November 2023

AWS Clean Rooms ML (Preview) helps you and your partners apply privacy-enhancing ML to generate predictive insights without having to share raw data with each other. The capability's first model is specialized to help companies create lookalike segments. With AWS Clean Rooms ML lookalike modeling, you can train your own custom model using your data, and invite your partners to bring a small sample of their records to a collaboration to generate an expanded set of similar records while protecting you and your partner’s underlying data. Healthcare modeling will be available in the coming months.

We are excited to announce new capabilities on Amazon SageMaker which help customers reduce model deployment costs by 50% on average and achieve 20% lower inference latency on average. Customers can deploy multiple models to the same instance to better utilize the underlying accelerators. SageMaker actively monitors instances that are processing inference requests and intelligently routes requests based on which instances are available.

Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL 1.0) foundation model is now generally available on-demand in Amazon Bedrock. SDXL 1.0 is the most advanced development in the Stable Diffusion text-to-image suite of models launched by Stability AI. The model generates images of high quality in virtually any art style and it excels at photorealism. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies, like Stability AI, along with a broad set of capabilities that provide you with the easiest way to build and scale generative AI applications with foundation models.

Amazon Redshift announces CONJUNCTION TYPE support for row-level security (RLS) policies and RLS support on standard views and late binding views, which enables you to apply granular access controls and ensure that users can only access rows that they are authorized to see, even when the underlying data evolves or user permissions change. 

You can now use Mountpoint for Amazon S3 to access objects stored in the new Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class using file system operations. The new S3 Express One Zone storage class is purpose-built to deliver the fastest cloud object storage for performance-critical applications that demand consistent single-digit millisecond request latency.

Today, AWS announces a range of capabilities in preview in Amazon Q to supercharge work for developers and IT professionals and provide expert assistance when building, deploying, and operating applications and workloads on AWS. Amazon Q is a generative AI-powered assistant that can be tailored to your business, code, data, and operations.

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced that Amazon Q can help you select Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon Q uses machine learning to help customers take quick and cost-effective decisions for their compute instance type before building their workloads. Amazon Q generates personalized EC2 instance suggestions for customers using the AWS Management Console or AWS documentation site. Its natural language interface provides an easy way for customers to communicate their requirements and get the best-matched instances.

Amazon Connect announces a preview of analytics data lake, a Zero ETL analytics capability that empowers organizations to access the insights needed to understand and optimize key contact center performance metrics (e.g., customer satisfaction) via a unified data source and their choice of Business Intelligence (BI) tool. With the analytics data lake, records are de-duped and ready to query; eliminating the need to build and maintain complex data pipelines to perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations to access Amazon Connect data to get it ready for analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

Today, AWS announces the preview of a new generative AI-based capability in Amazon DataZone to improve data discovery, data understanding and data usage by enriching the business data catalog. With a single click, data producers can generate comprehensive business data descriptions and context, highlight impactful columns, and include recommendations on analytical use cases.

Today, Amazon SageMaker launched a new version (0.25.0) of Large Model Inference (LMI) Deep Learning Container (DLC), with support for NVIDIA’s TensorRT-LLM Library. With these upgrades, customers can easily access state-of-the-art tooling to optimize Large Language Models (LLMs) on SageMaker. Amazon SageMaker LMI TensorRT-LLM DLC reduces latency by 33% on average and improves throughput by 60% on average for Llama2-70B, Falcon-40B and CodeLlama-34B models, compared to previous version.

Today we announce Amazon One Enterprise, a palm-based identity service for enterprise access control. The service enables organizations to provide a fast, convenient, and contactless experience for employees and authorized users to gain access to physical locations as well as digital assets such as restricted software resources. Amazon One Enterprise eliminates operational overhead associated with the management of traditional enterprise authentication methods, like badges and PINs. IT and security administrators can easily install the Amazon One devices and manage users, devices, and software updates in the AWS Management console. 

Amazon Redshift now supports multi-data warehouse writes through data sharing in public preview. You can start writing to Redshift databases from multiple Redshift data warehouses in just a few clicks. The written data is available to all warehouses as soon as it is committed. This allows teams to flexibly scale compute by adding warehouses of different types and sizes based on their write workloads’ price-performance needs, isolate compute to more easily meet SLAs, and easily and securely collaborate with other teams.

Amazon Web Services announces Amazon EC2 U7i, next-generation High Memory instances. U7i instances offer up to 32TiB of DDR5 memory enabling customers to scale transaction processing throughput in a fast-growing data environment. U7i instances are part of AWS 7th generation and are powered by custom fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids) delivering up to 125% more compute performance over existing U-1 instances.

