The week after AWS re:Invent builds on the excitement and energy of the event and is a good time to learn more and understand how the recent announcements can help you solve your challenges. As usual, we have you covered with our top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2024 post.

You can now watch keynotes and sessions on the AWS Event YouTube channel. This year Andy Jassy, now President and CEO at Amazon, returned to re:Invent and shared some thoughts in these videos.

Drawing on experiences Amazon has had building distributed systems at massive scale, Werner Vogels, VP and CTO at Amazon, shared critical lessons and strategies he has learned for managing complex systems in his keynote.

Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – A new generation of FPGA-powered instances (F2) is now available. In contrast to a purpose-built chip designed with a single function in mind and then hard-wired to implement it, a field programmable gate array (FPGA) can be programmed in the field, after it has been plugged in to a socket on a PC board. We’re also introducing Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances with 6TiB and 8TiB of memory. U7i instances are ideal to run large in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server. Graviton-based 8th generation instances now support bandwidth configurations for Amazon VPC and Amazon EBS.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails – We are reducing pricing by up to 85% to help you implement safeguards for your generative AI applications. Also, we’re adding multilingual capabilities with support for Spanish and French languages.

Amazon Simple Email Services (SES) – Now offers Global Endpoints for multi-region sending resilience and announces the availability of Deterministic Easy DKIM (DEED), a new form of global identity which simplifies the use of DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) management.

AWS CloudFormation – An enhanced version of the AWS Secrets Manager transform introducing automatic AWS Lambda upgrades.

Amazon Lex – Launches new multilingual streaming speech recognition models that enhance recognition accuracy through two specialized groupings: a European-based model (for Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, German, and Spanish) and a Asia Pacific-based model (for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese).

Amazon Connect – Now supports push notifications for mobile chat on iOS and Android devices. In this way, you can be proactively notified as soon as there is a new message from an agent or chatbot, even when not actively chatting. You can now also configure holidays and other variances to your contact center hours of operation.

AWS Security Hub – Now supports automated security checks aligned to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) v4.0.1, a compliance framework that provides a set of rules and guidelines for safely handling credit and debit card information.

AWS Resource Explorer – Supports 59 new resource types including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Kendra, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and Amazon SageMaker.

Amazon SageMaker AI – Inference optimized Amazon EC2 G6e instances (powered by NVIDIA L40S Tensor Core GPUs) and P5e (powered by NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs) are now available on Amazon SageMaker.

Amazon Redshift – Now supports automatically and incrementally refreshable materialized views on tables in a zero-ETL integration. Previously, in this case, you had to run a full refresh.

AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code – Now includes Amazon CloudWatch Logs Live Tail, an interactive log streaming and analytics capability that provides real-time visibility into your logs and makes it easier to develop and troubleshoot applications.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that you might find interesting:

Build a managed transactional data lake with Amazon S3 Tables – Just introduced at re:Invent 2024, Amazon S3 Tables is the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support and the easiest way to store tabular data at scale. This post on the AWS Storage Blog provides an overview of S3 Tables and an example of how to build a transactional data lake with S3 Tables using Apache Spark on Amazon EMR.

Introducing Cross-Region Connectivity for AWS PrivateLink – More information on this recent launch that can be used to share and access Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoint services across different AWS Regions.

Marc Brooker, VP/Distinguished Engineer at AWS, shared on his personal blog a few posts about what Amazon Aurora DSQL is, how it works, and how to make the best use of it:

• DSQL Vignette: Aurora DSQL, and A Personal Story
• DSQL Vignette: Reads and Compute
• DSQL Vignette: Transactions and Durability
• DSQL Vignette: Wait! Isn’t That Impossible?

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

— Danilo

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

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