Blox is a collection of open source projects for container management and orchestration on Amazon ECS. Blox gives you more control over how your containerized applications run on Amazon ECS, and it enables you to build schedulers and integrate third-party schedulers on top of ECS, while leveraging Amazon ECS to fully manage and scale your clusters.

You can now develop your AWS Lambda functions in C# using the .NET Core 1.0 runtime.

AWS OpsWorks has introduced a new offering, AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate. OpsWorks for Chef Automate provides a fully managed Chef server and suite of automation tools that give you workflow automation for continuous deployment, automated testing for compliance and security, and a user interface that gives you visibility into your nodes and their status. The Chef server gives you full stack automation by handling operational tasks such as software and operating system configurations, package installations, database setups, and more. The Chef server centrally stores your configuration tasks and provides them to each node in your compute environment at any scale, from a few nodes to thousands of nodes. OpsWorks for Chef Automate is completely compatible with tooling and cookbooks from the Chef community and automatically registers new nodes with your Chef server. 

AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly. Step Functions is a reliable way to coordinate components and step through the functions of your application. Step Functions provides a graphical console to arrange and visualize the components of your application as a series of steps. This makes it simple to build and run multi-step applications. Step Functions automatically triggers and tracks each step, and retries when there are errors, so your application executes in order and as expected. Step Functions logs the state of each step, so when things do go wrong, you can diagnose and debug problems quickly. You can change and add steps without even writing code, so you can easily evolve your application and innovate faster.

Amazon Pinpoint makes it easy to run targeted campaigns to drive user engagement in mobile apps. Amazon Pinpoint helps you understand user behavior, define which users to target, determine which messages to send, schedule the best time to deliver the messages, and then track the results of your campaign.

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.

You can now configure a dead letter queue (DLQ) on AWS Lambda to give you more control over message handling for all asynchronous invocations, including those delivered via AWS events (S3, SNS, IoT, etc). You can setup a DLQ by configuring the ‘DeadLetterConfig’ property when creating or updating your Lambda function. You can provide an SQS queue or an SNS topic as the ‘TargetArn’ for your DLQ, and AWS Lambda will write the event object invoking the Lambda function to this endpoint after the standard retry policy (2 additional retries on failure ) is exhausted. 

AWS Shield is a managed DDoS protection service that protects your web applications on AWS from DDoS attacks. AWS Shield Standard is available to all AWS customers at no additional cost, and protects your applications from the most common, frequently occurring DDoS attacks. If you need a higher level of protection against large and sophisticated attacks, you can subscribe to AWS Shield Advanced to protect your applications on Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. With AWS Shield Advanced, you also get access to AWS WAF at no additional cost, giving you the flexibility to write customized mitigations against application layer attacks. AWS Shield Advanced also provides 24X7 access to the DDoS Response Team (DRT) who can apply custom mitigations on your behalf and DDoS Cost Protection, to protect your AWS bill against usage fee surges during mitigation of a DDoS attack.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools. With CodeBuild, you are charged by the minute for the compute resources you use.

Amazon API Gateway now integrates with the AWS Marketplace to help API owners monetize their API and meter usage for their API products, without writing any code.