Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to analyze text documents and identify insights such as sentiment, entities, and topics in text. Amazon Comprehend now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints via AWS PrivateLink so customers can securely initiate API calls to Amazon Comprehend from within your VPC and without using public IPs. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network, while significantly simplifying your internal network architecture. You no longer need to use an Internet Gateway, Network Address Translation (NAT) devices, or firewall proxies to connect to Amazon Comprehend.  

You can now use AWS CodeDeploy to deploy applications to your virtual private cloud (VPC) through VPC endpoints powered by AWS PrivateLink. With this feature, you can use CodeDeploy to deploy your critical, internal applications without using an Internet gateway, public IP addresses, or a VPN connection. AWS PrivateLink provides secure connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet or leave the Amazon network.

AWS has updated Serverless Bot Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that automatically sets up a chatbot application with sample interactions for the chatbot. The solution makes use of AWS services, such as AWS Lambda, to implement the machine learning logic of the chatbot and Amazon Polly to turn text responses into lifelike speech.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) now supports next-generation, memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R5 nodes for high-performance applications. R5 nodes are based on the AWS Nitro System and feature enhanced networking based on the Elastic Network Adapter. Memory-optimized R5 nodes offer memory size flexibility from 16 to 768 GiB. 

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs customers can now use the AWS::EC2::FlowLog resource to create custom format VPC flow logs with enriched metadata fields and publish them to either CloudWatch Logs or S3, capture VPC flow logs at shorter aggregation intervals of up to 1-minute for quicker and more granular network visibility, and tag existing or new VPC flow log subscriptions, all directly through AWS CloudFormation.

IoT Foundations is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via consulting engagement from Trek10, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner with the AWS DevOps, AWS IoT Consulting and AWS SaaS Consulting Competencies. IoT Foundations is intended for those that want to create and connect devices to an AWS IoT infrastructure. Devices can be conceptual, pre-production, or ready to go to market – regardless of the device stage, IoT Foundations can scale and provide benefits. 

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for local printer redirection with the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. With local printer redirection, AppStream 2.0 users can redirect print jobs from their streaming application to a printer that is connected to their local computer. No printer driver needs to be installed on the AppStream 2.0 streaming instance to enable users to print documents during their streaming sessions.  

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) announced the availability of additional network metrics for containers using the EC2 launch type in either bridge or awsvpc networking modes. You can now measure the rate of network traffic to and from your containers in both ECS Container Insights in Amazon CloudWatch or the ECS task metadata endpoint. This lets you measure bytes transmitted or received per second to see whether your containers are processing requests from the internet or other applications. Additionally on the task metadata endpoint, you can measure packets received, transmitted, or lost for containers using awsvpc mode and EC2 launch type.

You can now govern the virtual private cloud (VPC) settings for your Lambda functions using IAM condition keys. Using these condition keys, you can enforce that users only deploy functions that are connected to a VPC. VPC-enabled functions send all traffic through your VPC and abide by your VPC’s network controls. You can use these network controls to define where your functions can connect. You can also restrict access to network locations, including the public internet.

AWS Glue version 2.0 featuring 10x faster Spark ETL job start times, is now generally available. With Glue version 2.0, job startup is faster and more consistent. In addition, AWS Glue version 2.0 Spark jobs will be billed in 1-second increments with a 1-minute minimum rather than a 10 minute minimum. As a result, customers can now run micro-batch, deadline sensitive, and interactive workloads more cost effectively. Customers can run micro-batch jobs to quickly load data lakes, data warehouses, and databases and enable real-time analytics. With faster job start times, customers can run SLA driven data pipelines more reliably. Faster job start times also enable interactive data exploration and experimentation.