Earlier this month, we introduced AWS PrivateLink , a new service that allows customers to privately access select AWS services from their Virtual Private Cloud and from on-premises via AWS Direct Connect. We are now extending this capability to customer and partner services hosted on AWS.

AWS Marketplace is pleased to announce that customers can now discover Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that are available on AWS PrivateLink, and connect to these applications using verified DNS names on the service endpoints. AWS PrivateLink enables customers to access services hosted on AWS in a highly available and scalable manner, while keeping the network traffic within the AWS network.

AWS AppSync is a new service in Public Preview that enables you to manage and update mobile app data in real-time between devices and the cloud, and allows apps to interact with the data on the mobile device when it is offline. With AWS AppSync, applications can easily access AWS services using a data language called GraphQL and an SDK that is optimized for mobile and web applications. GraphQL is an open standard that lets you request, change, and subscribe to the exact data you need in a single network request. This makes prototyping and building data intensive applications as simple as writing a few lines of code.

Now, you can use advanced security features (beta) for Amazon Cognito to help protect access to user accounts in your applications. These advanced security features provide risk-based adaptive authentication and protection from the use of compromised credentials.

You can now shift incoming traffic between two AWS Lambda function versions based on pre-assigned weights. This allows you to gradually shift traffic between two versions, helping you reduce the risk and limit the blast radius of new Lambda deployments. You can now also use AWS CodeDeploy to automatically manage the rollout of new function versions. CodeDeploy is a service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services like Lambda and Amazon EC2. CodeDeploy makes it easy to gradually and safely deploy updates to Lambda, and it is supported by the AWS Serverless Application Model .  

You can now use canary release deployments to gradually roll out new APIs in Amazon API Gateway. This helps you more safely roll out API changes and limit the blast radius of new deployments.

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Message brokers allow different software systems–often using different programming languages, and on different platforms–to communicate and exchange information. Messaging is the communications backbone that connects and integrates the components of distributed applications, such as order processing, inventory management, and fullfillment for e-commerce. Amazon MQ manages the administration and maintenance of ActiveMQ, a popular open-source message broker. Amazon MQ takes care of time-consuming tasks such as provisioning the infrastructure, setting up the broker, updating the software, and managing security. Amazon MQ is designed to withstand failures so your messages are highly available. With Amazon MQ, you get direct access to the ActiveMQ console and industry standard APIs and protocols for messaging, including JMS, NMS, AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, and WebSocket. You can easily move from any message broker that uses these standards to Amazon MQ because you don’t have to rewrite any messaging code in your applications.

AWS Batch now supports the submission of arrays of jobs with a single API call. With ArrayJobs, users can easily submit, with a single SubmitJob  call, up to 10,000 copies of a job. Users can also express dependencies on Array Jobs, including ‘N-to-N’ dependencies between related elements across multiple Array Jobs. Array Jobs simplify the submission and management of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations, parametric sweeps, and jobs which need to perform the same operation on thousands of input files or objects. AWS Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted. With AWS Batch, there is no need to install and manage batch computing software or server clusters.

Amazon EC2 H1 instances are the latest generation of Amazon EC2’s Storage Optimized instances, which are powered by 2.3 GHz Intel^® Xeon^® E5 2686 v4 processors (codenamed Broadwell), offer more vCPUs and more memory per terabyte of local magnetic storage compared to D2 instances. The largest instance size, h1.16xlarge, provides 64vCPUs and 16TB of HDD-based instance storage. H1 instances are designed for applications that need low cost storage, high disk throughput, and high sequential disk I/O access to large data sets. H1 instances are ideal for data-intensive workloads such as MapReduce-based workloads, distributed file systems such as HDFS and MapR-FS, network file systems, log or data processing applications such as Apache Kafka, and big data workload clusters.

Amazon EC2 Bare Metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the processor and memory of the underlying server. These instances are ideal for workloads that require access to hardware feature sets (such as Intel VT-x), or for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements.