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AWS Podcast
#690: AWS News Updates, October 21, 2024
00:29:29
Simon and Jillian cover all things new and interesting! Chapters: 00:35 AWS Marketplace 01:05 Analyt
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- [00:00]
Gillian Ford
This is episode 690 of the AWS podcast released on October 21, 2024.
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Simon
Hello everyone and welcome back to the ATABIS Podcast. Simlish here with you. Great to have you back and I'm doing my co host Gillian Ford. G'day Gillian. How you doing?
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Gillian Ford
Fantastic Simon, how about you?
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Simon
I am doing good. Now it's just the two of us today and we are missing our extra co host Shruti who is busily working on super secret stuff for Re Invent, isn't she?
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Gillian Ford
I know, it's so sad, but top secret stuff takes priority.
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Simon
She's cooking up cooking up the good stuff, cooking up the good stuff. But we have good stuff today to talk about so let's get right into it. Let's start with the Atomis Marketplace at A Marketplace has announced the general availability of a new Procurement Insights Dashboard which means you can manage your organization's renewals and optimize your database marketplace spend so you get detailed visibility across everything. It is amazing the stuff you can find in the marketplace. It's a really easy way to get access to cool software and AWS Partner Central now also supports association of AWS Marketplace private offer to a launched opportunity so you can tag it all together and do that partnery stuff. Let's talk a bit about analytics. Amazon Redshift announces general availability for data sharing with data like tables. So this gives you a secure and convenient way to share live data lake tables across different Amazon Redshift warehouses. Now this data sharing of data like tables in the AWS Glue catalog provides live access to the data, which means you always get the most up to date and consistent information. Amazon Redshift also introduces query identifiers for improved query performance monitoring. So this is a query hash and it uniquely identifies SQL queries based on the textual representation and predicate values, which means you can trace them through Amazon OpenSearch Serverless has recently introduced a suite of new features and enhancements to enable faster indexing, improved search performance and expanded analytics capability. Some of the updates include the introduction of a flat object data type which lets you have more efficient storage and searching of nested data. It also supports enhanced geospatial features and it also expanded its field types, et cetera, et cetera. Lots of updates. Check them out. Auto scaling in AWS Glue Interactive Sessions is now generally available, so you can now dynamically scale your resources up and down based on the workload. Amazon redshift has launched RA3 large instances so this gives you a new smaller size in the RA3 node type with a 2V CPU and 16 gig of memory, so again flexibility where you need it. And Amazon Redshift has announced MTLS support for Amazon msk. So this is mutual transport layer security and this works between Amazon Redshift Provision Cluster or Serverless Workgroup and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka Cluster or Serverless, so that means you get super secure connectivity. Amazon EMR Serverless has introduced job run concurrency and queuing controls, so this allows you to manage the maximum number of concurrent jobs for an application and queue other things. It also prevents job run failures when API limits are exceeded, et cetera, et cetera. Amazon Managed Streaming For Apache Kafka MSK APIs now support AWS Private Link so you can invoke those APIs from within your VPC without traversing the public Internet and Amazon Q in Quicksight now generates data stories that are personalised to users, so this allows you to create visually compelling documents and presentations that provide insights, highlight key findings and recommend actionable next.
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Gillian Ford
Steps Up Next is application integration. Amazon EventBridge event bus now provides an end to end event delivery latency metric in Amazon CloudWatch that tracks the duration between event ingestion and successful delivery to the targets on your event bus. AWS B2B data interchange now supports outbound EDI transformation, enabling you to generate x12edi documents from JSON or XML data inputs. This new capability adds to B2B Data Interchange's existing support for transforming inbound EDI documents and automatically generating EDI acknowledgments. With the ability to transform and generate x12 EDI documents up to 150 megabytes, you can now automate your bi directional EDI workflows at scale on aws.
- [04:25]
Simon
Let's talk about artificial intelligence. There are four new synthetic generative voices for Amazon Polly speaking in American and Australian English, although I could say Australian English. So the we have the new voices. We have one Australian English voice, Olivia, and three US English voices, Joanna, Danielle and Stephen. Now these are similar to our neural voices with the same names, but they have more natural pronunciation and porosity. Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation now supports evaluating custom models. So obviously understanding how your model is performing is important. And now you can use automatic evaluation with predefined algorithms for metrics such as accuracy, robustness and toxicity. Additionally for those metrics or subjective and custom metrics such as friendliness, style and alignment to brand voice, you can set up a human evaluation workflow with a few clicks. So this means you can leverage your own employees or even an AWS managed team as reviewers. Model evaluation provides built in curated data sets or you can bring your own Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases is announcing the general availability of the Stop Ingestion API. This API offers you greater control over data ingestion workflows by allowing you to stop and ongoing ingestion job that you don't want to continue. Something new in Preview Amazon Q Business now supports an integration with smartsheet now this is a modern enterprise work management platform trusted by millions of people at companies across the globe. The connector makes it easy to synchronize data from your smartshare instance to your Amazon Q index. We're also happy to announce sample based partitioning for AWS Health Omics variant stores. So with this release, any new variant stores customers create will automatically be partitioned successfully.
