It’s AWS Summit season! Free events are now rolling out worldwide, bringing our cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn. Whether you prefer joining us online or in-person, these gatherings offer valuable opportunities to expand your AWS knowledge. I’ll be attending the AWS Amsterdam Summit and would love to meet you—if you’re planning to be there, please stop by to say hello! Visit the AWS Summit website today to find events in your area, sign up for registration alerts, and reserve your spot at an AWS Summit near you.
Speaking of AWS news, let’s look at last week’s new announcements.
Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention.
AWS WAF integration with AWS Amplify Hosting now generally available – You can now directly attach AWS WAF to your AWS Amplify applications through a one-click integration in the Amplify console or using infrastructure as code (IaC). This integration provides access to the full range of AWS WAF capabilities, including managed rules that protect against common web exploits like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). You can also create custom rules based on your application needs, implement rate-based rules to protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by limiting request rates from IP addresses, and configure geo-blocking to restrict access from specific countries. Firewall support is available in all AWS Regions in which Amplify Hosting operates.
Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import introduces real-time cost transparency – If you’re using Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import to run your customized foundation models (FMs), you can now access full transparency into compute resources and calculate inference costs in real time. Before model invocation, you can view the minimum compute resources (custom model units or CMUs) required through both the Amazon Bedrock console and Amazon Bedrock APIs. As models scale to handle increased traffic, Amazon CloudWatch metrics provide real-time visibility into total CMUs used, enabling better cost control through near-instant visibility. This helps you make on-the-fly model configuration changes to optimize costs. The feature is available in all Regions where Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import is supported, with additional details available in Calculate the cost of running a custom model in the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.
Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports Amazon OpenSearch Managed Cluster for vector storage – Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases securely connects FMs to company data sources for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), delivering more relevant and accurate responses. With this launch, you can use Amazon OpenSearch Managed Cluster as a vector database while using the full suite of Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases features. This integration expands the list of supported vector databases, which already includes Amazon OpenSearch Serverless, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Neptune Analytics, Pinecone, MongoDB Atlas, and Redis. The native integration with vector databases helps mitigate the need to build custom data source integrations. This feature is now generally available in all existing Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and OpenSearch Service Regions.
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announces the general availability of industry-leading image content filters – This new capability offers industry-leading text and image content safeguards that help you block up to 88% of harmful multimodal content without building custom safeguards or relying on error-prone manual content moderation. Image content filters can be applied across all categories within the content filter policy including hate, insults, sexual, violence, misconduct, and prompt attacks. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides configurable safeguards to detect and block harmful content and prompt attacks, define topics to deny and disallow specific topics, redact personally identifiable information (PII) such as personal data, and block specific words. It also provides contextual grounding checks to detect and block model hallucinations and to identify the relevance of model responses and claims, and to identify, correct, and explain factual claims in model responses using Automated Reasoning checks. This capability is generally available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions. To learn more, visit Amazon Bedrock Guardrails image content filters provide industry-leading safeguards in the AWS Machine Learning Blog and Stop harmful content in models using Amazon Bedrock Guardrails in the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.
Scenarios capability now generally available for Amazon Q in QuickSight – This capability guides you through data analysis by uncovering hidden trends, making recommendations for your business, and intelligently suggesting next steps for deeper exploration using natural language interactions. Now you can explore past trends, forecast future scenarios, and model solutions without needing specialized skill, analyst support, or manual manipulation of data in spreadsheets. With its intuitive interface and step-by-step guidance, the scenarios capability of Amazon Q in QuickSight helps you perform complex data analysis up to 10x faster than spreadsheets. Whether you’re optimizing marketing budgets, streamlining supply chains, or analyzing investments, Amazon Q makes advanced data analysis accessible so you can make data-driven decisions across your organization. This capability is accessible from any Amazon QuickSight dashboard, so you can move seamlessly from visualizing data to asking what-if questions and comparing alternatives. Previous analyses can be easily modified, extended, and reused, helping you quickly adapt to changing business needs.
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 and instance types in additional Regions:
- Amazon DataZone is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Europe (Paris) AWS Regions – Amazon DataZone is a fully managed data management service to catalog, discover, analyze, share, and govern data between data producers and consumers in your organization.
- The next generation of Amazon SageMaker is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Europe (Paris) AWS Regions – Amazon SageMaker is the center for all your data, analytics, and AI. SageMaker Unified Studio provides a single development environment that consolidates AWS analytics and AI/ML tools.
- Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 is now available in Mexico (Central) and Asia Pacific (Thailand) AWS Regions – Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 makes data in your Amazon Redshift data warehouse and data lake more accessible with a web-based tool for SQL users such as data analysts, data scientists, and database developers.
- Amazon Keyspaces expands Multi-Region Replication to support all AWS Regions – Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, highly available, managed Cassandra-compatible database service that helps you run your Cassandra workloads on AWS using existing application code and developer tools.
- AWS Network Firewall is now available in the Asia Pacific (Thailand) and Mexico (Central) AWS Regions – AWS Network Firewall is a managed firewall service that automatically scales with traffic, requires no infrastructure maintenance, and integrates with AWS Firewall Manager for centralized policy control across AWS accounts.
- Amazon CloudWatch RUM is now generally available in Israel (Tel Aviv) and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Regions – CloudWatch RUM monitors web applications by collecting real-time client-side performance data and providing dashboards that show end-user experience metrics, including page load anomalies, core web vitals, and errors across different geolocations, browsers, and devices.
- Amazon VPC IP Address Manager is now available in Asia Pacific (Thailand) and Mexico (Central) AWS Regions – Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) IP Address Manager (Amazon VPC IPAM) makes it easier to plan, track, and monitor IP addresses for AWS workloads, helping you organize addresses based on routing and security needs and set simple business rules to govern IP address assignments.
- Amazon Q Business now available in Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Region – Amazon Q Business is the most capable generative AI–powered assistant for finding information, gaining insight, and taking action at work. It can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems.
- Amazon EC2 P5en instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia) and Asia Pacific (Jakarta) AWS Regions – P5en instances feature 8 H200 GPUs with 1.7x memory size, paired with 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors and Gen5 PCIe for 4x CPU-GPU bandwidth. This helps improve collective communications performance for distributed training workloads such as deep learning, generative AI, real-time data processing, and high performance computing (HPC) applications.
- Amazon EC2 R8g instances now available in US West (N. California) AWS Region – These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPU (up to 48xlarge) and memory (up to 1.5 TB) than AWS Graviton3 based R7g instances. These instances are up to 30% faster for web applications, 40% faster for databases, and 45% faster for large Java applications compared to Graviton3 based R7g instances.
- Amazon EC2 C8g instances now available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Region – These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPUs and memory compared to Graviton3 based Amazon C7g instances. AWS Graviton4 processors are up to 40% faster for databases, 30% faster for web applications, and 45% faster for large Java applications than AWS Graviton3 processors.
- Amazon SageMaker AI is now available in Mexico (Central) and Asia Pacific (Thailand) AWS Regions – Amazon SageMaker AI is a fully managed platform that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly.
- Amazon ElastiCache now supports AWS PrivateLink in Asia Pacific (Jakarta) and Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) AWS Regions – AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises networks without exposing traffic to the public internet and securing your network traffic. To use AWS PrivateLink with Amazon ElastiCache, you create an interface VPC endpoint for Amazon ElastiCache in your VPC using the Amazon VPC console, AWS SDK, or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).
Other AWS events
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That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
— EsraThis 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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