Today, we are excited to announce Amazon Transcribe’s next generation, multi-billion parameter speech foundation model-powered system that expands automatic speech recognition (ASR) to over 100 languages. Amazon Transcribe is a fully managed ASR service that makes it easy for customers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their applications. Our speech foundation model is trained using best-in-class self-supervised algorithms to learn the inherent universal patterns of human speech across languages and accents.

Amazon Personalize is excited to announce Content Generator, a new generative AI powered capability that makes recommendations more compelling by identifying thematic connections between recommended items. Content Generator will assist customers in crafting taglines to create a more engaging browsing experience.

Today we are announcing customizable EC2 rightsizing recommendations within AWS Compute Optimizer. With this launch you can now adjust both CPU headroom and thresholds, configure a new 32-day lookback period option, and set instance family preferences. These settings can be configured at the organization, account, or regional level.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, you can quickly and easily build conversational bots (chatbots), virtual agents, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Amazon Lex leverages Generative AI to accelerate bot building by automatically generating a bot from a user's prompt. Simply provide a description in natural language to generate a starting point which can be further refined.

PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground is a fun and intuitive hands-on, shareable generative AI app-building tool. Post announcement, builders made tens of thousands of AI-powered apps in a matter of days, shared on social media using single-step tools from within the playground. Today, PartyRock is announcing a new Discover page, where top community-created apps will be curated by AWS. The page will showcase what PartyRock users are building and help others to get hands-on by providing a central resource for inspiration and discovery. Here you’ll find some of the most viewed, remixed, and snapshotted apps, curated by PartyRock employees, including those they found particularly amusing, novel, or helpful for understanding key generative AI concepts. Everyone can learn to build AI apps with PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground.

Today, AWS Step Functions announces an optimized integration for Amazon Bedrock, making it easier to integrate generative AI capabilities into Step Functions workflows, accelerating development of generative AI applications. This launch enables you to use Step Functions to orchestrate interactions with foundation models and add in steps for human intervention, without needing to write or maintain integration code. You can leverage Step Functions Workflow Studio to visually develop, inspect, and audit user defined generative AI workflows with ease. 

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now enables you to create Multi-AZ file systems in Shared VPCs from participant accounts, making it even easier for your organization to decentralize how you administer network and storage resources.

We are excited to announce Amazon CloudWatch Logs Infrequent Access (Logs IA), a new log class for cost-effectively consolidating all your logs natively on AWS, helping to improve visibility into your overall application health. CloudWatch Logs IA offers a subset of CloudWatch Logs' capabilities including managed ingestion, cross-account log analytics, and encryption with a lower per GB ingestion price making Logs IA ideal for ad-hoc querying and after-the-fact forensic analysis on infrequently accessed logs.

You can now run OpenSearch version 2.11 in Amazon OpenSearch Service. With OpenSearch 2.11, we have made several improvements to search, observability, security analytics, and OpenSearch Dashboards. This version includes features that were launched as part of open source OpenSearch versions 2.10 and 2.11. This launch includes the introduction of hybrid search queries, which uses normalization processors to improve search relevance, by combining relevance scores of lexical queries with natural language-based k-NN vector search queries. It also includes multimodal search, which allows users to search image and text pairs like product catalog items, and the introduction of neural sparse retrieval in addition to existing dense retrieval for semantic search applications. Search practitioners can test out these new search methods with the new search comparison tool which lets you compare the results of two different search queries side by side in OpenSearch Dashboards. 

Today, AWS announces support for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) within Amazon CodeCatalyst. This launch allows you to connect to a VPC from CodeCatalyst Workflows, extending the number of developer scenarios supported by CodeCatalyst.

Today, we are excited to announce that customers using IAM Identity Center as their authentication method in SageMaker Studio can now fully automate setup of Studio user profiles using SageMaker and IdC APIs.

Starting today, Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion is now available in 3 additional commercial regions: Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Canada (Central).

Amazon QuickSight launches custom permissions support for roles to restrict QuickSight functionality for users based on their role in the account (Reader, Author, Admin.) This feature is supported with all QuickSight identity types, including IAM Identity Center.

Amazon ECR is announcing the preview of repository creation templates, allowing customers to specify initial configuration for repositories that are automatically created by ECR via pull through cache. ECR customers can now specify configuration for these repositories, including encryption settings, lifecycle policies, and repository permissions. This enables customers to define custom configurations and assign them as defaults for various use cases within their registries. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL now supports the latest minor versions PostgreSQL 15.5, 14.10, 13.13, 12.17, and 11.22. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of PostgreSQL, and to benefit from the bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the PostgreSQL community. With this release, RDS for PostgreSQL now supports pgactive extension starting with PostgreSQL major versions 11 and higher.

