As expected, there were lots of exciting launches and updates announced during the AWS Summit New York. You can quickly scan the highlights in Top Announcements of the AWS Summit in New York, 2024.
My colleagues and fellow AWS News Blog writers Veliswa Boya and Sébastien Stormacq were at the AWS Community Day Cameroon last week. They were energized to meet amazing professionals, mentors, and students – all willing to learn and exchange thoughts about cloud technologies. You can access the video replay to feel the vibes or just watch some of the talks!
Last week’s launches
In addition to the launches at the New York Summit, here are a few others that got my attention.
Advanced RAG capabilities Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – These include custom chunking options to enable customers to write their own chunking code as a Lambda function; smart parsing to extract information from complex data such as tables; and query reformulation to break down queries into simpler sub-queries, retrieve relevant information for each, and combine the results into a final comprehensive answer.
Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management and Prompt Flows – This is a preview launch of Prompt Management that help developers and prompt engineers get the best responses from foundation models for their use cases; and Prompt Flows accelerates the creation, testing, and deployment of workflows through an intuitive visual builder.
Fine-tuning for Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku in Amazon Bedrock (preview) – By providing your own task-specific training dataset, you can fine tune and customize Claude 3 Haiku to boost model accuracy, quality, and consistency to further tailor generative AI for your business.
IDE workspace context awareness in Amazon Q Developer chat – Users can now add @workspace to their chat message in Q Developer to ask questions about the code in the project they currently have open in the IDE. Q Developer automatically ingests and indexes all code files, configurations, and project structure, giving the chat comprehensive context across your entire application within the IDE.
New features in Amazon Q Business – The new personalization capabilities in Amazon Q Business are automatically enabled and will use your enterprise’s employee profile data to improve their user experience. You can now get answers from text content in scanned PDFs, and images embedded in PDF documents, without having to use OCR for preprocessing and text extraction.
Amazon EC2 R8g instances powered by AWS Graviton4 are now generally available – Amazon EC2 R8g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads such as databases, in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics. These are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and deliver up to 30% better performance compared to AWS Graviton3-based instances.
Vector search for Amazon MemoryDB is now generally available – Vector search for MemoryDB enables real-time machine learning (ML) and generative AI applications. It can store millions of vectors with single-digit millisecond query and update latencies at the highest levels of throughput with >99% recall.
Introducing Valkey GLIDE, an open source client library for Valkey and Redis open source – Valkey is an open source key-value data store that supports a variety of workloads such as caching, and message queues. Valkey GLIDE is one of the official client libraries for Valkey and it supports all Valkey commands. GLIDE supports Valkey 7.2 and above, and Redis open source 6.2, 7.0, and 7.2.
Amazon OpenSearch Service enhancements – Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports workloads up to 30TB of data for time-series collections enabling more data-intensive use cases, and an innovative caching mechanism that automatically fetches and intelligently manages data, leading to faster data retrieval, efficient storage usage, and cost savings. Amazon OpenSearch Service has now added support for AI powered Natural Language Query Generation in OpenSearch Dashboards Log Explorer so you can get started quickly with log analysis without first having to be proficient in PPL.
Open source release of Secrets Manager Agent for AWS Secrets Manager – Secrets Manager Agent is a language agnostic local HTTP service that you can install and use in your compute environments to read secrets from Secrets Manager and cache them in memory, instead of making a network call to Secrets Manager.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports logging of all events in AWS CloudTrail – This capability lets you get details on who made API calls to S3 Express One Zone and when API calls were made, thereby enhancing data visibility for governance, compliance, and operational auditing.
Amazon CloudFront announces managed cache policies for web applications – Previously, Amazon CloudFront customers had two options for managed cache policies, and had to create custom cache policies for all other cases. With the new managed cache policies, CloudFront caches content based on the Cache-Control headers returned by the origin, and defaults to not caching when the header is not returned.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.
We launched existing services in additional Regions:
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Data API for Aurora PostgreSQL is now available in 10 additional AWS regions.
- Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) is now available in nine new AWS Regions.
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) customers can now host their applications in Canada West (Calgary) region, and send text messages (SMS) to consumers in more than 200 countries and territories.
- Amazon EMR support for backup and restore for Apache HBase Tables is available in Asia Pacific (Seoul) region.
- Amazon Cognito is now available in Canada West (Calgary) and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) regions.
Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that you might find interesting:
Context window overflow: Breaking the barrier – This blog post dives into intricate workings of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, and why is it crucial to understand and mitigate the limitations of CWO (context window overflow).
Using Agents for Amazon Bedrock to interactively generate infrastructure as code – This blog post explores how Agents for Amazon Bedrock can be used to generate customized, organization standards-compliant IaC scripts directly from uploaded architecture diagrams.
Automating model customization in Amazon Bedrock with AWS Step Functions workflow – This blog post covers orchestrating repeatable and automated workflows for customizing Amazon Bedrock models and how AWS Step Functions can help overcome key pain points in model customization.
AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo Sueiras writes about open source projects, tools, and events from the AWS Community; check out Ricardo’s page for the latest updates.
Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:
AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. To learn more about future AWS Summit events, visit the AWS Summit page. Register in your nearest city: Bogotá (July 18), Taipei (July 23–24), AWS Summit Mexico City (Aug. 7), and AWS Summit Sao Paulo (Aug. 15).
AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Upcoming AWS Community Days are in Aotearoa (Aug. 15), Nigeria (Aug. 24), New York (Aug. 28), and Belfast (Sept. 6).
Browse all 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!
— Abhishek
This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!