You can now block merging pull requests until specified rules are met. Previously, you could only block merging a pull request through custom IAM permissions. You can now create an approval rule specifically for a pull request, or create approval rule templates to be applied to all future pull requests in a repository. You can specify rule requirements, such as the total number of approvals or approval from a specific user, that must be met before code is merged. Approval rules and approval rule templates help ensure that only high quality code changes are merged into your codebase.

You can now add tags while copying snapshots. Previously, a user had to first copy the snapshot and then add tags to the copied snapshot manually. Moving forward, you can specify the list of tags you wish to be applied to the copied snapshot as a parameter on the Copy Snapshot API. 

AWS Lambda now supports Amazon SQS FIFO as an event source. This allows you to use Lambda for building event-driven applications where ordered events and operations are critical. For example, you can build an application that displays the correct product price by sending price modifications in the right order.  

We’re excited to announce a free new digital training series on AWS Snowball Edge, a petabyte-scale data transport device with on-board storage and compute capabilities. This three-course series is designed to teach you how to use the device and help you decide if it’s appropriate for your data transport needs.

You can now proactively manage your quotas with Amazon CloudWatch Usage Metrics and Service Quotas Integration. Usage Metrics provide visibility into resource and API utilization for your AWS services. A new Metric Math function allows you to retrieve your most up-to-date quotas from Service Quotas. With these capabilities you have greater visibility into your service usage, and you can start to proactively manage your quotas.

You can now use Environment Variables with your AWS Lambda functions in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

You can now monitor, isolate, and diagnose performance impacting your Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) container instances . This new feature available with CloudWatch Container Insights, automates the collection of fifteen new CloudWatch custom metrics such as CPU, memory, and file system and network utilization of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The feature also summarizes these metrics in an ECS Instances dashboard to improve cluster performance, improve app resilience and availability, and troubleshoot issues from your ECS clusters faster.

You can now use Amazon Lex for use cases that are subject to Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance. Amazon Lex is SOC 1, 2, and 3 compliant, allowing you to get deep insight into the security processes and controls that protect customer data. AWS maintains SOC compliance through extensive third-party audits of AWS controls. These audits ensure that the appropriate safeguards and procedures are in place to protect against security risks that may affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer and company data. The results of these third-party audits are made available on the AWS SOC Compliance site, where auditors can view the published reports to get more information about the controls established to support AWS operations and compliance.

We’re excited to announce three new courses specifically designed to help APN Partners use AWS solutions to better help their customers and differentiate their organizations. These courses provide a technical understanding of how machine learning (ML), VMware and containers work in the AWS Cloud.

Application Load Balancers now support Weighted Target Groups routing. With this launch you will be able to do weighted routing of the traffic forwarded by a rule to multiple target groups. This enables various use cases like blue-green, canary and hybrid deployments without the need for multiple load balancers. It even enables zero-downtime migration between on-premises and cloud or between different compute types like EC2 and Lambda.