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Gillian Ford
Couple of updates in Compute Lambda recursive loop detection can now automatically detect and stop recursive loops between lambda and S3. Lambda recursive loop detection, which is enabled by default, is a preventative guardrail that automatically detects and stops recursive invocations between Lambda and other supported services, preventing unintended usage and billing from runaway workloads. Customers commonly use S3 as an event source to trigger lambda functions, and customer misconfigurations of code defect can cause processed events to be sent back to the Amazon S3 bucket that invoked the lambda function. And this can cause unintended recursive loops. I'm sure we've all seen one of those before.
- [06:56]
Simon
I've done this one. It's like do something. When something comes into S3, something comes into S3. Write to S3. Something came into S3.
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Gillian Ford
Totally. But good news is that now Lambda will automatically detect and stop such recursive loops, which certainly is going to save us a lot of headache.
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Simon
Yeah, it'll save me from myself.
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Gillian Ford
Yeah, exactly. Thank you. That was the word I was looking for. Another one we've got is Amazon EC2 now supports optimized CPUs post instance launch AWS compute optimizer now supports 80 new Amazon EC2 instance types. If you haven't used Compute Optimizer, I highly recommend turning it on. It is one of those things that a lot of people don't know about, but it is a great cost optimization tool belt. At least I use it all the time when I'm talking to customers. Simon, is that the case with you too?
- [07:53]
Simon
Totally. It just tells you what the right thing to do is based upon the data. You don't even have to think. Yes, but as I say, always make sure you tell your boss, boss, I spent a lot of time on this. I really thought about it and look at these savings I got you.
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Gillian Ford
No one's going to complain by that.
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Simon
No, no one ever complained for spending less.
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Gillian Ford
Yes, that's right. Amazon Inspector enhances engine for Lambda Standard scanning and this upgrade will provide you with a more comprehensive view of the vulnerabilities in the third party dependencies used in your lambda functions and associated lambda layers in your environment. With this launch of this enhanced scanning engine, you'll benefit from the capabilities without any disruption to your existing workflows. Existing customers can expect to see some findings closed as the new engine reevaluates your existing resources to better assess risks while also surfacing new vulnerabilities. Now we've got customer engagement. Amazon Connect contact lens dashboards now includes the ability to color code metric performance, customize service level thresholds and switch metrics within widgets. With these dashboards you can view and compare real time and historical aggregated performance trends and insights using custom defined time periods like week over week, creating charts that are summarized things, time series charts, all of the charts. You can further customize the dashboards by changing the metrics you want to monitor as well as color code metric performance based on custom defined thresholds. So one example might be if you want to automatically show service level as red if it dips below 70% or yellow if it is between 70 to 90% and green if it's greater than 90% and this can help give you a quick visual indicator on how the service level is performing. Amazon Connect Chat now supports using your customer's initial message and flows. This enables you to improve self service containment rates and personalize the customer experience. You can use the initial chat message to display the right step by step guide triggering interactive messages from Amazon Lex or route the chat to the best agent. So one example could be let's say the initial message is about an order issue. You can immediately show the customer a list pickers of recent orders. Or maybe there's a message that's about rescheduling a delivery. You can present a date and time pickers to help them make the change. Amazon Q in Connect, which is a generative AI powered assistant for contact center agents. This now enables contact center supervisors to pre configure large language model prompts to match your company's brand and business guidelines. Amazon Connect can now generate forecasts for smaller workloads with as little as one contact, making it easier for contact center managers to predict demand. This eliminates the need for you to manually adjust historical data to meet minimum data requirements. By reducing minimum data requirements, you can now enable managers to generate forecasts for smaller volume workloads than were previously possible, making it easier to do capacity planning and staffing. Amazon Connect Contact Lens now allows users to save and publish reports and dashboards as read only. Amazon Connect now supports multi day copy and paste of agent schedules. Amazon Connect now supports the ability to initiate outbound SMS contacts, enabling you to help increase customer satisfaction by engaging your customers on their preferred communication channel. You can now deliver proactive SMS experiences for scenarios such as post contact surveys, appointment reminders and service updates, allowing customers to respond at their convenience. Additionally, you can offer customers the option to switch to SMS while waiting in a call queue, eliminating their hold time. Amazon SES now supports HTTPs for tracking open and click events while using custom domains. Using HTTPs helps meet security compliance requirements and reduces the chances of email delivery issues with mailbox providers that reject non secure links. The new feature provides the flexibility to configure HTTPs as mandatory for both open and click tracking or make it optional based on the protocol of the links in your email.
