AWS Weekly Roundup — AWS Lambda, AWS Amplify, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Rekognition, and more — December 18, 2023

My memories of Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2023 are still fresh even when I’m currently wrapping up my activities in Jakarta after participating in AWS Community Day Indonesia. It was a great experience, from delivering chalk talks and having thoughtful discussions with AWS service teams, to meeting with AWS Heroes, AWS Community Builders, and AWS User Group leaders. AWS re:Invent brings the global AWS community together to learn, connect, and be inspired by innovation. For me, that spirit of connection is what makes AWS re:Invent always special.

Here’s a quick look of my highlights at AWS re:Invent and AWS Community Day Indonesia:

If you missed AWS re:Invent, you can watch the keynotes and sessions on demand. Also, check out the AWS News Editorial Team’s Top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2023 for all the major launches.

Recent AWS launches
Here are some of the launches that caught my attention in the past two weeks:

Query MySQL and PostgreSQL with AWS Amplify – In this post, Channy wrote how you can now connect your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases to AWS Amplify with just a few clicks. It generates a GraphQL API to query your database tables using AWS CDK.

Migration Assistant for Amazon OpenSearch Service – With this self-service solution, you can smoothly migrate from your self-managed clusters to Amazon OpenSearch Service managed clusters or serverless collections.

AWS Lambda simplifies connectivity to Amazon RDS and RDS Proxy – Now you can connect your AWS Lambda to Amazon RDS or RDS proxy using the AWS Lambda console. With a guided workflow, this improvement helps to minimize complexities and efforts to quickly launch a database instance and correctly connect a Lambda function.

New no-code dashboard application to visualize IoT data – With this announcement, you can now visualize and interact with operational data from AWS IoT SiteWise using a new open source Internet of Things (IoT) dashboard.

Amazon Rekognition improves Face Liveness accuracy and user experience – This launch provides higher accuracy in detecting spoofed faces for your face-based authentication applications.

AWS Lambda supports additional concurrency metrics for improved quota monitoring – Add CloudWatch metrics for your Lambda quotas, to improve visibility into concurrency limits.

AWS Malaysia now supports 3D-Secure authentication – This launch enables 3DS2 transaction authentication required by banks and payment networks, facilitating your secure online payments.

Announcing AWS CloudFormation template generation for Amazon EventBridge Pipes – With this announcement, you can now streamline the deployment of your EventBridge resources with CloudFormation templates, accelerating event-driven architecture (EDA) development.

Enhanced data protection for CloudWatch Logs – With the enhanced data protection, CloudWatch Logs helps identify and redact sensitive data in your logs, preventing accidental exposure of personal data.

Send SMS via Amazon SNS in Asia Pacific – With this announcement, now you can use SMS messaging across Asia Pacific from the Jakarta Region.

Lambda adds support for Python 3.12 – This launch brings the latest Python version to your Lambda functions.

CloudWatch Synthetics upgrades Node.js runtime – Now you can use Node.js 16.1 runtimes for your canary functions.

Manage EBS Volumes for your EC2 fleets – This launch simplifies attaching and managing EBS volumes across your EC2 fleets.

See you next year!
This is the last AWS Weekly Roundup for this year, and we’d like to thank you for being our wonderful readers. We’ll be back to share more launches for you on January 8, 2024.

Happy holidays!

— Donnie