Top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2023

And that’s a wrap on the major announcements from re:Invent 2023! Scroll down to see a recap of all the exciting news from the event.

For more ways to experience re:Invent, and to stay in touch with all the news that never stops at AWS, be sure to follow these great resources:

• AWS News Blog: Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr and colleagues keep you posted on the biggest and best new AWS offerings.
• What’s New with AWS: a comprehensive list of all AWS launches
• The Official AWS Podcast: a podcast for developers and IT professionals looking for the latest news and trends from AWS.
• AWS On Air: live-streamed announcements and hands-on demos.

(This post was last updated: 3:57 p.m. PST, Dec. 14, 2023.)

Quick category links:

Analytics | Application Integration | AWS Marketplace | Cloud Financial Management | Compute | Contact Center |Container | Customer Enablement | Database | Developer Tools | End User Computing | Generative AI / Machine Learning | Management & Governance | Networking & Content Delivery | Partner Network | Security, Identity, & Compliance | Serverless | Storage | Quantum Technologies

Analytics

Introducing Amazon Q Generative SQL in Amazon Redshift (Preview)
Simplify query authoring and increase your productivity by using natural language to receive SQL code recommendations without extensive knowledge of your organization’s complex database metadata.

Introducing new AI-driven scaling and optimizations in Amazon Redshift Serverless (Preview)
Amazon Redshift Serverless uses AI techniques to scale automatically with workload changes across all key dimensions—such as data volume changes, concurrent users, and query complexity—to meet and maintain your price performance targets.

Announcing Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift (Preview)
This capability enables near real-time analytics and machine learning (ML) using Amazon Redshift on petabytes of transactional data from Amazon Aurora

Announcing Amazon RDS for MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift (Preview)
The new capability allows you to access transactional data from Amazon RDS for MySQL to run analytics and machine learning (ML) on petabytes of data in Amazon Redshift.

Announcing Amazon DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift (Preview)
This enables customers to run high performance analytics on their DynamoDB data.

Introducing highly durable Amazon OpenSearch Service clusters with 30% price/performance improvement
Ingest, store, index, and access just about any amount of data, while also enjoying a 30% price/performance improvement over existing instance types, eleven nines of data durability, and a zero-time Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

AWS Clean Rooms Differential Privacy enhances privacy protection of your users’ data (preview)
Help protect the privacy of your users with mathematically backed and intuitive controls in a few steps.

AWS Clean Rooms ML helps customers and partners apply ML models without sharing raw data (preview)
This capability helps you and your partners apply machine learning (ML) models on your collective data without copying or sharing raw data with each other.

Announcing Amazon OpenSearch Service zero-ETL integration with Amazon S3 (preview)
This is a new way to query operational logs in Amazon S3 and S3-based data lakes without needing to switch between services.

New generative AI capabilities for Amazon DataZone further simplify data cataloging and discovery (preview)
This new feature can automate the traditionally labor-intensive process of data cataloging and dramatically decrease the amount of time needed to provide context for organizational data.

Analyze large amounts of graph data to get insights and find trends with Amazon Neptune Analytics
This new analytics database engine makes it faster for data scientists and application developers to quickly analyze large amounts of graph data.

New Amazon Q in QuickSight uses generative AI assistance for quicker, easier data insights (preview)
With a reimagined Q&A experience, users can generate stories examining their data, see executive summaries from data in seconds, and answer questions of data not answered by dashboards and reports.

Use anomaly detection with AWS Glue to improve data quality (preview)
This new feature will help to improve your data quality by using machine learning to detect statistical anomalies and unusual patterns.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs now offers automated pattern analytics and anomaly detection
Amazon CloudWatch can now automatically recognize and cluster patterns among log records, extract noteworthy content and trends, and notify you of anomalies using advanced machine learning algorithms.

Application Integration

AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio is now available 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.

Announcing throughput increase and dead letter queue redrive support for Amazon SQS FIFO queues
With Amazon Simple Queue Service, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume. Today, we’ve introduced two new capabilities for first-in, first-out (FIFO) queues.

Manage EDI at scale with new AWS B2B Data Interchange
Now, organizations can automate and monitor the transformation of electronic data interchange-based business-critical transactions at cloud scale.

AWS Marketplace

Easily deploy SaaS products with new Quick Launch in AWS Marketplace
SaaS Quick Launch helps buyers make the deployment process easy, fast, and secure by offering step-by-step instructions and resource deployment using preconfigured AWS CloudFormation templates

Cloud Financial Management

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.

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.

Compute

Join the preview for new memory-optimized, AWS Graviton4-powered Amazon EC2 instances (R8g)
Equipped with brand-new Graviton4 processors, the new R8g instances will deliver better price performance than any existing memory-optimized instance.

