AWS Goodies - April 22, 2024

Welcome to this week's first edition of AWS Goodies! After a fun weekend that included a lot of family time and a brand-new grandson, I have plenty of cool stuff to share with you today.

Generative AI PartnerCast - My colleague Sean Howard told me about this upcoming AWS PartnerCast: Generative AI for AWS Partners:

In this session we will provide a comprehensive update to generative AI on AWS, including relevant latest features, real-world use cases implemented at customers, and legal matters.

Registration is free and subject to approval.

Security Immersion Day (en Espanol) - The AWS Multi-Customer Security Immersion Day will be delivered in Spanish on May 4th; the agenda looks great:

Spot Placement Dashboard on AWS - This new member of the AWS Solutions Library Samples provides Guidance for Building a Spot Placement Score Tracker on AWS. It automates the capture of Spot Placement Scores, stores them as CloudWatch metrics, and lets you visualize them in CloudWatch dashboards.

The solution uses an EventBridge cron that runs a Lambda function every 5 minutes to capture and update the scores. A single run of the function is able to capture metrics for multiple projected workloads.

Live Meeting Assistant - Paul Colmer ?????? shared a link to a new blog post, Live Meeting Assistant with Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Bedrock, and Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock. The post describes a meeting assistant that provides live transcription with speaker attribution, live translation into over 75 languages, context-aware meeting assistance, on-demand meeting summaries, an automated summary at meeting's end, audio processing, and even a browser extension to capture audio and meeting metadata from popular meeting apps. Here's the architecture:

OpenSearch OR1 Instances - Elizabeth Fuentes Leone shared a new blog post (Amazon OpenSearch Service Under the Hood : OpenSearch Optimized Instances(OR1)) that goes into considerable detail on the new OR1 instances. For example, post talks about how the instances are designed to deliver high throughput with 11 9's of durability while also keeping costs low, and shows how documents are simultaneously indexed and logged.

CloudFront Functions REST API - David Behroozi shared a very intriguing blog post, Using CloudFront functions as a REST API . He implemented a lightweight function that sorted an array of objects by an object path, easily done but perhaps overkill for a Lambda function. As he says:

Could I use something lightweight like CloudFront functions? Yes! In this post, I'll show how I use CloudFront as a performant, inexpensive REST API that runs on the edge.

Indeed he could, and here's what he came up with:

David's post includes a CDK stack that creates a CloudFront distribution wiht 3 APIs, with more info in the README. He also included his benchmark results and some cost estimates.

AWS Cloud Institute - The deadline to apply for the next cohort of AWS Cloud Institute is approaching! Here's what it says on the can:

Want to break into tech? We removed the guesswork with a structured pathway built by AWS experts with input from companies who need cloud talent. Come solve real-world business problems, learn from the pros, and launch your cloud career.

Watch this quick video to learn more:

If you are reading this and know someone who could benefit, please encourage them to apply now.

Generative AI Security - Danilo Poccia shared a blog post, A secure approach to generative AI with AWS from our colleagues Anthony Liguori and Colm MacCárthaigh . The post addresses many of the common concerns that come up when AI enters the chat, and discusses the end-to-end encryption features of the upcoming Trainium2 chip, as well as GPU instances based on NVIDIA's new Blackwell platform.

And that's all for today!