AWS Week in Review – December 12, 2022

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS! The world is asynchronous, is what Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, reminded us during his keynote last week at AWS re:Invent. At the beginning of the keynote, he showed us how weird a synchronous world would be and how everything in nature is asynchronous. One example of an event-driven application he showcased during his keynote is Serverlesspresso, a project my team has been working on for the last year. And last week, we announced Serverlesspresso extensions, a new program that lets you contribute to Serverlesspresso and learn how event-driven applications can be extended. Last Week’s Launches…

Now – Process PDFs, Word Documents, and Images with Amazon Comprehend for IDP

Today we are announcing a new Amazon Comprehend feature for intelligent document processing (IDP). This feature allows you to classify and extract entities from PDF documents, Microsoft Word files, and images directly from Amazon Comprehend without you needing to extract the text first. Many customers need to process documents that have a semi-structured format, like images of receipts that were scanned or tax statements in PDF format. Until today, those customers first needed to preprocess those documents using optical character recognition (OCR) tools to extract the text. Then they could use Amazon Comprehend to classify and extract entities from those preprocessed files. Now with Amazon Comprehend for IDP, customers can process their semi-structured documents, such as PDFs, docx, PNG, JPG,…

Introducing Amazon GameLift Anywhere – Run Your Game Servers on Your Own Infrastructure

In 2016, we launched Amazon GameLift, a dedicated hosting solution that securely deploys and automatically scales fleets of session-based multiplayer game servers to meet worldwide player demand. With Amazon GameLift, you can create and upload a game server build once, replicate, and then deploy across multiple AWS Regions and AWS Local Zones to reach your players with low-latency experiences across the world. GameLift also includes standalone features for low-cost game fleets with GameLift FleetIQ and player matchmaking with GameLift FlexMatch. Game developers asked us to reduce the wait time to deploy a candidate server build to the cloud each time they needed to test and iterate their game during the development phase. In addition, our customers told us that they…

Announcing Amazon CodeCatalyst (preview), a Unified Software Development Service

Today, we announced the preview release of Amazon CodeCatalyst. A unified software development and delivery service, Amazon CodeCatalyst enables software development teams to quickly and easily plan, develop, collaborate on, build, and deliver applications on AWS, reducing friction throughout the development lifecycle. In my time as a developer the biggest excitement—besides shipping software to users—was the start of a new project, or being invited to join a project. Both came with the anticipation of building something cool, cutting new code—seeing an idea come to life. However, starting out was sometimes a slow process. My team or I would need to update our local development environments—or entirely new machines—with tools, libraries, and programming frameworks. We had to create source code repositories…