Latest updates from the world of AWS - Q3 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 and responds quickly to customer needs, in order to provide new and enhanced services and functionality to meet their requirements.

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 stay up to date with the latest announcements from AWS, as innovations allow us to provide our customers with the latest and greatest solutions that can improve their competitiveness and efficiency.

In the latest installment in our series, we've compiled what we think were the most important new developments on the AWS front in Q3 2023.

Highlights of the third quarter of 2023

Several new instance types have been added to the Elastic Compute Cloud world:

-EC2 P5 instances for generative AI and HPC applications with outstanding performance.

-The EC2 C7gd, M7gd and R7gd instances are now equipped with AWS Graviton3 processors, delivering 25% better performance than their predecessors.

-The EC2 Hpc7a instances with up to 192 vCPUs and 768 GB of memory are now available, and a 300 Gbps -Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking device ensures extremely high data rates with very low latency.

-The EC2 M7i-flex and M7i, EC2 C7i and EC2 M7a instances are now generally available.

-Also generally available from the above is the Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances for macOS, which offers on average 35% better performance than its M1 predecessor.

The local 2.0 version of Amazon DynamoDB, a locally runnable version of the hugely popular database service, has been released It allows you to test your DynamoDB application locally at no extra cost. You can also create incremental exports to S3 in the future.

Amazon OpenSearch now also supports higher gp3 volumes with up to 16000 IOPS and 1000 MiB/s throughput, making search and indexing faster. OpenSearch 2.7 is now also available as an option.

Amazon CloudWatch now supports Cross-Account Service quotas, allowing you to keep track of different resource limits for up to multiple AWS accounts from a single/central location. In addition, regex filtering can now be used to search.

AWS Backup support for S3 and Amazon Athena is now available in Spain, Zurich, Melbourne, Hyderabad.

In addition to the above, cross-account backup for AWS Backup is now available in almost a dozen new regions, making it easier to replicate your backed up data within your AWS organization.

AWS Config supports 35 new resource types (#1 and #2), including within App Runner, EC2, Pinpoint and S3.

Amazon Bedrock is now generally available, making it easy to build generative AI-based applications with foundation models (FMs).

CloudFront distributions have become more secure by providing AWS WAF security advisories to users in the CloudFlare console.

Amazon Aurora now supports the new PostgreSQL versions 15.4, 14.9, 13.12, 12.16 and 11.21, while MySQL 8.0.28 and 8.0.34 are now available, and PostgreSQL 16 can now be used as a preview.

In addition to the above, Amazon Aurora and RDS also provide extended support for MySQL 5.7 and PostgreSQL 11, which are already in EoL (end-of-life) status.

To the delight of Java developers, Amazon Corretto 21 is now generally available.

Amazon SES has further expanded its feature set and now provides arrival and other historical data for each email.

Security Groups can now also be used with Network Load Balancers.

App Runner now also supports Bitbucket as a source repository.

AWS CodeBuild will also begin to support GitHub Actions, simplifying the process of testing, building, and launching our products.

More TLDs (top level domains) can now be registered in Amazon Route 53, bringing the total number of domain endings supported to 329.

In Amazon EKS, you can now run up to 16 times more pods on Windows nodes, while Karpenter now supports Windows, EFS persistent hosting is now easier to use, and of course both EKS and EKS Distro support Kubernetes 1.28.

The maximum IOPS performance cap on Amazon EFS has been increased to 55,000 (1.6 times), allowing AWS to provide faster performance for the various services we build on top of it.

Mountpoint for Amazon S3, a new open source file manager, is now generally available and can be used to mount an S3 bucket to our various resources.

Amazon Lambda can now independently detect and stop recursive calls.

A new feature has been added to AWS Proton: the so-called "deployment history" gives you a better view of the events that happened during deployment.

Amazon Redshift ML now integrates with Amazon Forecast, making it easier to create and train predictive models from time-series data.

AWS Transfer Family now supports SFTP connections, making it easier to securely transfer files between our remote servers and Amazon S3.

The Analysis menu has been introduced in Amazon QuickSight, bringing all analysis-related functions into one place to help you get a better view of your data.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server can now be connected to either on-premise or cloud-running, self-managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD).

AWS Dedicated Local Zones are now available! DLZ is a type of AWS infrastructure that is fully under the control of Amazon engineers. It's a dedicated cloud resource for dedicated use, with physical elements deployed at a location you specify (such as a local data center) to meet local legal and regulatory requirements. Dedicated local zones are operated by AWS staff.

AWS Marketplace has introduced a "self-service" launch option for SaaS products, which will make it faster and more convenient to bring them to market.

These changes and improvements will make the world of AWS even more exciting and will have a significant positive impact on the industry and customers. We will be back 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!