Top AWS re:Invent 2023 Announcements
Amador Criado
Introduction
AWS re:Invent stands as a pivotal learning conference hosted by AWS, serving the global cloud-computing community. This immersive in-person event goes beyond traditional conferences, offering keynote announcements, extensive training and certification opportunities, over 2,000 technical sessions, an expansive Expo, and engaging after-hours events. The sheer scale and breadth of AWS re:Invent make it a must-attend for cloud professionals worldwide.
In the context of this article, we'll narrow our focus to the specific realm of Cloud Architecture and DevOps. As a Cloud Architect, I find immense value in exploring and dissecting the announcements that directly impact my professional domain. Join me in uncovering the latest innovations and advancements unveiled during AWS re:Invent 2023, with a keen emphasis on services and updates relevant to Cloud Architecture and DevOps.
Keynote Highlights
During almost one week, the main AWS executives appeared and we have several interesting Keynotes trying to summarize the next year predictions and the impact of them. Despite generative AI (GenAI) dominated the conference as a central theme, there was more than 140 announces from different topics.
From the point of view of Cloud Architecture, I highly recommend the Keynote of Dr. Werner Vogels, but here ara a link to the rest of them:
CEO Keynote with Adam Selipsky: Amazon Web Services CEO shares his perspective on cloud transformation and highlights innovations in data, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Monday Night Live Keynote with Peter DeSantis: Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing, dives deep into the engineering that powers AWS services.
Keynote with Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian: Vice President of Data and AI at AWS explores the powerful relationship between humans, data, and AI, unfolding right before us.
Keynote with Dr. Werner Vogels: Amazon.com’s VP and CTO, covers best practices for designing resilient and cost-aware architectures, and discusses why artificial intelligence is something every builder must consider when developing systems and the impact this will have in our world.
Cutting-Edge Services and Features:
Developer tools
| Announcement | Description | Blog Link |
| AWS Fault Injection Service | Utilize AWS Fault Injection Service to showcase the resilience of multi-region and multi-AZ applications. Explore new scenarios that demonstrate application performance in the face of specific failure scenarios. | Link to Blog |
| AWS Application Composer IDE Extension | Elevate visual modern applications development with the IDE extension for AWS Application Composer. Leverage AI-generated Infrastructure as Code (IaC) seamlessly within your IDE. Build modern applications and iterate on infrastructure code templates using Amazon CodeWhisperer. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon Q Code Transformation (Preview) | Streamline the process of upgrading Java applications with Amazon Q Code Transformation. This preview feature simplifies the modernization of existing application code using Amazon Q. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon Q in Amazon CodeCatalyst (Preview) | Boost developer productivity with generative-AI-powered Amazon Q in Amazon CodeCatalyst. Easily transition from conceptualizing ideas to producing fully tested, merge-ready, and running code with just a few natural language inputs. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon CodeCatalyst Updates | Introducing custom blueprints in Amazon CodeCatalyst. Additionally, a new enterprise pricing tier is available, offering project lifecycle management along with the custom blueprints. | Link to Blog |
Generative AI / Machine Learning
| Announcement | Description | Blog Link |
| Amazon SageMaker Studio Enhancements | Amazon SageMaker Studio introduces a web-based interface, Code Editor, flexible workspaces, and streamlines user onboarding. The new interface loads faster, providing consistent access to your preferred IDE and SageMaker resources. | Link to Blog |
| Package and Deploy Models in Amazon SageMaker | Accelerate model deployment with new tools and guided workflows in Amazon SageMaker. The SageMaker Python SDK now includes the ModelBuilder class for packaging models, performing local inference, and deploying to SageMaker from your local IDE or SageMaker Studio notebooks. | Link to Blog |
| Explore and Prepare Data with Amazon SageMaker Canvas | Use natural language to explore and prepare data with Amazon SageMaker Canvas. This capability, complemented by foundation model (FM)-powered natural language instructions, enhances data exploration, analysis, visualization, and transformation. | Link to Blog |
