#693: AWS News Updates, November 4, 2024

Summary

AWS Podcast Episode #693: AWS News Updates, November 4, 2024

Hosted by Amazon Web Services, Episode #693 of the AWS Podcast, released on November 4, 2024, provides a comprehensive overview of the latest updates and innovations across AWS services. Hosted by Jillian Ford and Shruti Kini, this episode delves into advancements in analytics, artificial intelligence, compute, cost management, customer engagement, databases, developer tools, management and governance, media services, migration and modernization, networking, security, identity and compliance, and storage. Below is a detailed summary capturing all key points, discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode.

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Introduction and Event Preparation

Jillian Ford opens the episode by welcoming listeners and setting the stage for the numerous updates to be discussed. Shruti Kini shares excitement about the upcoming AWS re:Invent event:

[00:21] Shruti: "Reinvent is right around the corner. It is almost a little over a month away and everyone at AWS is preparing for a fabulous event. We have lots of exciting content across different sessions planned and lots of exciting demos and things like that on the expo floor."

AWS Marketplace Updates

The hosts highlight several new features and improvements in the AWS Marketplace:

• Private Marketplace Notifications: Streamlines the product request approval process for Private Marketplace customers.
• AWS GovCloud Support: Sellers can manage single AMI product availability in AWS GovCloud regions through a self-service experience.
• Expanded Currency and Disbursement Options: Support for contract pricing private offers in four new currencies and the option to choose non-US bank accounts for disbursement.

Analytics Enhancements

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to updates in AWS Analytics services:

• Amazon Redshift:

  • Query Profiler: Launched to enhance query monitoring and diagnostics.
  • ETL Integrations: General availability of Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL ETL integrations with Amazon Redshift.
  • Refresh Interval Support: Now supports refresh intervals in a zero ETL integration.

• Amazon QuickSight:

  • EventBridge Integration: Expanded support for more events, enabling automation of workflows like continuous deployment and backups. Events are delivered to EventBridge in near real-time, allowing developers to create rules for event-driven actions.
  • Scheduled Reports via API: QuickSight can now trigger scheduled reports programmatically.
  • Shared Folders Management: Programmatic export and import of shared folders, continuous replication, migration, and permission management.

• AWS Data Exchange and Datazone:

  • Data Grants APIs: Enables programmatic data sharing.
  • Project Designations: New designations for project members to perform specific tasks within Amazon Datazone.

• Amazon Managed Services:

  • Apache Airflow: Simplified interaction with the REST API using AWS credentials.
  • Apache Flink: Supports per-second billing for more granular cost management.

Artificial Intelligence Advancements

Jillian Ford and Shruti Kini delve deep into the latest AI and machine learning updates:

• Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet Model:

  • Availability: Now available in Amazon Bedrock in the US West 2 (Oregon) region.
  • Performance Improvements: Significant gains in coding capabilities, outperforming all publicly available models on benchmarks like SWE Bench (improved from 33% to 49%) and Tau Bench across retail and airline domains.
  • Computer Use Capabilities (Beta): Enables Claude to interact with computer interfaces, allowing actions like moving a cursor and clicking buttons. Shruti emphasizes caution for developers to use this feature for lower-risk tasks initially.

  [05:17] Jillian: "The upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet model is now available in the US West 2 region, Oregon. Let me repeat that again if you're trying to look for it right now in Virginia, in Frankfurt. Right now it's only in US west too."

• Amazon Bedrock:

  • Custom Model Import: General availability allows customers to import custom weights for supported architectures (e.g., Metal Llama 3.2, Mixtral 8x7b) without managing infrastructure. Facilitates seamless integration with Bedrock tools like agents and knowledge bases.
  • Model Evaluation: Supports both automatic and human evaluations, with options for predefined and custom metrics.
  • Conversational Builder: A new chat interface for building Bedrock agents using natural language instructions.

• Amazon QBusiness:

  • Analytics Dashboard: Integration with Amazon CloudWatch logs provides insights into application usage, trends, and user feedback.
  • Connector Metadata: Enhances search relevance by utilizing metadata fields, improving response accuracy for user queries.
  • AI-Powered Assistant Embedding: Allows developers to embed AI assistants into application interfaces with a no-code setup, facilitating quick deployment of chatbots for technical documentation or website content.

• Additional AI Enhancements:

  • Amazon Transcribe: Support for 30 additional languages, totaling 54 supported languages for streaming audio transcriptions.
  • AWS Cloud Shell & SageMaker Studio: Support for Amazon Q in the CLI and G6E instance types in SageMaker Studio notebooks, enhancing performance for AI and ML workloads.
  • AWS Supply Chain: Introduction of the Amazon Q assistant to streamline supply chain operations by analyzing data and providing operational and financial insights.

  [13:12] Shruti: "This is a really long list of extremely useful updates. I mean it's so awesome that the custom model import is now generally available."

