AWS Weekly Roundup: What’s App, AWS Lambda, Load Balancers, AWS Console, and more (Oct 14, 2024)

Last week, AWS hosted free half-day conferences in London and Paris. My colleagues and I demonstrated how developers can use generative AI tools to speed up their design, analysis, code writing, debugging, and deployment workflows. These events were held at the GenAI Lofts. These lofts are open until October 25 (London) and November 5 (Paris). They will be packed with events, conferences, workshops, and meetups. If you’re around, be sure to check the agenda (London, Paris).

Our well-known AWS News blog co-author Veliswa did an amazing demo. She live-coded a Duolingo-like app from scratch, just using suggestions and reviews from Amazon Q Developer.

Now, let’s turn to other exciting news in the AWS universe from last week.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

Bring your conversations to WhatsApp — AWS has added support for What’sApp to AWS End User Messaging, so developers can reach users on WhatsApp with multimedia and interactive messaging options. This feature integrates with SMS and push notifications already available. Developers can get started quickly using AWS Management Console.

Amazon Redshift data sharing with data lake tables — This offers a secure and convenient way to share live data lake tables across different Amazon Redshift warehouses. Data sharing of data lake tables in AWS Glue Data Catalog provides live access to the data, so you always see the most up-to-date and consistent information as it’s updated in the data lake.

Zonal shift and zonal autoshift for cross zoned Network Load Balancer — Network Load Balancer (NLB) now supports the Amazon Application Recovery Controller zonal shift and zonal autoshift features on load balancers that are enabled across zones. With Zonal shift, you can quickly shift traffic away from an impaired Availability Zone and recover from events such as bad application deployment and gray failures. Zonal autoshift safely and automatically shifts your traffic away from an Availability Zone when AWS identifies a potential impact to it.

Console to Code to generate infrastructure as a service code — This is by far my favorite launch of the week. Console to Code makes it simple, fast, and cost-effective to move from prototyping in the AWS Management Console to building code for production deployments. You can generate code for their console actions in their preferred format with a single click. The generated code helps you get started and bootstrap your automation pipelines for tasks. Console to Code is powered by Amazon Q Developer.

A new getting started experience for AWS CodePipeline — AWS CodePipeline introduces a simplified and new getting started experience so you can quickly create new pipelines. When you create a new pipeline using the CodePipeline console, you can now select from a list of pipeline templates across build, automation, and deployment use cases. After selecting a pipeline template, you will be prompted to enter values for the action configuration fields in the pipeline definition, and completing the process will render a fully configured pipeline that’s ready to run.

AWS Lambda detects and stops recursive loops between Lambda and Amazon S3 — Lambda recursive loop detection can now automatically detect and stop recursive loops between AWS Lambda and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Lambda recursive loop detection, which is enabled by default, is a preventative guardrail that automatically detects and stops recursive invocations between Lambda and other supported services, preventing unintended usage and billing from runaway workloads.

Amazon MemoryDB for Valkey — Amazon MemoryDB is a fully managed, Valkey– and Redis OSS-compatible database service, which provides multi-AZ durability, microsecond read and single-digit millisecond write latency, and high throughput. It is ideal for use cases such as caching, leaderboards, and session stores. With MemoryDB for Valkey, you can benefit from a fully managed experience built on open-source technology while using the security, operational excellence, and reliability that AWS provides. MemoryDB for Valkey also delivers the fastest vector search performance at the highest recall rates among popular vector databases on AWS.

Amazon Polly adds four new English voices for the generative engine and expands to three Regions — Polly is a managed service that turns text into lifelike speech, so you can create applications that talk and to build speech-enabled products depending on your business needs. The generative engine is the most advanced Amazon Polly text-to-speech (TTS) model. With this launch, we add a variety of new synthetic generative English voices to the Amazon Polly portfolio: an Australian English voice Olivia and three US English voices Joanna, Danielle, and Stephen. These voices have more natural pronunciation and prosody. You can use this high-tier product in various industries and for different purposes such as education, publishing, or marketing.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS What’s New Feed page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS Cloud Day Prague — Join us for a free technical conferences in Prague on October 23. I will be there and share with attendees “The Art of Transforming a Foundation Model into a Domain Expert”. Be sure to register today!

Innovate Migrate, Modernize, and Build — Whether you are new to the cloud or an experienced user, you will learn something new at AWS Innovate. This is a free online conference. Register for a time and region convenient to North America (October 15), or Europe, Middle East & Africa (October 24).

AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Don’t miss out on the AWS Community Days happening on October 19 in Vadodara, Spain, and Guatemala.

AWS re:Invent 2024 — Registration is now open for the annual tech extravaganza, taking place December 2 – 6 in Las Vegas. Beside recording podcast episodes, I will present three sessions:

• CMP410 | Accelerate testing cycles of CI/CD pipelines with EC2 Mac instances (with Vishal)
• DEV301 | The art of transforming foundation models into domain experts (with Gregory)
• DEV334 | Swift, server-side, serverless

There are just a few seats left for these three sessions, so be sure to book your seat today!

Browse more upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!