Introducing Amazon EC2 high memory U7i Instances for large in-memory databases (preview)
The new U7i instances are designed to support large, in-memory databases including SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Contact Center

Container

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector provides agentless metric collection for Amazon EKS
This new capability discovers and collects Prometheus metrics from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) automatically and without an agent.

Amazon EKS Pod Identity simplifies IAM permissions for applications on Amazon EKS clusters
This enhancement lets you define required IAM permissions for your applications in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters so you can connect with AWS services outside the cluster.

Customer Enablement

Increase collaboration and securely share cloud knowledge with AWS re:Post Private
re:Post Private includes content tailored specifically for your organization’s use cases, along with private discussion and collaboration forums for the members of your organization and your AWS account team.

Database

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Getting started with new Amazon RDS for Db2
IBM Db2 is an enterprise-grade relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by IBM.

Developer Tools

Use AWS Fault Injection Service to demonstrate multi-region and multi-AZ application resilience
New scenarios let you demonstrate that your applications perform as intended if an AWS Availability Zone experiences a full power interruption or connectivity from one AWS region to another is lost.

IDE extension for AWS Application Composer enhances visual modern applications development with AI-generated IaC
Now you can use AWS Application Composer directly in your IDE to visually build modern applications and iteratively develop your infrastructure as code templates with Amazon CodeWhisperer.

Upgrade your Java applications with Amazon Q Code Transformation (preview)
This new capability simplifies upgrading and modernizing existing application code using Amazon Q.

Improve developer productivity with generative-AI powered Amazon Q in Amazon CodeCatalyst (preview)
Developers can go from an idea to fully tested, merge-ready, running code with only natural language inputs, in just a few clicks.

End User Computing

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.

Announcing cross-region data replication for Amazon WorkSpaces
Snapshots are taken every 12 hours, replicated to the desired destination region, and are used to provide a recovery point objective of 12-24 hours.

Generative AI / Machine Learning

Amazon SageMaker Studio adds web-based interface, Code Editor, flexible workspaces, and streamlines user onboarding
The new web-based interface loads faster and provides consistent access to your preferred integrated development environment (IDE) and SageMaker resources and tooling, regardless of your IDE choice.

Package and deploy models faster with new tools and guided workflows in Amazon SageMaker
Among several new capabilities, you can use the new ModelBuilder class in the SageMaker Python SDK to package models, perform local inference to validate runtime errors, and deploy to SageMaker from your local IDE or SageMaker Studio notebooks.

Use natural language to explore and prepare data with a new capability of Amazon SageMaker Canvas
SageMaker Canvas now supports using foundation model-(FM) powered natural language instructions to complement its comprehensive data preparation capabilities for data exploration, analysis, visualization, and transformation.

Amazon SageMaker adds new inference capabilities to help reduce foundation model deployment costs and latency
With the new inference capabilities, you can deploy one or more foundation models (FMs) on the same SageMaker endpoint and control how many accelerators and how much memory is reserved for each FM.

Leverage foundation models for business analysis at scale with Amazon SageMaker Canvas
This new capability makes it easier for you to evaluate and generate responses from FMs for your specific use case with high accuracy.

Amazon SageMaker Clarify makes it easier to evaluate and select foundation models (preview)
You can now use SageMaker Clarify to evaluate, compare, and select FMs in minutes based on metrics such as accuracy, robustness, creativity, factual knowledge, bias, and toxicity.

Evaluate, compare, and select the best foundation models for your use case in Amazon Bedrock (preview)
Experiment with different models in the playground environment, and to iterate faster, add automatic evaluations of the models. Then, when you prepare for launch or limited release, you can incorporate human reviews to help ensure quality.

Introducing Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, a purpose-built infrastructure for distributed training at scale
You can now train FMs for weeks or months while SageMaker actively monitors the cluster health and provides automated node and job resiliency.

Amazon Titan Image Generator, Multimodal Embeddings, and Text models are now available in Amazon Bedrock
Amazon Titan models incorporate 25 years of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) innovation at Amazon and offer a range of high-performing image, multimodal, and text model options through a fully managed API.

Amazon Bedrock now provides access to Anthropic’s latest model, Claude 2.1
The newest model offers an industry-leading 200,000 token context window, reduced rates of hallucination, improved accuracy over long documents, system prompts, and a beta tool use feature for function calling and workflow orchestration.

Introducing Amazon Q, a new generative AI-powered assistant (preview)
You can use Amazon Q in your work to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insights, and take action by connecting to your company’s information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems.

Amazon Q brings generative AI-powered assistance to IT pros and developers (preview)
With Amazon Q, you minimize the time and effort you need to gain the knowledge required to answer AWS questions, explore new AWS capabilities, learn unfamiliar technologies, and architect solutions that fuel innovation.

Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock helps implement safeguards customized to your use cases and responsible AI policies (preview)
Promote safe interactions between users and your generative AI applications by implementing safeguards customized to your use cases and responsible AI policies.

