What's New in AWS From Amazon re:Invent 2023

Amazon Web Services held its?2023 AWS re:Invent conference ?during the last week of November. The re:Invent conference is where Amazon announces updates and new services for the AWS cloud platform. As many organisations have built their technology stack wholly or partly on AWS, what gets announced at the conference is always keenly anticipated.

In the sections below, I’ll outline some headline announcements with links to more info and finish with three Amazon pages where you can get more details and watch videos from the conference.

As always, don’t hesitate to contact me or your PFH and TerraAlto contacts to chat about AWS cloud use in general or any of the new technologies that Amazon announced.

Amazon Q - A New Generative AI-Powered Assistant

It won’t surprise anyone reading this to hear that generative AI (GenAI) tools and solutions were prominent at the conference. GenAI has captured most of the tech sector excitement during 2023. Amazon already plays in the AI space with various AWS solutions, but they don’t want to be eclipsed by the buzz around OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google GenAI solutions.

Amazon announced Amazon Q - an AI-powered chatbot for AWS customers to counter the buzz around those tools (although Amazon might not frame it that way). Amazon Q is a GenAI solution that they have trained on 17 years of AWS knowledge that organisations can directly connect to their unique information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems.?

Businesses can use Amazon Q to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insights, and get immediate, relevant information and advice to enable staff to streamline tasks, accelerate decision-making and problem-solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work. For examples of how Businesses can use Amazon Q to streamline processes and operations, see this?AWS News Blog post ?and the?Amazon Q Product ?page.

Other AI-related News

In addition to the Amazon Q announcement, there was other significant AI-related news.

Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock?- Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed AWS service that makes leading foundation models from AI companies available through an API along with developer tooling to help build and scale GenAI applications. A new addition to Bedrock is?Guardrails .?

Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock enables you to consistently implement measures to ensure safe and relevant user experiences that align with your company policies and principles. These guardrails help you define prohibited topics and use content filters to remove any undesirable or harmful content from user interactions with your GenAI applications. This provides an additional layer of control on top of any protections built into the foundation models.

You can apply guardrails to all large language models (LLMs) in Amazon Bedrock, including fine-tuned models and Agents for Amazon Bedrock. This ensures consistency in how you deploy your preferences across applications, allowing you to deliver value while closely managing user experiences based on your requirements. Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock helps you build GenAI applications that align with your acceptable use policies.

Upgraded Chips for Faster GenAI Model Training?- In addition to software improvements across AWS for GenAI and more, Amazon also?announced ?upgraded hardware that will significantly reduce the time needed to train GenAI foundational models. Amazon has specifically crafted their latest Trainium2 chip to be up to four times faster when training AI models than their first-generation chips.?

Moreover, you can implement the new chips in AWS EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 processors. This advancement makes it possible to train foundation models and LLMs in a fraction of the time while improving energy efficiency by up to twice the previous rate.

New Virtual Desktop Hardware

It wasn’t all AI and LLM announcements at the conference, although those will get the headlines. Many businesses still need to deliver line-of-business desktops and applications to an increasingly remote or hybrid workforce. Virtual desktops as part of a Digital Workspace strategy are a way to deliver this.

Amazon has been delivering in this space via AWS-hosted virtual desktops in Amazon WorkSpaces. To help make the deployment of these virtual desktops easier, Amazon has announced the?Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client . The new hardware device is priced at a level well below that of a typical PC or laptop and will be a tempting option for many businesses. Read more in this announcement blog -?https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-workspaces-thin-client .

Updates to Core Infrastructure Services

Also outside of GenAI news were updates to core infrastructure services that organisations that build on AWS are probably using. Some examples include:

·????????? Amazon S3 Express One Zone - A new addition to S3 object storage called Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class offers extremely low latency between compute and storage. This can significantly reduce the runtime of data-intensive applications, especially those that use hundreds or thousands of parallel compute nodes to process large amounts of data. These applications typically store data for a short period but require frequent access during that time.

·????????? Amazon Aurora Limitless Database - Amazon Aurora Limitless Database is designed to offer developers outstanding performance and flexibility for their demanding workloads. It comes packed with several key features, including:

??????????? Automatic scaling - Amazon Aurora Limitless Database can dynamically scale to handle millions of write transactions per second.

??????????? Petabyte-scale storage - It is capable of managing petabytes of data in a single database.

??????????? Serverless and rapid scaling - It operates in a serverless manner and provides fast scalability.

·????????? Amazon ElastiCache Serverless - A service that simplifies cache creation and scaling without the need for capacity planning. It enables developers to enhance their application performance seamlessly, enabling them to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management. This serverless caching solution offers a hassle-free experience, allowing customers to create highly available caches in just a few minutes. Here are some of its key features:

??????????? Instant Scalability - With Amazon ElastiCache Serverless, you can easily scale your cache to meet application demand instantly without having to worry about capacity planning.

??????????? Highly Available Cache - It lets you create highly available caches quickly and easily in under a minute.

??????????? Maintenance-free Infrastructure - ElastiCache Serverless eliminates the need for infrastructure maintenance, provisioning, and configuration, so you can focus on what matters - developing applications.

Amazon One Enterprise

Lastly, I want to call out the?Amazon One Enterprise ?preview. Amazon One Enterprise is a secure palm reader authentication service that offers a hassle-free biometric identification device for enterprise access control. The fully managed service provides highly accurate and contactless access to buildings, secure areas, physical equipment, and software resources. The service offers a fast and convenient experience for employees and other authorised users, making it easy for organisations to manage access control.

Final Thoughts

I’ve only scratched the surface of the announcements at the latest re:Invent conference. I’ve called out the headlines (GenAI!) and some other news that interested me and might interest you. Use the three links below for all the latest news and announcements. And talk to PFH and TerraAlto about how you can use existing and new AWS services to enhance your business infrastructure in the cloud.

Further Reading

As promised in the introduction, here are some Amazon resources where you can find deeper dives into the re:Invent conference news.

Amazon: Live updates from AWS re:Invent 2023 - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws-reinvent-2023-live

Amazon: AWS News Blog - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/

Amazon: AWS re:Invent Conference Page - https://reinvent.awsevents.com

Stephen O’Herlihy | CTO, PFH Technology?Group