleration to your DynamoDB tables, without requiring developers to manage cache invalidation, data population, or cluster management. Now you can focus on building great applications for your customers without worrying about performance at scale. You do not need to modify application logic, since DAX is compatible with existing DynamoDB API calls. You can enable DAX with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console or using the AWS SDK. Just as with DynamoDB, you only pay for the capacity you provision.

You can now access Amazon DynamoDB from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using VPC endpoints, enabling you to have all network traffic between your application and DynamoDB traverse the public Internet or stay within the AWS cloud.

Pricing will be key consideration for municipalities when choosing external vendors, finds Frost & Sullivan’s Environment & Water Team.