Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in the US West (California) AWS region.

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. AWS App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and ensuring high-availability for your applications. 

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in 3 additional AWS Regions including US West (N. California), Europe (Paris), and Europe (Stockholm). This regional expansion is particularly useful for organizations where data residency considerations previously made it difficult for customers to use Amazon SES. 

You can now add connection time metrics to your reporting in Amazon Connect. This enables you to understand the time from when Connect sends a contact to an agent to when they accept and are connected to the phone call or chat. 

Port forwarding sessions created using Session Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now support multiple simultaneous connections over the session. This improvement reduces the rendering latency and improves load times for applications that load data using multiple concurrent connections, when delivering such applications over a port forwarding session.

You can now filter automation executions by resource groups in Systems Manager Automation. This allows you to group and view the automation executions specific to your applications or environments.  

Amazon CloudFront announces Origin Shield, a centralized caching layer that helps increase your cache hit ratio to reduce the load on your origin. Origin Shield also decreases your origin operating costs by collapsing requests across regions so as few as one request goes to your origin per object. You can also use Lambda@Edge with Origin Shield to enable advanced serverless logic like dynamic origin load balancing. Customers using Origin Shield for live streaming, image handling, or multi-CDN workloads have reported up to a 57% reduction in their origin’s load.

You can now process multiple Amazon Kinesis data streams with a single Kinesis Client Library (KCL) based consumer application. Previously, each KCL based application processes a single Kinesis data stream. With this new capability, you can update the list of streams at runtime for multi-stream processing in a scalable KCL application without redeploying the application. This reduces operational overhead of maintaining multiple KCL applications.

AWS Lambda now supports AWS PrivateLink. With this feature you can manage and invoke Lambda functions from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without exposing your traffic to the public internet. PrivateLink provides private connectivity between your VPCs and AWS services, like Lambda, on the private AWS network.

Amazon Redshift now allows users to modify the compression encoding of existing columns with a single statement. This new capability makes it easier to maintain the optimal compression encodings in Amazon Redshift to achieve high performance and reduce the storage utilization.