| Evaluate Models in Amazon Bedrock (Preview) | Experiment with models, add automatic evaluations, and incorporate human reviews in the playground environment of Amazon Bedrock. Evaluate, compare, and select the best foundation models for your use case. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon SageMaker HyperPod for Distributed Training | Introducing Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, a purpose-built infrastructure for distributed training at scale. Train foundation models for extended periods while benefiting from automated cluster health monitoring and job resiliency. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon Titan Image Generator, Multimodal Embeddings, and Text Models in Amazon Bedrock | Amazon Titan models, encompassing 25 years of AI and ML innovation, are now available in Amazon Bedrock. Access high-performing image, multimodal, and text model options through a fully managed API. | Link to Blog |
| Claude 2.1 Model in Amazon Bedrock | Amazon Bedrock now provides access to Anthropic’s latest model, Claude 2.1. Featuring an industry-leading 200,000 token context window, reduced hallucination rates, improved accuracy for long documents, system prompts, and a beta tool use feature. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon Q: Generative AI-powered Assistant (Preview) | Introducing Amazon Q, a new generative AI-powered assistant. Use Amazon Q for conversations, problem-solving, content generation, gaining insights, and taking action by connecting to your company’s information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon Q for IT Pros and Developers (Preview) | Amazon Q brings generative AI-powered assistance to IT pros and developers. Minimize the time and effort required to gain knowledge, explore new AWS capabilities, learn unfamiliar technologies, and architect innovative solutions. | Link to Blog |
| Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock (Preview) | Implement safeguards customized to your use cases and responsible AI policies with Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock. Promote safe interactions between users and generative AI applications. | Link to Blog |
| Agents for Amazon Bedrock with Improved Control | Agents for Amazon Bedrock is now available with improved control of orchestration and visibility into reasoning. Accelerate generative AI application development by orchestrating multistep tasks. | Link to Blog |
| Customize Models with Fine-tuning in Amazon Bedrock | Privately and securely customize foundation models in Amazon Bedrock with your own data. Fine-tune models to build applications specific to your domain, organization, and use case. | Link to Blog |
| Knowledge Bases in Amazon Bedrock for RAG Experience | Knowledge Bases now deliver a fully managed Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) experience in Amazon Bedrock. Securely connect foundation models to your company data for enhanced capabilities. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics (Preview) | Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics, powered by Amazon Bedrock, introduces new generative AI-powered call summaries. Improve customer experience, and agent and supervisor productivity by automatically summarizing customer service calls. | Link to Blog |
| Build Generative AI Apps with AWS Step Functions | Build generative AI apps using AWS Step Functions and Amazon Bedrock. Step Functions provides two new optimized API actions for Amazon Bedrock: InvokeModel and CreateModelCustomizationJob. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon CodeWhisperer Enhancements | Amazon CodeWhisperer now offers new AI-powered code remediation, IaC support, and integration with Visual Studio. Enhance automation, security, efficiency, and accelerate code delivery with these new features. | Link to Blog |
Application Integration
| Announcement | Description | Blog Link |
| AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio in AWS Application Composer | This new integration brings together the development of workflows and application resources into a unified visual infrastructure as code (IaC) builder. | Link to Blog |
Cost Optimization
| Announcement | Description | Blog Link |
| Check your AWS Free Tier usage programmatically with a new API | You can use the API directly with the AWS Command Line Interface or integrate it into an application with the AWS SDKs. | Link to Blog |
| New Cost Optimization Hub centralizes recommended actions to save you money | This new AWS Billing and Cost Management feature makes it easy for you to identify, filter, aggregate, and quantify savings for AWS cost optimization recommendations. | Link to Blog |
| New Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client provides cost-effective, secure access to virtual desktops | The Thin Client is a small cube that connects directly to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and other USB peripherals such as headsets, microphones, and cameras. | Link to Blog |
| New Amazon CloudWatch log class for infrequent access logs at a reduced price | This new log class offers a tailored set of capabilities at a lower cost for infrequently accessed logs, enabling customers to consolidate all their logs in one place in a cost-effective manner. | Link to Blog |
