Latest news from the world of AWS - Q1 & Q2 2023

Amazon Web Services' (AWS) market leadership is primarily driven by continuous innovation. On the one hand, the company constantly develops and expands its product offering, so that users can always choose from the most up-to-date and effective solutions. On the other hand, AWS monitors customer needs and responds quickly to provide new capabilities and services.

The pace of innovation at AWS can be challenging at times, even for those who like us work closely with them as a key partner. That's why it's important for us to keep up to date with the latest announcements from AWS, as innovations allow us to provide our customers with the latest and greatest solutions that will improve their competitiveness and efficiency.

In the latest installment of our series of articles, we've rounded up what we think were the most important new developments on the AWS front in Q1 and Q2 of 2023.

Highlights of the first quarter of 2023

Running virtual machines in the cloud via Amazon EC2. What's new:

• Graviton3-based C7g machines are now also available in bare metal size. The innovation represents a significant performance increase of up to twice that of the previous generation for some workloads.
• M7g and R7g machines, also based on Graviton3, were launched. Like their aforementioned counterparts, they offer up to twice the performance of the previous generation and are available in 9 different sizes, including bare metal.
• C6in, M6in, M6idn, R6in and R6idn machines are now also available in bare metal size.
• EC2 Auto Scaling generates forecasts 4 times a day instead of once a day to better adapt to resource needs.
• EC2 Auto Scaling now supports a rollback function, so if you want to replace a machine in an Auto Scaling group and for some reason it fails, you can easily, even automatically, roll back to the previous state.
• UEFI and Legacy BIOS bootable images (AMI) can now be created in EC2.
• AWS Systems Manager can now be enabled for all machines running in an account in a single operation.
• Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks are newly available in EC2 Image Builder.

Lightsail for Research has been released, allowing you to launch software such as Scilab, RStudio or Jupyter in the cloud in just a few clicks.

Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition supports Microsoft Active Directory authentication.

With AWS Glue 4.0, you can now perform ETL operations on streaming data.

Amazon Quicksight SDK 2.0 has been released, improving communication between host applications and embedded dashboards.

S3 Object Lambda can be configured as a source for Cloudfront distributions.

Amazon S3 will automatically begin to encrypt all new objects, starting this January.

A preview of Amazon DataZone has been announced. This is a data management service that allows you to catalog, analyze and share data between organizations in a secure and transparent way.

Also available under Amazon RDS Custom are the new General Purpose gp3 storage volumes.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool announced consolidated reports and improved search functionality to help users more easily identify which areas pose risks.

Amazon Neptune announced graph-explorer, an open source visualization tool for low-code users.

AWS Network Firewall supports IPv6.

Amazon Connect has now made long chats available, so users can continue a conversation they've already started without having to repeat what they've said.

A Porting Advisor for Graviton has been released. This is an open source command line tool that analyzes source code, accelerates and supports the migration to Graviton-based machines.

Continuous IPv6 CIDR blocks provided by Amazon are now available in sizes /52 to /40.

A 99.99% Service Level Agreement (SLA) is now also available for Amazon MemoryDB for Redis.

Images stored in private Docker registries in Amazon Sagemaker can now be used to teach models.

AWS CloudTrail Lake now also supports loading events from non-AWS sources.

Highlights of the second quarter,2023

AWS opened its first office in Budapest, Hungary.

Virtual machines can now be run in the cloud via Amazon EC2. New:

• Trn1n Tranium-based machine, optimized for training network intensive AI models, are now available.
• Inf2 Inferentia2 chip-based machines optimized for generative AI have been released.
• Hpc7g Graviton-based machines designed for High Performance Computing (HPC) have beenannounced.
• C7gn Graviton-based machines have been announced, providing a cost-effective solution for network-intensive workloads.
• A preview of the M7a machines is now available. These machines deliver the best performance available on x86-based systems and offer the best price/performance ratio among AWS general purpose machines.
• I4g Graviton-based storage optimized machines have been released.
• EC2 Image Builder supports vulnerability scanning in custom images using Amazon Inspector.

The AWS Service Catalog now supports Terraform open source, making it easier to share, manage and organize Terraform configurations within AWS.

Amazon S3 now applies 2 security best practices to all new buckets by default. Enable S3 Block Public Access and disable S3 access control lists (ACLs).

You can now run RDS Custom for SQL Server databases in a Multi-AZ manner.

Amazon CodeWhisperer, an AI-enabled, programming-assisted, source code generation tool, is now available.

Amazon GuardDuty can now continuously monitor requests to Lambda functions via network logs.

Amazon CodeCatalyst, a single piece of software that helps you build and deploy applications to AWS as quickly as possible, is available.

AWS DataSync Discovery, which speeds up and simplifies migration from on-premise to AWS, has been announced.

Amazon RDS now supports the latest Graviton3-based M7g and R7g machines.

AWS Verified Access is now available, enabling secure access to enterprise software without the use of VPN.

Sagemaker models can now be deployed on inf2 and ml.trn1 machines with AWS accelerator cards.

You can now easily deploy models created in Amazon SageMaker Canvas in just a single click, retraining those models and automatically creating new forecasts as new data comes in.

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports IAM authentication.

Private Access to the AWS Management Console, which allows you to bind access to the console to stricter rules, is now available.

Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized for I/O intensive workloads has been announced.

AWS has made the Cedar description language and engine open source, allowing you to define accesses in code. Amazon Verified Permissions, a service to help manage application entitlements, is now available using Cedar.

On Amazon Cloudfront, you can now enable basic AWS WAF rules with a single click.

AWS Application Discovery Service Agentless Collector also supports on-premise databases.

AWS Database Migration Service is now available serverless.

Amazon Security Lake is now available, allowing you to collect and manage all your security-related data in one central location.

AWS Glue Data Quality now continuously monitors the data quality of data lakes and data pipelines; Glue for Ray can now help you scale Python jobs.

With AWS Signer, you can now verify and sign images stored in the Elastic Container Registry (ECR).

In AWS Cloudtrail Lake, you can now also pause or enable data loading at specific times, so you can collect events for a specific period of time without having to delete and recreate the repository.

Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports query timing as well as Single sign-on (SSO) with Identity Provider (IdP).

AWS Payment Cryptography, supporting cryptographic operations across payment processing applications, has been announced.

A preview of the AWS Database Encryption SDK for Amazon DynamoDB is available, enabling client-side encryption for DynamoDB workloads.

A preview of CodeGuru Security, which uses machine learning to search for vulnerabilities in program code, has been released.

Profiles can be created within Well-Architected to tailor reviews to business goals.

In the Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, you can now create features from data.

AWS AppFabric, which lets you connect software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to security tools and manage them in a central location, has been announced.

These changes and advancements make the world of AWS even more exciting and will have a significant positive impact on the industry and customers. We will be back in the next quarter with the latest news and information from the AWS landscape. If you are interested in the benefits of cloud services and AWS services, contact us!