Agents for Amazon Bedrock is now available with improved control of orchestration and visibility into reasoning
Agents for Amazon Bedrock helps you accelerate generative artificial intelligence (AI) application development by orchestrating multistep tasks.

Customize models in Amazon Bedrock with your own data using fine-tuning and continued pre-training
Privately and securely customize foundation models with your own data in Amazon Bedrock to build applications that are specific to your domain, organization, and use case.

Knowledge Bases now delivers fully managed RAG experience in Amazon Bedrock
With a knowledge base, you can securely connect foundation models (FMs) in Amazon Bedrock to your company data for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics adds new generative AI-powered call summaries (preview)
Powered by Amazon Bedrock, this feature helps businesses improve customer experience, and agent and supervisor productivity by automatically summarizing customer service calls.

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.

Amazon CodeWhisperer offers new AI-powered code remediation, IaC support, and integration with Visual Studio
These new enhancements deliver more automation, security, efficiency, and accelerated code delivery for customers, and provides this support in more places where developers work.

Management & Governance

Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals for automatic instrumentation of your applications (preview)
You get a pre-built, standardized dashboard showing the most important metrics, such as volume of requests, availability, latency, and more, for the performance of your applications.

New myApplications in the AWS Management Console simplifies managing your application resources
Now, you can more easily manage and monitor the cost, health, security posture, and performance of your applications on AWS from a widget in the AWS Management Console.

Use Amazon CloudWatch to consolidate hybrid, multicloud, and on-premises metrics
You can now consolidate metrics from your hybrid, multicloud, and on-premises data sources using Amazon CloudWatch and process them in a consistent, unified fashion.

Use natural language to query Amazon CloudWatch logs and metrics (preview)
To make it easy to interact with your operational data, Amazon CloudWatch is introducing natural language query generation for Logs and Metrics Insights.

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.

Networking & Content Delivery

Zonal autoshift automatically shifts your traffic away from Availability Zones when we detect potential issues
The new capability of Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller shifts your workload’s traffic away from an Availability Zone when it identifies a potential failure and shifts it back once the failure is resolved.

Mutual authentication for Application Load Balancer reliably verifies certificate-based client identities
With this new feature, you can now offload client authentication to Application Load Balancer, ensuring only trusted clients communicate with backend applications.

External endpoints and testing of task states now available in AWS Step Functions
Now AWS Step Functions HTTPS endpoints let you integrate third-party APIs and external services to your workflows.

Partner Network

Announcing new diagnostic tools for AWS Partner-Led Support (PLS) participants
The AWS Partner-Led Support program now has access to the same tools that AWS Support Engineers use to assist AWS customers.

Security, Identity, & Compliance

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.

AWS Control Tower adds 65 new controls
With this launch, we’ve added a set of purpose-built controls to help you meet your digital sovereignty requirements.

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.

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).

Serverless

Vector engine for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now available
The vector engine makes it easy for you to build modern machine learning-augmented search experiences and generative generative AI applications without needing to manage the underlying vector database infrastructure.

AWS Lambda functions now scale 12 times faster when handling high-volume requests
Each synchronously invoked Lambda function now scales by 1,000 concurrent executions every 10 seconds until the aggregate concurrency across all functions reaches the account’s concurrency limit.

Storage

Announcing the new 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.

Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive is now available with AWS Backup
This feature lets you transition your infrequently accessed Amazon EBS Snapshots to low-cost archive, long-term storage.

Replication failback and increased IOPS are new for Amazon EFS
Replication failback makes it easier to synchronize when performing disaster recovery, and Amazon EFS now supports up to 250,000 read IOPS and up to 50,000 write IOPS per file system.

Automatic restore testing and validation now available in AWS Backup
With this feature, you can automate the entire restore testing process and avoid surprises later by determining now whether you can successfully recover using your backups in the event of a data loss such as ransomware.

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.

Announcing on-demand data replication for Amazon FSx for OpenZFS
Now you have the capability to send a snapshot from one file system to another file system in your account.

Introducing shared VPC support for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
With this highly requested feature, you can now create Multi-AZ FSx for ONTAP file systems in VPCs that have been shared with you by other accounts in the same AWS Organization.

New – Scale-out file systems for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
You can now create Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file systems that are up to 9x faster than even before.

FlexGroup Volume Management for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is now available
You can now create, manage, and back up your Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP FlexGroup volumes using the AWS Management Console, the Amazon FSx CLI, and the AWS SDK.

Quantum Technologies

Reserve quantum computers, get guidance and cutting-edge capabilities with Amazon Braket Direct
This program gets you dedicated, private access to the full capacity of various quantum processing units (QPUs) without any queues or wait times, and more.

Editors note: This post was updated on Dec. 14, 2023 to include several launches related to Amazon Redshift that were not included in the original versions of this roundup.