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Now the spooky season has come and gone. Although there are no Halloween-themed releases, AWS celebrated in a big way last week with a number of exciting releases! With more and more exciting things being revealed every week in the AWS re:Invent 2024 countdown, it would be no exaggeration to say that we have now entered the ‘pre’ re:Invent phase.
There’s a lot to cover, so put on your wizard hat, open that big bag of snacks, and let’s take a look at last week’s goodies!
For developers
There was no shortage of gifts from AWS for developers this Halloween!
AWS enhances your Lambda application building experience with the VS Code IDE and AWS Toolkits. AWS enhances AWS Lambda development with the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, providing guided setup for coding, testing, and deploying Lambda applications directly within the IDE. It includes sample walkthroughs and one-click deployment to simplify the development process. Now building apps using Lambda is as intuitive as creating spells in the Wizard’s Workshop!
AWS Amplify Integration with Amazon S3 for Static Website Hosting — AWS Amplify Hosting now integrates with Amazon S3 for seamless static website hosting with global CDN support through Amazon CloudFront. This simplifies setup and provides secure, high-performance delivery with custom domains and SSL certificates. Hosting a site is now easier than finding jack-o’-lanterns on Halloween night!
AWS Lambda now supports AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) operations. AWS Lambda now supports AWS Fault Injection Simulator (AWS FIS) jobs, allowing developers to test resiliency by injecting controlled faults such as latency and execution errors. This allows you to improve monitoring and operational readiness by simulating real-world failures without code changes. Great for testing out old candy dispensers!
AWS CodeBuild now supports automatic build retries. AWS CodeBuild now provides automatic build retries, allowing developers to set retry limits for failed builds. This reduces manual intervention by automatically retrying builds up to specified limits, handling annoying and intermittent errors like a ghostbuster cleaning up a haunted pipeline.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud launches a new security group sharing feature. Amazon VPC now supports sharing security groups across multiple VPCs within the same account and across participant accounts in a shared VPC. This simplifies security management and ensures consistent traffic filtering across the organization. Securing your network is now as seamless as keeping digital bogeymen at bay!
Amazon DataZone extends data access through tools like Tableau, Power BI, and more. Amazon DataZone now supports the Amazon Athena JDBC driver, allowing you to seamlessly access your data lake assets from BI tools like Tableau and Power BI. This allows analysts to easily connect and analyze data. Now you can access your data as easily as a witch flying on a broomstick!
Generative AI
Amazon Q and Amazon Bedrock continue to make generative AI look like magic. Here are a few releases from the past week:
Amazon Q Developer Inline Chat — Amazon Q Developer introduces inline chat support. This allows developers to engage directly within the code editor for tasks such as optimization, commenting, and test creation. Real-time inline comparison makes it easy to review changes available in Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDE. This is essentially password magic. No need for the Witch’s Cauldron!
You can now fine-tune Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B and 70B models on Amazon Bedrock. Amazon Bedrock now supports fine-tuning for Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B and 70B models, allowing developers to customize these AI models with their own data. With 128K context length, Llama 3.1 efficiently handles large amounts of text, making it suitable for domain-specific applications. Now AI will not be afraid of processing huge amounts of data, even on dark and stormy nights!
Tweaking features for Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock. Fine-tuning capabilities for the Claude 3 Haiku model are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, allowing you to customize your data to improve accuracy. Make your AI as unique as your Halloween costume!
Plan, save and track expenses
Here are a few new releases to help you make the most of your budget and keep track of how much candy you’re buying.
AWS now accepts partial card payments. AWS now supports partial payments via credit or debit card, allowing users to split their monthly bill across multiple cards. This flexibility allows you to manage your budget as smoothly as a ghost gliding between haunted houses!
Amazon Bedrock now supports cost allocation tags for inference profiles. Amazon Bedrock now supports cost allocation tags for inference profiles, allowing customers to track and manage generated AI costs by department or application. This makes managing your finances a pleasure, not a trick!
Budget-related events are now added to AWS Deadline Cloud. AWS Deadline Cloud, a service used to render and manage visual effects and animation workloads, now supports real-time spend updates and automatic notifications by sending budget-related events through Amazon EventBridge. This will help you control your project costs without the fear of unexpected surprises!
This week’s busiest team award is… Back to Amazon Redshift!
Clearly, the Amazon Redshift team loves Halloween and has decided to celebrate in a big way with a lot of releases! Here are the highlights:
Amazon Redshift and Amazon Bedrock Integration for Generative AI — Amazon Redshift is now integrated with Amazon Bedrock for generative AI operations using SQL, adding AI capabilities like text generation directly to your data warehouse. Now you can gain rich insights without complicated spells!
Announcing general availability of Amazon Redshift Auto Copy — Auto Copy for continuous data ingestion from Amazon S3 to Amazon Redshift is now generally available. This streamlines your workflow, making data integration as smooth as carving a soft pumpkin!
Amazon Redshift now supports incremental refresh of materialized views (MVs) of data lake tables. Amazon Redshift now supports incremental refresh of materialized views of data lake tables, increasing efficiency by updating only data that has changed. This way, you can keep your data up-to-date without any burdensome overhead!
Announcing Amazon Redshift Serverless with AI-driven scaling and optimization — Amazon Redshift Serverless now offers AI-driven scaling to automatically scale resources based on workloads. This ensures smooth performance without any creepy surprises!
CSV result format support for Amazon Redshift Data API — Amazon Redshift Data API now supports CSV output for SQL query results, improving data processing flexibility. This will allow your data to be processed as smoothly as a ghost’s whisper!
Halloween Week Contest Runner-up… Amazon CloudWatch!
The Amazon CloudWatch team has been busy handing out candy this Halloween too! Let’s check it out.
Amazon CloudWatch now monitors EBS volumes that exceed provisioned performance. Amazon CloudWatch now provides metrics to determine if your Amazon EBS volumes are exceeding IOPS or throughput limits. This will help you quickly identify and resolve performance issues before they become serious problems!
New Amazon CloudWatch metrics for monitoring I/O latency for Amazon EBS volumes — Amazon CloudWatch now provides metrics for average read and write I/O latency for Amazon EBS volumes to help you identify performance issues . These insights are available to you by the minute at no additional cost. This will help prevent waiting times from sneaking up on you like a Halloween ghost!
Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey adds new CloudWatch metrics for monitoring server-side response time. Amazon ElastiCache now includes metrics for read and write request latency to help you monitor server response times. This will help you quickly discover and resolve performance issues before they become alarming!
conclusion
This concludes Halloween 2024. I don’t know about you, but this is my favorite time of the year, followed by the New Year. They both have an element of unpredictability that I like very much. While Halloween makes us excited to see what costumes we will wear, the new year is about new possibilities and conquering new horizons.
Luckily, AWS delivers fun and innovation all year long, so you don’t have to wait until the new year to explore new frontiers with AWS. What better way to see it in action than at AWS re:Invent 2024!
I wonder what kind of spells and surprises we’ll conjure up when Halloween 2025 arrives. Until next time, keep your eyes on the horizon and get your brooms ready!