Compute Updates

The podcast discusses multiple updates in AWS's compute services:

• AWS Lambda:

  • Custom Serializer Support: Now supports using a custom serializer with Java runtimes.
  • Code Editor Integration: Features a new code editor based on Code OSS/VS Code, enhancing the development experience.
  • Real-Time Log Analytics: Enabled via Amazon CloudWatch Logs Library Tail.
  • Function Insights Dashboard: Surfaces key function insights directly within the Lambda Console.

• EC2 Enhancements:

  • Image Builder: Now supports Apple macOS, allowing customers to create and manage custom macOS images.
  • Dedicated Hosts: Support for live migration-based host maintenance.
  • Capacity Reservations: Ability to assign billing of unused On-Demand Capacity Reservations to organization accounts.

• Amazon EKS:

  • Application Recovery Controller: General availability of optimized Accelerated AMIs for Amazon Linux 2023, supporting enhanced security and performance features.
  • Dual Stack Support: For EKS Management API Endpoints and Kubernetes API Server endpoints in IPv6 clusters, enabling connectivity via IPv6, IPv4, or dual-stack clients.

• Amazon CloudWatch:

  • Application Signals: Enhanced with support for Amazon ECS applications, providing automated instrumentation and tracking of application performance against business objectives.

• Others:

  • Ubuntu Pro Spot Instances: Deployment support with extended security updates.
  • Elastic Beanstalk: Adds support for Python 3.12 on Amazon Linux 2023 environments.
  • Time Slicing for Nvidia GPU in Bottlerocket: Enhances AI/ML workload efficiency by optimizing GPU resource sharing.
  • Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) Update: Improves scalability for AI/ML applications with high bandwidth and low latency networking.

Cost Management Updates

Jillian Ford and Shruti Kini cover updates aimed at enhancing cost management for AWS customers:

• AWS Billing Conductor:
  • Pro Forma Data Visibility: Customers can view reservation and savings plans coverage and utilization reports.
  • Spending Alerts: Monitor pro forma spend and receive alerts when exceeding desired spending limits.

Customer Engagement Enhancements

The episode highlights several updates focused on improving customer engagement:

• Amazon SES:

  • TLS Version Visibility: Provides insights into the TLS versions used in sent messages.
  • Email Delivery Configurability: Enhanced with options to set maximum delivery times.

• Amazon Connect:

  • Screen Sharing: Introduces screen sharing capabilities for more interactive support.
  • iOS and Android Chat SDKs: Support in-app chat experiences, enhancing mobile customer interactions.

Database Innovations

A suite of updates in AWS’s database services were discussed:

• Amazon Aurora:

  • Global Database Tagging: Allows applying tags to global clusters for better resource organization and cost tracking.
  • Global Database Writer Endpoint: Simplifies routing and connectivity during cross-region switchover or failover operations.
  • PostgreSQL and MySQL Enhancements: Forward write requests from read replicas to the writer instance, aiding in scaling read workloads requiring read-after-write consistency.

• Amazon RDS:

  • Oracle Support: Version 24.1 of Oracle Application Express for Oracle Database 19C and 21C.
  • SQL Server: Support for Windows Authentication in RDS Custom for SQL Server.
  • MariaDB: Support for MariaDB 11.4 with new password validation options.
  • Multi-AZ Deployments: Integration with AWS IAM for database authentication.

• Amazon Timestream: Introduction of query insights for live analytics.

• Amazon DynamoDB: User experience enhancements allowing customers to favorite and organize frequently used tables.

Developer Tools Updates

Improvements and new features in developer tools were covered:

• Finch: General availability of Linux support for this open-source CLI tool simplifies container development by bundling essential components.

• AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild:

  • CodePipeline v2: Introduces automatic stage retry on failure.
  • CodeBuild: Now supports managed Network Access Control Lists (ACLs) for reserved capacity fleets, allowing better control over network traffic.

End User Computing Enhancements

• Amazon AppStream 2.0: Now supports custom shared network storage, enabling users to access and collaborate on shared files seamlessly without manual transfers.

Management and Governance Updates

Several enhancements were announced to streamline management and governance:

• Partial Payments for AWS Bills:

  • Availability: Customers can now make partial payments towards their monthly AWS bills using multiple cards, a feature that previously required contacting AWS customer service.

  [24:58] Shruti: "This functionality, which would have previously required calling AWS customer service, is now available by logging into your Console account."

• Amazon CloudWatch:

  • Lock Pattern Analysis and Anomaly Detection: Improved readability with name tokens and increased default quotas from 10 to 500 per account.

• AWS Launch Wizard for SAP: Deeper integration with AWS Systems Manager, facilitating management and operations of SAP applications on AWS.

