AWS News Blog

AWS Weekly Roundup: AI21 Labs’ Jamba-Instruct in Amazon Bedrock, Amazon WorkSpaces Pools, and more (July 1, 2024)

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AWS Summit New York is 10 days away, and I am very excited about the new announcements and more than 170 sessions. There will be A Night Out with AWS event after the summit for professionals from the media and entertainment, gaming, and sports industries who are existing Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers or have a keen interest in using AWS Cloud services for their business. You’ll have the opportunity to relax, collaborate, and build new connections with AWS leaders and industry peers.

Let’s look at the last week’s new announcements.

Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention.

AI21 Labs’ Jamba-Instruct now available in Amazon Bedrock – AI21 Labs’ Jamba-Instruct is an instruction-following large language model (LLM) for reliable commercial use, with the ability to understand context and subtext, complete tasks from natural language instructions, and ingest information from long documents or financial filings. With strong reasoning capabilities, Jamba-Instruct can break down complex problems, gather relevant information, and provide structured outputs to enable uses like Q&A on calls, summarizing documents, building chatbots, and more. For more information, visit AI21 Labs in Amazon Bedrock and the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.

Amazon WorkSpaces Pools, a new feature of Amazon WorkSpaces – You can now create a pool of non-persistent virtual desktops using Amazon WorkSpaces and save costs by sharing them across users who receive a fresh desktop each time they sign in. WorkSpaces Pools provides the flexibility to support shared environments like training labs and contact centers, and some user settings like bookmarks and files stored in a central storage repository such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Amazon FSx can be saved for improved personalization. You can use AWS Auto Scaling to automatically scale the pool of virtual desktops based on usage metrics or schedules. For pricing information, refer to the Amazon WorkSpaces Pricing page.

API-driven, OpenLineage-compatible data lineage visualization in Amazon DataZone (preview) – Amazon DataZone introduces a new data lineage feature that allows you to visualize how data moves from source to consumption across organizations. The service captures lineage events from OpenLineage-enabled systems or through API to trace data transformations. Data consumers can gain confidence in an asset’s origin, and producers can assess the impact of changes by understanding its consumption through the comprehensive lineage view. Additionally, Amazon DataZone versions lineage with each event to enable visualizing lineage at any point in time or comparing transformations across an asset or job’s history. To learn more, visit Amazon DataZone, read my News Blog post, and get started with data lineage documentation.

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now offers observability logs – You can now monitor knowledge ingestion logs through Amazon CloudWatch, S3 buckets, or Amazon Data Firehose streams. This provides enhanced visibility into whether documents were successfully processed or encountered failures during ingestion. Having these comprehensive insights promptly ensures that you can efficiently determine when your documents are ready for use. For more details on these new capabilities, refer to the Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock documentation.

Updates and expansion to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Lens Catalog – We announced updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Lens Catalog to provide expanded guidance and recommendations on architectural best practices for building secure and resilient cloud workloads. The updates reduce redundancies and enhance consistency in resources and framework structure. The Lens Catalog now includes the new Financial Services Industry Lens and updates to the Mergers and Acquisitions Lens. We also made important updates to the Change Enablement in the Cloud whitepaper. You can use the updated Well-Architected Framework and Lens Catalog to design cloud architectures optimized for your unique requirements by following current best practices.

Cross-account machine learning (ML) model sharing support in Amazon SageMaker Model Registry – Amazon SageMaker Model Registry now integrates with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM), allowing you to easily share ML models across AWS accounts. This helps data scientists, ML engineers, and governance officers access models in different accounts like development, staging, and production. You can share models in Amazon SageMaker Model Registry by specifying the model in the AWS RAM console and granting access to other accounts. This new feature is now available in all AWS Regions where SageMaker Model Registry is available except GovCloud Regions. To learn more, visit the Amazon SageMaker Developer Guide.

AWS CodeBuild supports Arm-based workloads using AWS Graviton3 – AWS CodeBuild now supports natively building and testing Arm workloads on AWS Graviton3 processors without additional configuration, providing up to 25% higher performance and 60% lower energy usage than previous Graviton processors. To learn more about CodeBuild’s support for Arm, visit our AWS CodeBuild User Guide.

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:

Other AWS news
Here are some additional news items that you might find interesting:

Top reasons to build and scale generative AI applications on Amazon Bedrock – Check out Jeff Barr’s video, where he discusses why our customers are choosing Amazon Bedrock to build and scale generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) applications that deliver fast value and business growth. Amazon Bedrock is becoming a preferred platform for building and scaling generative AI due to its features, innovation, availability, and security. Leading organizations across diverse sectors use Amazon Bedrock to speed their generative AI work, like creating intelligent virtual assistants, creative design solutions, document processing systems, and a lot more.

Four ways AWS is engineering infrastructure to power generative AI – We continue to optimize our infrastructure to support generative AI at scale through innovations like delivering low-latency, large-scale networking to enable faster model training, continuously improving data center energy efficiency, prioritizing security throughout our infrastructure design, and developing custom AI chips like AWS Trainium to increase computing performance while lowering costs and energy usage. Read the new blog post about how AWS is engineering infrastructure for generative AI.

AWS re:Inforce 2024 re:Cap – It’s been 2 weeks since AWS re:Inforce 2024, our annual cloud-security learning event. Check out the summary of the event prepared by Wojtek.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. To learn more about future AWS Summit events, visit the AWS Summit page. Register in your nearest city: New York (July 10), Bogotá (July 18), and Taipei (July 23–24).

AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Upcoming AWS Community Days are in Cameroon (July 13), Aotearoa (August 15), and Nigeria (August 24).

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Esra

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Esra Kayabali

Esra Kayabali

Esra Kayabali is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, specialising in analytics, including data warehousing, data lakes, big data analytics, batch and real-time data streaming, and data integration. She has more than ten years of software development and solution architecture experience. She is passionate about collaborative learning, knowledge sharing, and guiding community in their cloud technologies journey.