AWS Transfer Family now offers pre-defined security policies to control cryptographic algorithms used for communication between your end users’ file transfer clients and AWS Transfer Family server endpoints, helping you meet your organization’s requirements for security and compatibility.  

AWS has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances in US East (Ohio), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Sydney, Tokyo). Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips, which Amazon custom-designed to provide customers with the lowest cost-per-inference in the cloud and lower barriers for everyday developers to use machine learning at scale.  

AWS Step Functions announces enhancements to Amazon States Language, making it easier for you to build workflows. Customers now have more flexibility within their state machine definition and allow for more dynamic behaviour within their workflow application with enhanced Choice and Task states.

Amazon Braket is a fully managed quantum computing service that helps researchers and developers explore potential applications and evaluate current quantum computing technologies. Amazon Braket provides a development environment to design quantum algorithms, test them on simulated quantum computers, and run them on different types of quantum computing hardware.

Customer AI is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer, delivered via a consulting engagement from Peak, an AWS Retail and AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. Customer AI helps with acquisition and retention, allowing companies to target and acquire ideal customers to grow revenues, increase profits, and drive a higher ROI from marketing campaigns. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in activities that include AI opportunity identification, data analysis, business case creation to operationalize AI and custom configuration of a Customer AI System.

Amazon QuickSight now supports folders for organization and sharing. Personal folders allow admins and authors to organize and manage content within their user accounts. Authors and admins can create personal folders and add dashboards, analyses and data sets in them. Personal folders are private to each author/admin and do not affect permissions of assets stored within. Shared folders allow admins and authors to simplify sharing and permissions management over 1000s of dashboards, analyses and data sets, while providing readers with a hierarchical discovery model for information within the team/organization. Shared folders must first be created by QuickSight Admins, who can then grant access to authors and readers. Assets placed in a shared folder will be shared with users at the permission level (owner or viewer) that users have to the folder. Personal and Shared folders are accessible to users from QuickSight’s new home page. This new home page has direct links to favorites and recently accessed items, folders and provides sections specific to dashboards, analyses and data sets, with choice of a new responsive thumbnail view or a list view. Read more about folders in this AWS Big Data blog post .

The Improving Forecast Accuracy with Machine Learning is an AWS Solutions Implementation that provides an automated pipeline for generating, testing, and comparing Amazon Forecast models and forecasts allowing developers and data scientists to reduce either the overhead costs of developing new forecasts or the time required to optimize existing ones.

You can now use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to distribute UDP traffic to container-based applications running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Network Load Balancers are fully-managed load balancers that operate at the connection level (Layer-4) and are capable of handling millions of requests at ultra-low latency. Until now, you could use Network Load Balancers on Amazon EKS only with the TCP protocol. With this new integration, you can run workloads such as DNS, IoT, real-time media, and syslog using UDP protocol, allowing high throughput at ultra low latency through the Network Load Balancer.

Starting today, AWS Systems Manager Explorer provides a summary of Support cases across your AWS accounts, to help you get better visibility into the operational health of your AWS environment. Systems Manager Explorer is an operations dashboard that provides a view of your operations data across your AWS accounts and Regions, helping you see where you may need to investigate and remediate operational issues. AWS Support provides tools and technology, people, and programs designed to proactively fix issues and help you optimize performance, lower costs, and innovate faster.

AWS Lambda now supports Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) as an event source, giving customers more choices to build serverless applications with streaming data. Customers can build Apache Kafka consumer applications with Lambda functions without needing to worry about infrastructure management. Amazon MSK is a fully managed service that makes it easy to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data.