Latest updates from the world of AWS - Q4 2023

Amazon Web Services' (AWS) dominance in the market is primarily due to its 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 sometimes be a challenge 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 improve their competitiveness and efficiency.

In the latest installmentof our article series, we've rounded up what we think were the most important new developments on the AWS front in Q4 2023.

Highlights of the fourth quarter of 2023

DoH (DNS over HTTPS) has been made available in Amazon Route 53, making it safer to serve our infrastructure.

Region 33 is now available: AWS Canada West (Calgary) is now the second Canadian region of choice with 70 services.

A new feature has been added to the Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller: Zonal Autoshift. It allows you to automatically redirect your traffic to a different availability zone (AZ) if AWS finds problems in that AZ during self-testing.

In Amazon OpenSearch Service, OR1 instance types are now optional, providing a 30% cost/performance improvement when storing and indexing data in S3.

The web IDE has arrived in Amazon SageMaker Studio, among many other new features! The new features make it easier to develop and faster to bring on a new colleague or start a new project.

In addition, you can now control Amazon SageMaker Canvas with free-word commands via the "Chat for data prep" feature, or even use foundation models from Amazon Bedrock or Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart without writing code.

In addition, the Amazon SageMaker HyperPod has been added, which makes training foundation models faster due to the pre-configured and dedicated infrastructure.

Five new foundational models taught on big data have been added to Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon Q, which is broadly a generative AI-based "chatbot" and problem-solving assistant that can be tailored to your needs, has been introduced. It can help facilitate decision making, employees’ day-to-day work, and even innovative collaborative thinking, based on the information we have accumulated within our company (code bases, project management systems, internal document repositories, etc.).

To understand how Amazon Q can benefit your own company, the easiest way is to use AWS, because of course AWS has also introduced it into the day-to-day life of its own service on AWS Console.

New AI-enabled features have also been added to Amazon Redshift:

• For example, Amazon Redshift Serverless now uses AI to scale more efficiently.
• Amazon Q generative SQL in Amazon Redshift Query Editor provides recommendations for SQL queries from free-word input.

Vector search in Amazon DocumentDB (Amazon's MongoDB compatible service) is now generally available.

MySQL 5.7 and 11 PostgreSQL databases running on Amazon RDS and Aurora will automatically receive extended support for Amazon RDS, which will allow these database versions to receive the necessary security and other updates after EoL (end-of-life).

Three new features have been added to Amazon Inspector:

• We can now test our container images for vulnerabilities at build time of our CI/CD using the new API feature.
• We can now monitor our EC2 instances without installing any plugins.
• Issues with AWS Lambda functionality can now be detected by GenAI and of course fixed in our code.

A new module called myApplications has been added to the Amazon Console to help us get access to our most recently launched applications more quickly.

Following the introduction of the "self-service" launch option in the AWS Marketplace in Q3, AWS have added a new feature called SaaS Quick Launch, which will make it even faster and safer to get them to market.

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

• R7i memory-optimized instances are now generally available.
• In addition, compute-optimized C7a instances have been released.
• R8g instances are Graviton4-based and memory-optimized.
• U7i machines can have up to 32 TiB of memory, making them particularly suitable for running so-called in-memory databases.
• DL2q instances are, by their acronym, suitable for running deep learning algorithms.

From mid-2024, Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service IMDSv2 will become the default

AWS Systems Manager will now be configurable "by default" for all EC2 machines in a region.

The "government cloud", which is typically important for the public sector and is already known in the US, is slowly coming to Europe: the rollout of the so-called AWS European Sovereign Cloud is well underway, with the first region to be launched in Germany.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs now offers automated sample analytics and anomaly detection.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus can now collect data and metrics from EKS without an agent.

Amazon ElastiCache Serverless for Redis and Amazon ElastiCache Serverless for Memcached services are now available, adding new serverless caching services to Amazon's product portfolio.

The Cost Optimization Hub now makes cost optimization easier.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone is a new high-performance storage model that delivers up to 10x performance gains over the S3 standard.

With Amazon Braket Direct, researchers now have the option to pre-book dedicated quantum computer(s), saving them the wait if necessary. They can also consult directly with "quantum specialists".

A preview of the Amazon Aurora Limitless Database is now available, enabling horizontal scaling of databases to process millions of writes per second.

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

IBM's Db2 is also now available in RDS.

The Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive is now also available in AWS Backup, providing a significant cost reduction if you don't need to access AWS snapshots immediately.

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.

Two new features have been added to EFS:

• Replication failback: typically useful for use during disaster recovery processes when we need to synchronize different EFS volumes.
• IOPS changes: now 250000 read IOPS and up to 50000 write IOPS per file system are available.

Amazon Lambda scales up to 12 times faster.

The new Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client makes it cheaper and more efficient to run virtual workstations.

These changes and advancements 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!