AWS Batch now allows users to configure retry strategies based on defined exit codes. Customers can now determine whether their AWS Batch jobs retry based on specified events such as infrastructure failure or application failure. This allows customers to tightly control the actions taken on job failure – resulting in lower costs and faster throughput by retrying only when necessary.

Amazon Textract is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Canada (Central) regions. Amazon Textract is a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. 

Porting Assistant for .NET is now open source. Users can now extend the data set with new recommendations for assessment and use the extended data set to scan their project for incompatibilities. Users can also review and offer suggestions on exiting data sets. Users can actively participate in the development process and bring their experience and expert knowledge to the tool. They can review open issues in GitHub, comment on any of the issues that they are familiar with, make suggestions, ask questions, or open new issues if they like to start a new conversation. Source code for compatibility analysis component, assessment APIs and the data set used for the assessment are released under Apache 2.0 license 

AWS IQ is a professional services marketplace that connects AWS customers with AWS Certified freelancers and consulting firms with deep AWS expertise. IQ allows you to connect with experts within minutes, easily grant access to your AWS account and pay through your AWS bill when work is complete. 

AWS DataSync now offers a simplified agent setup using the agent’s local console. This enables you to set up your agent faster, and test network connectivity between your on-premises storage and AWS within minutes. 

Amazon Connect now enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s Neural Text-to-Speech Voices (NTTS) within their contact center across four new regions. These new voices deliver improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo. You can now use 14 NTTS voices in the London, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo regions, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to use the over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

You now can manage access to Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, by using temporary security credentials for the Python, Go, and Node.js Cassandra drivers.  

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to deploy and configure AWS Backint Agent, an SAP-certified backup and restore application for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2 instances. While creating a deployment with AWS Launch Wizard, you will have the option to enable backups with Backint Agent by selecting the Amazon S3 bucket where the backups will be stored and the encryption keys to use. Additionally, you can configure backups to local volumes for ad-hoc backups if needed.

AWS Systems Manager now lets you easily search for runbooks and other Systems Manager documents, such as Run Command and Distributor packages, by specifying a part of the name as the search keyword. This feature enables easy discovery of runbooks when you have a large number of runbooks in your account or when you do not remember the exact name of a runbook.  

AWS Outposts support for AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) lets customers share access to Outposts resources – EC2 instances, EBS volumes, subnets, and local gateways (LGWs) – across multiple accounts within an organization. With this new capability, you can enable distributed teams and business units within your organization to configure VPCs, launch and run EC2 instances, and create EBS volumes.