AWS Weekly Roundup: multiple new launches, AI training partnership with Anthropic, and join AWS re:Invent virtually (Nov 25, 2024)

Last week, I saw an astonishing number of new feature and service launches from AWS. This means we are getting closer to AWS re:Invent 2024! Our News Blog team is also finalizing blog posts for re:Invent to introduce some awesome launches from service teams for your reading pleasure.

The most interesting news is that we’re expanding our strategic collaboration with Anthropic as our primary training partner for development of our AWS Trainium chips. This is in addition to being their primary cloud provider for deploying Anthropic’s Claude models in Amazon Bedrock. We’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies with these kinds of collaborations.

Last week’s launches
Here are some AWS bundled feature launches:

Amazon Aurora – Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now supports scaling to 0 Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs). With 0 ACUs, you can now save cost during periods of database inactivity. Instead of scaling down to 0.5 ACUs, the database can now scale down to 0 ACUs. Amazon Aurora is now compatible with MySQL 8.0.39 and PostgreSQL 17.0 in the Amazon RDS Database preview environment.

Amazon Bedrock – You can quickly build and execute complex generative AI workflows without writing code with the general availability of Amazon Bedrock Flows (previously known as Prompt Flows). Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports binary vector embeddings for building Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. Amazon Bedrock also introduce a preview launch of Prompt Optimization to rewrite prompts for higher quality responses from foundational models (FMs). You can use AWS Amplify AI kit to easily leverage your data to get customized responses from Bedrock AI models to build web apps with AI capabilities such as chat, conversational search, and summarization.

Amazon CloudFront – You can use gRPC applications in Amazon CloudFront that allows bidirectional communication between a client and a server over HTTP/2 connections. Amazon CloudFront introduces Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) origins to deliver content from applications hosted in VPC private subnets, and Anycast Static IPs to provide you with a dedicated list of IP addresses for connecting to all CloudFront edge locations worldwide. You can also conditionally change or update origin servers on each request with origin modification within CloudFront Functions, and use new log configuration and delivery options.

Amazon CloudWatch – You can use field indexes and log transformation to improve log analytics at scale in the CloudWatch Logs. You can also use enhanced search and analytics experience and runtime metrics support with CloudWatch Application Signals, and percentile aggregation and simplified events-based troubleshooting directly from the web vitals anomaly in CloudWatch Real User Monitoring (RUM).

Amazon Cognito – You can secure user access to your applications with passwordless authentication, including sign-in with passkeys, email, and text message. Amazon Cognito introduces Managed Login, hosted sign-in and sign-up experience that customers can personalize to align with their company or application branding. Cognito launches new user pool feature tiers: Essentials and Plus as well as a new developer-focused console experience. To learn more, visit Donnie’s blog post.

Amazon Connect – You can use new customer profiles and outbound campaigns to help you proactively address customer needs before they become potential issues. Amazon Connect Contact Lens now supports creating custom dashboards, as well as adding or removing widgets from existing dashboards. With new Amazon Connect Email, you can receive and respond to emails sent by customers to business addresses or submitted via web forms on your website or mobile app.

Amazon EC2 – You can shift the launches of EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling Group (ASG) away from an impaired Availability Zone (AZ) to quickly recover your unhealthy application in another AZ with Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) zonal shift and zonal autoshift. Application Load Balancer (ALB) now supports HTTP request and response header modification giving you greater controls to manage your application’s traffic and security posture without having to alter your application code.

AWS End User Messaging (aka Amazon Pinpoint) – You can now track feedback for messages sent through the SMS and MMS channel, explicitly block or allow messages to individual phone numbers overriding your country rule settings, and cost allocation tags for SMS resources to track spend for each tag associated with a resource. AWS End User Messaging also now support integration with Amazon EventBridge.

AWS Lambda – You can use Lambda SnapStart for Python and .NET functions to deliver as low as sub-second startup performance. AWS Lambda now supports Amazon S3 as a failed-event destination for asynchronous invocations and Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals to easily monitor the health and performance of serverless applications built using Lambda. You can also use a new Node.js 22 runtime and Provisioned Mode for event source mappings (ESMs) that subscribe to Apache Kafka event sources.