Amazon Connect now provides a Contact Lens conversational analytics dashboard that enables customers to understand why customers are contacting, the trends of contact drivers over time, and the performance of each of those call drivers (e.g., average handle time for call driver “where’s my stuff?”). You can view and compare real-time and historical aggregated performance, trends, and insights using custom-defined time periods (e.g., week over week), summary charts, time-series chart, etc. Managers can uncover trends and patterns for different call drivers across key metrics including contacts handled and average handle time. For example, contact center managers can use this dashboard to identify which call driver is driving a spike in contact volume and, in one click, drill down into that category by analyzing individual contacts.

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable file storage for compute workloads, now supports throughput scaling. This capability enables you to adjust the throughput tier of your file systems to meet changing performance requirements with greater agility and lower cost.

AWS Systems Manager now publishes status updates for operational issues and change requests to Amazon EventBridge. This enables customers to leverage Amazon EventBridge to respond to operational issues and change requests in real-time. With this integration, customers can now listen for changes in operational issues or change requests and trigger workflows in real-time, such as calling a Lambda function or sending notification to Slack and Pager Duty.

In October, AWS launched a self-guided experience in AWS Partner Central with automated tasks that accelerates the partner journey from registration to listing in AWS Marketplace. Now, we’ve extended that guidance throughout the Software Path, providing partners with the personalized tasks and guidance to help you develop and mature your software offering(s). As you progress through the four growth motions of build, market, sell and grow, you’ll automatically become eligible for key ISV programs like AWS SaaS Factory and AWS ISV Accelerate. Relevant tasks will be surfaced to help you complete the requirements and unlock greater partner benefits and programs. 

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) DL2q instances. DL2q instances are powered by Qualcomm AI 100 Standard accelerators and are the first to feature Qualcomm’s AI technology in the public cloud. 

AWS Trusted Advisor has launched 37 new Amazon RDS checks that provide best practice guidance by analyzing DB instance configuration, usage, and performance data. These new checks span the performance, fault tolerance, security, and operational excellence categories of Trusted Advisor.

Starting today, you have access to new dashboards in the WAF console to enable you to better monitor your traffic. These dashboards are available by default and require no additional setup. These dashboards leverage CloudWatch metrics and highlight metrics such as total requests, blocked requests, allowed requests, bots vs non bot requests, bot categories, CAPTCHA solve rate, top 10 matched rules and more, on a per-Web ACL basis.

Amazon QuickSight is introducing shared restricted folders, a Contributor role and support for data source asset types in folders. These capabilities enable governed QuickSight asset sharing at the folder level. 

Amazon Connect now supports creating and managing tasks in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Amazon Connect Tasks empowers you to prioritize, assign, and track all contact center agent tasks to completion, improving agent productivity and ensuring customer issues are quickly resolved. For example, you can configure rules in Amazon Connect that automatically create tasks to route customer tickets from your ticketing system to available agents, pre-populate relevant information using task templates to help them resolve issues faster, and schedule tasks for a specific date or time to reach out to the customer. Amazon Connect Tasks also provides pre-built integrations with CRM applications (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce) and APIs to more easily integrate with business-specific applications and leverage all relevant customer information to successfully resolve customer issues.

AWS Lambda launches a single pane view of metrics, logs, and traces in the Lambda console, making it easy for you to monitor and troubleshoot your Lambda functions. 

Research and Engineering Studio on AWS (RES) is an open source, easy-to-use web-based portal for administrators to create and manage secure cloud-based research and engineering environments. Using RES, scientists and engineers can visualize data and run interactive applications without the need for cloud expertise. 

Today, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) announces support for JSON protocol, enabling lower latency and improved performance for SQS customers. Based on AWS performance tests for a 5KB message payload, JSON protocol for Amazon Simple Queue Service reduces end-to-end message processing latency by up to 23% and reduces application client side CPU and memory usage. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. 

Customers running applications with more than one containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate can now leverage Seekable OCI (SOCI) to lazily load specific container images within the Amazon ECS task definition. This eliminates the need to generate SOCI indexes for smaller container images within the task definition, while still getting the benefits of SOCI with larger container images, improving the overall application deployment and scale-out time.

AWS App Runner now supports IPv6-based traffic for public App Runner service endpoints, allowing customers to access their App Runner service(s) endpoint over IPv6. This helps customers meet IPv6 compliance requirements, and removes the need for handling address translation between IPv4 and IPv6.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now supports the October 2023 Release Update (RU) for Oracle Database versions 19c and 21c.