| Optimize your storage costs for rarely-accessed files with Amazon EFS Archive | We’ve added a new storage class for Amazon Elastic File System optimized for long-lived data that is rarely accessed. | Link to Blog |
Database
| Announcement | Description | Blog Link |
| Amazon Redshift adds new AI capabilities, including Amazon Q, to boost efficiency and productivity | Now you can get SQL recommendations from natural language prompts, and Redshift now scales capacity proactively and automatically to deliver tailored performance optimizations. | Link to Blog |
| Vector search for Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now generally available | This new built-in capability lets you store, index, and search millions of vectors with millisecond response times within your document database. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon OpenSearch Service is now available | This capability lets you perform a search on your DynamoDB data by automatically replicating and transforming it without custom code or infrastructure. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon ElastiCache Serverless for Redis and Memcached is now available | This new serverless offering allows customers to create a cache in under a minute and instantly scale capacity based on application traffic patterns. | Link to Blog |
| Join the preview of Amazon Aurora Limitless Database | This new capability supports automated horizontal scaling to process millions of write transactions per second and manage petabytes of data in a single Aurora database. | Link to Blog |
Storage
| Announcement | Description | Blog Link |
| Amazon S3 Express One Zone high performance storage class | The new Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class is designed to deliver up to 10x better performance than the S3 Standard storage class and is a great fit for your most frequently accessed data and your most demanding applications. | Link to Blog |
Security
| Announcement | Description | Blog Link |
| Three new capabilities for Amazon Inspector broaden the realm of vulnerability scanning for workloads | Amazon Inspector introduces a new set of open source plugins and an API, continuous monitoring for your Amazon EC2 instances, and generative AI-powered assisted code remediation for your AWS Lambda functions. | Link to Blog |
| Amazon Detective adds new capabilities to accelerate and improve your cloud security investigations | Amazon Detective adds four new capabilities to help you save time and strengthen your security operations. | Link to Blog |
| Detect runtime security threats in Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, new in Amazon GuardDuty | The new capability helps detect potential runtime security issues in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) clusters running on both AWS Fargate and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). | Link to Blog |
| IAM Access Analyzer updates: Find unused access, check policies before deployment | A new analyzer continuously monitors roles and users looking for permissions that are granted but not actually used, and a policy checker validates that newly authored policies do not grant additional (and perhaps unintended) permissions. | Link to Blog |
Conclusion
As a Cloud Architect, I consistently prioritize alignment with the Cloud Pillars and Well-Architected frameworks, not only within AWS projects but also across various cloud providers. These frameworks serve as standard best practices for cloud adoption. AWS re:Invent stands out as one of the premier IT innovation events globally, adopting a comprehensive approach to presenting information. All pillars and best practices are meticulously covered, showcasing AWS's commitment to innovation and solidifying its leadership in the cloud services domain.
Choosing a concise list of announcements for Cloud Architecture and DevOps from the presented at AWS re:Invent is challenging. The summarized tables aim to reflect my perspective on the most impactful services, particularly from an architect's standpoint.
While AWS re:Invent 2022 had a focus on low code/no-code innovations, this year has unmistakably brought generative AI to the forefront, influencing various resources concurrently. Amazon Q, in particular, appears to be a revolutionary way to interact with AWS documentation, addressing a common daily practice for numerous profiles. Its potential to enhance the already robust documentation with a layer of intelligent generative AI is promising.
For those who missed keynotes and sessions, they are available for viewing on the AWS re:Invent site: AWS re:Invent 2023
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Written by
Amador Criado
Amador Criado
Cloud Architect/Engineer with leadership and communication skills. Ownership of the entire lifecycle of a project (SDLC), and motivated to continue growing in Cloud and automation. Passionate about new technologies, responsible and enthusiastic collaborator dedicated to streamline processes and eciently solve project requirements.