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Simon
Man, that connect team has been busy for our customers that's for sure.
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Gillian Ford
They really have.
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Simon
Yeah, crazy. Now moving to the topic of database because the database teams have been working hard too. Firstly we're happy to announce Amazon Elasticache support for Valky with serverless price 33% lower and node based priced 20% lower than other supported engines. With Elasticache serverless for ValKey, customers can create a cache in under a minute and get started for as low as $6 a month. Valkey is an open source high performance key value data store stewarded by the Linux Foundation. It's a drop in replacement of Redis oss backed by 40 plus companies with rapid adoption since project inception in March 2024. Hundreds of thousands of customers use Elasticache to improve their database and application performance and optimize cost. Caching for the win for many things is really important. Elasticache for Valkey provides a fully managed experience built on open source technology whilst leveraging the security, operational excellence 99.99% availability and reliability from AWS. So it's really useful for things like caching, leaderboards, session stores et cetera and to lower cost. Elasticache Serverless for Valkey Minimum data store is 100 meg 90% lower than Elasticache serverless for Redis OSS if you're using Elasticache reserve nodes when you switch from Elasticache for Redis OSS to Elasticache for Valkey you retain your existing discounted reserve node rates across all node sizes within the same family. We're also happy to announce Amazon MemoryDB support for ValKey as well. This is also priced 30% lower than MemoryDB for Redis OSS and with MemoryDB for ValKey you're not charged for data written up to 10 terabytes a month and then it's 80% lower to write additionally for that. Now as we mentioned, this is a drop in replacement of Redis OSS and Amazon MemoryDB is a fully managed Valkey and Redis OSS compatible database service which gives you multi az durability, microsecond read and single digit millisecond write latency and high throughput. Again super useful for caching type workloads, but it gives you that incredibly fully managed experience. If your application is not running as fast as you want, you need to think about your caching strategies Amazon Aurora Serverless V2 now supports database capacity of up to 256Aurora Capacity Units or ACUs and this is basically approximation of 2 gigabytes of memory and corresponding CPU networking per ACU. This high capacity is double what we used to have, which was 128, so now you can have even more capability. Amazon timestream for InfluxDB now supports additional configuration options, providing you with more control over how the engine behaves and communicates with its clients with the latest Launch. Timestream for InfluxDB also introduces a feature that allows you to monitor instant CPU memory and disk utilizations directly from the AWS Management Console. We're also happy to announce reserved nodes flexibility for Amazon elasticache, so this lets you get the most out of your reserve nodes discount. Previously you had to purchase a reservation for a specific node type and you could only get a discount for the given type with no flexibility. Now you can get size flexibility within the instance family or node family and the AWS region as well. Amazon aurora now supports PostgreSQL 16 4, 15, 8, 14, 13, 1316 and 12 20. Your regular reminder to upgrade your stuff. Most important thing to do to keep yourself cyber secure and cyber safe and also get benefits of performance and other things. Also before you upgrade stuff, test your stuff and it makes it easy with Aurora because you can just create a snapshot, run your tests, make sure everything's okay, and then do the update and Amazon Aurora MySQL now supports the RDS Data API. You can now access those Aurora clusters via secure HTTP endpoint and run SQL statements without the use of database drivers and without managing connections. This follows the launch of the Data API for Amazon Aurora Postgres, SQL compatible edition for Aurora serverless v2 and Aurora provisioned Database Instances last year.
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Gillian Ford
Now onto Developer Tools AWS Announcing the general availability of Console to Code, which is powered by Amazon Q Developer Console to Code makes it simple, fast and cost effective to move from prototyping in the AWS Management Console to building code for production deployments. Customers can generate code for their console actions in their preferred format with a single click. The generated code helps customers get started and bootstrap their automation pipelines for tasks. Console to Code makes it easy to convert actions performed in the console into reusable code using the language of your choice.
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Simon
So this is really interesting because it's basically saying if you have to do click ops only do it once. So automate what you clicked opt totally.
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Gillian Ford
And I think it's going to really help people that are new to the cloud, maybe new to software engineering and you have an idea be able to just get started with something a lot faster.