Amazon OpenSearch Service – You can scale a single cluster to 1000 data nodes (1000 hot nodes and/or 750 warm nodes) to manage 25 petabytes of data. Amazon OpenSearch Service introduces Custom Plugins, a new plugin management option to extend the search and analysis functions in OpenSearch.

• OpenSearch Serverless – You can use OpenSearch SQL and OpenSearch Piped Processing Language (PPL) query to leverage your existing SQL skills and tools, Binary Vector and FP16 compression to help reduce costs by lowering the memory requirements, and Point in Time (PIT) search to run multiple queries against a dataset fixed at a specific moment in OpenSearch Serverless.
• OpenSearch Ingestion – You can now use AWS Lambda to define custom Lambda functions in your OpenSearch Ingestion pipelines and it now supports writing security data to Amazon Security Lake to ingest and transform security data from popular 3rd party sources.

Amazon Q Business – You can use tabular search to extract answers from tables embedded in documents ingested in Q Business. You can drag and drop files to upload and reuse any recently uploaded files in new conversations without uploading the files again. Amazon Q Business now supports integrations to Smartsheet in general, and Asana, Google Calendar in preview to automatically sync your index with your selected data sources. You can also use Q Business browser extensions for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

Amazon Q Developer – You can ask questions directly related to the AWS Management Console page you’re viewing, eliminating the need to specify the service or resource in your query. You can also use customizable chat responses generated by Q Developer in the IDE to securely connect Q Developer to your private codebases to receive more precise chat responses. Finally, you can use voice input and output capabilities in the AWS Console Mobile App along conversational prompts to list resources in your AWS account.

Amazon QuickSight – You can use Layer Map to visualize custom geographic boundaries, such as sales territories, or user-defined regions, and Image Component to upload your images directly for a variety of use cases, such as adding company logos. Amazon QuickSight also provides the ability to import visuals from an existing dashboard or analysis into your current analysis and Highcharts visuals to create custom visualizations using the Highcharts Core library in preview.

Amazon Redshift – You can ingest data from a wider range of streaming sources from Confluent Managed Cloud and self-managed Apache Kafka clusters on Amazon EC2 instances. You can also use enhanced security defaults which helps you adhere to best practices in data security and reduce the risk of potential misconfigurations.

AWS System Manager – You can use a new and improved version of AWS Systems Manager that brings a highly requested cross-account, and cross-Region experience for managing nodes at scale. AWS Systems Manager now supports instances running Windows Server 2025, Ubuntu Server 24.04, and Ubuntu Server 24.10.

Amazon S3 – You can configure S3 Lifecycle rules for S3 Express One Zone to expire objects on your behalf and append data to objects in S3 Express One Zone. You can also use Amazon S3 Express One Zone as a high performance read cache with Mountpoint for Amazon S3. Amazon S3 Connector for PyTorch now supports Distributed Checkpoint (DCP), improving the time to write checkpoints to Amazon S3.

Amazon VPC – You can use Block Public Access (BPA) for VPC, a new centralized declarative control that enables network and security administrators to authoritatively block Internet traffic for their VPCs. Amazon VPC Lattice now provides native integration with Amazon ECS, easily to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.

There’s a lot more launch news that I haven’t covered here. See AWS What’s New for more details.

See you virtually in AWS re:Invent
Next week we’ll hear the latest news from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community in Las Vegas. If you come, check out the agenda, session catalog, and attendee guides before your departure.

If you’re not able to attend re:Invent in person, we’re offering the option to livestream our Keynotes and Innovation Talks. With the registration for online pass, you will have access to on-demand keynote, Innovation Talks, and selected breakout sessions after the event. You can also register with AWS Builder ID, a personal account that enables one-click event registration and provides access to many AWS tools and services.

Please stay tuned in the next week!

– Channy