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Simon
Yeah. But still hit that infrastructure as code as well so you're not having to trade one for the other totally.
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Gillian Ford
Next up, AWS Code Pipeline introduces a simplified and new getting started experience to enable you to quickly create new pipelines. We are pleased to announce that Amazon is extending the end of life dates for Amazon Kreto 8 and Amazon Korero 11. The new end of light dates are as follows. Amazon Corretto8 December 2030Amazon Corretto11 January 2032 but don't wait till the last minute.
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Simon
Yeah update now if you can.
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Gillian Ford
I know a lot of you are tempted to wait till the last minute.
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Simon
Yeah, now I can wait another five years. Awesome.
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Gillian Ford
AW Code Pipeline introduces the commands action that enables you to easily run shell commands as part of your pipeline execution. With the command to action you will have access to a secure compute environment backed by codebuild to run the AWS cli, third party tools or any shell commands. The commands action runs codebuild manage on demand EC2 and uses an Amazon Linux 2023 Standard 5.0 image AWS CodePipeline V2 type pipelines introduces pipeline variable check as a new rule that customers can use in their stage level condition to gate a pipeline execut execution.
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Simon
Let's talk end user computing. Nice. DCV has renamed to Amazon DCV and The new version 2024.0 with support for Ubuntu 24.04 is available now. Amazon DCV is a high performance remote display protocol designed to help customers securely access remote desktop or application sessions including things like 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high performance GPUs. It is very cool. It has lots of new features as well in the latest release, so check that out. Amazon Workspaces now supports file transfer between workspace sessions and local devices, so this helps customers manage and share files seamlessly increasing their productivity. And this is supported on personal workspaces that use the DCV streaming protocol which we just mentioned when using the Windows Linux client applications or web access and printer redirection and user selected regional settings are also now available on Amazon AppStream 2.0 multi session fleets, so this allows you to have enhanced end user experience by being able to get access to the things you need when you need them. And Amazon AppStream 2.0 has also introduced automatic time zone redirection so that you can have a better experience from the client device. And it has also increased application setting storage limits from 1 gig to 5 gig so you can store more stuff and one quick update for the Internet of things AWS it Core has removed TLS ALPN requirement and adds custom authorizer capabilities so devices no longer need to rely on transport layer security, application layer, protocol negotiation or ALPN extension to determine authentication type and protocol. And now you can add additional X509 client certificates and validation to custom authentication workflows. Previously you had to define your selected authentication device by connecting to a defined port and providing TLS ALPN with a chosen protocol. The new capability to configure authentication type and protocol purely based on the TLS SNI or Server Name Indication extension makes it simpler to connect devices to the cloud without requiring TLS alpn. Lots of other benefits to help your authentication, including customization, et cetera. If you're in iot, check this one out.
- [21:31]
Gillian Ford
Up next Management and Governance AWS announces a new VMware SPI for managed services as part of Migration Acceleration program in AWS Partner Central AWS Chatbot adds support to centrally managed access to AWS accounts from Slack and Microsoft Teams with AWS organizations. This launch introduces Chatbot Management Policy Type in AWS organizations to control access to your organization's accounts from from Slack channels and Microsoft Teams channels. AWS Resource Explorer customers can now list all AWS resources indexed by Resource Explorer across services, regions and AWS accounts. Customers use Resource Explorer to search for supported AWS resources using keywords and search operators to return up to 1000 relevancy ranked results. Starting today, customers can use the same familiar search operators to list and paginate through all matching results with AWS Risk Explorer's new List Resources API. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now offers customers the option to use IPv6 addresses for their new and existing workspaces. AWS Repost launches Repost Agent, a generative AI powered assistant that's designed to enhance customer interactions by offering intelligent and near real time responses on Repost. Repost Agent provides the first response to questions in the Repost community. Cloud developers can now get general technical guidance faster to successfully build and operate their cloud workloads. AWS announces End User Messaging Social enabling developers to message their end users on WhatsApp, the world's most popular messaging app with over 2.7 billion users. With this release, developers can create rich messaging experiences on WhatsApp with multimedia content and interactive interactive features. They can now use WhatsApp alongside end user messaging, SMS and push notifications as part of their messaging strategy, ensuring they can communicate to their end users through the channels they prefer most. AWS Application Composer is now called AWS Infrastructure Composer. The new name emphasizes our capabilities in building infrastructure architectures.
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Simon
Let's talk about media services AWS Deadline Cloud now supports resubmitting jobs so you can easily run jobs again with updated parameters. Now, if you haven't come across the AWS Deadline Cloud, it's a fully managed service that simplifies render management for teams, creating computer generated 2D and 3D graphics and visual effects for films, TV shows, commercials, games and industrial design, and some updates on the topic of networking and content delivery. Cross Zone Enabled Network Load Balancer now supports Zonal Shift and Zonal Auto Shift. Zonal Shift allows you to quickly shift traffic away from an impaired availability zone and recover from events such as a bad application deployment or gray failures. Zonal Auto Shift safely and automatically shifts your traffic away from an AZ when AWS identifies a potential impact to it. Now enabling Cross Zone on NLBS is a popular configuration for AWS customers that need an even distribution of traffic across application targets and multiple AZs. Now with this launch, you can shift traffic away from an AZ in the event of a failure, just like you're able to for Cross Zone disabled load balances as well. Amazon Cloudfront has launched support for JA4 fingerprinting of incoming requests. Now this enables customers to allow known clients or block requests from malicious clients. The JA4 fingerprint is passed by the Cloudfront viewer JA4 fingerprint header and you can expect the fingerprints using custom logic on your application web services or using cloudfront functions or Lambda at edge. Now, if you haven't come across a JA4 TLS client fingerprint, it contains a 38 character long fingerprint of the TLS client hello, which is used to initiate a secure connection from the clients. The fingerprint can be used to build a database of known good and bad actors to apply when inspecting HTTP requests. You can add the CloudFront viewer ja4 fingerprint header to an Origin request policy and attach the policy to your cloudfront distributions. Then you can inspect them and take the Correct action. Amazon Route 53 resolver endpoints now support DNS over HTTPs with server name indication SNI validation, so this allows you to encrypt DNS queries that pass through the endpoints and improve privacy by minimizing the visibility of information exchanged through the queries. With this launch, you can now specify the host name with your outbound endpoint configuration to perform TLS handshakes for your DNS requests from the outbound endpoints to the DOH server. Enabling SNI validation for your DOH resolver endpoints also helps you meet regulatory and business compliance requirements. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud now supports BYO IP and BYO ASN in all AWS local zones, and you can now launch Amazon CloudWatch Internet monitor from Amazon Network Load Balancer Console so you don't have to flip between them. You can get it right from there.
- [26:51]
Gillian Ford
Up next Security Identity and Compliance AWS Security Hub launches seven new security controls we now offer service reference information to streamline automation of policy management workflows, helping you to retrieve available actions across AWS services from machine readable files.
- [27:12]
Simon
And finally the topic of storage Mount point for Amazon S3csi driver has introduced new access controls for individual Kubernetes pods. Previously you can configure an IAM role that the CSI drive used for all pods. Now you can further strengthen your application security when building multitenant environments by configuring the CSI driver to use individual IAM roles for each pod that attaches a volume. Amazon S3 has added service quota support for S3 general purpose buckets, so you can now view the total number of buckets in an AWS account, compare it to your bucket quota and request any service limit increases you need. And finally, Amazon Data firehose delivers data streams into Apache Iceberg format tables in Amazon S3. So the new feature allows you to route records in a data stream to different Apache Iceberg tables based on the content of the incoming record. Which is pretty cool. There were a lot of updates there. Gillian. Plenty to get on with?
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Gillian Ford
Absolutely, yeah. What was your favorite? Simon?
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Simon
I'm actually going to go with the console to Code one because I think that, you know, we often talk about the need for infrastructure as code and it is important. But often folks are visually oriented and at least in their starting point, they want to just click on some stuff and be guided. And this to me feels like a nice bridge. What about you?
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Gillian Ford
I like it. I'm also going to go with a different one, which is Repost one, because I don't think I've ever seen an update from us on the update show on Repost. So I feel like I've got to give it a shout out.
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Simon
Absolutely.
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Gillian Ford
Two, I feel like it's one of those resources that is so valuable, but a lot of people just underutilize it or some people just don't really know that it's there for them.
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Simon
I know it's there. Yeah.
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Gillian Ford
So I definitely recommend if you haven't heard of Repost, it's just all things aws. There's got a really active community. You've got also folks that work at AWS who are in there answering questions as well. So definitely take advantage of it. And now the generative AI component. What else doesn't have generative AI these days?
- [29:12]
Simon
Well, exactly. What else you need?
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Gillian Ford
Love it.
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Simon
Jillian, how do folks get in touch with you?
- [29:18]
Gillian Ford
Ms. Jill Ford on X.
- [29:20]
Simon
Excellent. And if you want to go Old School, awspodcast@Amazon.com is the other place you can do it. And until next time, keep on building.