• AWS IAM Identity Center:

  • Streamlined Access: Simplifies first-time access to the AWS Console Mobile application.
  • Seamless Link Experience: Allows links to AWS services and resources to open directly in the AWS Console mobile app.

• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus: Now supports configuring the minimum duration for active alerts after triggering conditions are no longer valid.

• Resiliency Widget on My Applications: Provides enhanced visibility and proactive control over the resilience posture of each application.

Media Services Updates

• AWS Deadline Cloud: Announces new event types delivered through Amazon EventBridge, enabling workflow triggers as jobs progress and complete.

Migration and Modernization Enhancements

• AWS Transfer Family: Provides real-time status updates for file transfers initiated via SFTP connectors, allowing better monitoring and orchestration of file transfer workflows.

• AWS Mainframe Modernization Service: Introduces new integrations for greater flexibility, including support for LDAP, print and output management, AWS health events, and Amazon EC2 M7I instances.

• AWS Database Migration Service Serverless: Now supports MongoDB and Amazon DocDB as data sources, broadening migration capabilities.

Networking Updates

• Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC):

  • Zonal Shift and Auto Shift Enhancements: Expanded support for Amazon EKS and Network Load Balancers (NLB) with cross-zone configurations. ARC helps in recovering unhealthy applications by shifting traffic away from impaired Availability Zones (AZs).

  [29:06] Shruti: "Zonal Shift works with NLB by blocking all traffic to targets in an impaired AZ and removing the zonal IP from DNS responses while it is active."

Security, Identity, and Compliance

• AWS Firewall Manager: Now supports retrofitting existing AWS WAF Web Access Control Lists (ACLs).

• AWS IAM Identity Center: Simplifies service calls with a single identity context, enhancing security and user management.

Storage Enhancements

• Amazon S3: Introduces region and bucket name filters for the List Buckets API, improving data retrieval efficiency.

• Amazon EFS: Supports up to 60 gigabytes of read throughput, doubling previous capacities to enhance performance.

Host Reflections and Highlights

In the concluding segment, Shruti and Jillian reflect on the updates:

[31:29] Shruti: "Anything that stands out, I mean I think the custom model import being generally available. That's, that's really cool."

[32:09] Jillian: "I love the call outs that you made. Also, embedding Q Business into your application interface, that really is going to make it just super quick for certain use cases."

Shruti appreciates the customer-centric updates, such as the ability to make partial payments, while Jillian emphasizes the significance of AI advancements, particularly the embedding capabilities of Amazon QBusiness.

[32:36] Shruti: "You can basically embed a generative AI assistant into whatever application you're building. It's one thing to sort of embed models or embed some sort of AI functionality, but to embed a completely sort of, well put together assistant directly into your application, that's, that's cool."

Conclusion and Call to Action

The hosts encourage listeners to engage and provide feedback:

[33:09] Jillian: "A super easy way to get in touch with everyone here on the AWS podcast is go to aws.amazon.com/podcasts. There is a big button that says submit questions and feedback. We actually will read your feedback if you send it to us, so please do. And until next time, keep on building."

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Key Takeaways:

• AI and Machine Learning: Significant advancements with the release of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and enhanced capabilities in Amazon Bedrock and QBusiness, emphasizing improved performance and ease of integration.

• Compute and Analytics: Introduction of powerful tooling and integrations that enhance performance, monitoring, and ease of use across services like Lambda, Redshift, and QuickSight.

• Customer-Centric Features: Updates such as partial bill payments and enhanced AWS IAM Identity Center streamline user experience and operational efficiency.

• Comprehensive Service Enhancements: Broad range of updates across databases, developer tools, and security ensures that AWS continues to support diverse and evolving customer needs.

For developers, IT professionals, and businesses leveraging AWS, this episode underscores AWS’s commitment to innovation, scalability, and user-centric solutions, ensuring that AWS remains a pivotal platform for building and managing modern cloud applications.

Transcript

[A]

This is episode 693 of the AWS podcast released on November 4th, 2024.

[B]

Welcome everyone to the AWS Podcast. This is your favorite impersonator of Simon Gillian Ford and I am with the Amazing Shruti today. Shruti, how are things going?

[A]

They've been well. You know Reinvent is right around the corner. It is almost a little over a month away and everyone at AWS is preparing for a fabulous event. We have lots of exciting content across different sessions planned and lots of exciting demos and things like that on the expo floor. So yeah, I mean all of us here, especially in the product marketing team, are very busy with that.

[B]

Oh yeah, everyone's super excited for it. Hopefully the people who are listening are also really excited for it because there's to be a lot of fun stuff. Always there is.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

Well, it's just going to be us too today. No Simon, but we've got a lot of good updates so we are going to get right to it. Let's start off with the AWS Marketplace. AWS Marketplace announces the general availability of Private Marketplace Notifications. This is a new feature that streamlines the product request approval process for Private Marketplace customers. Abuse Marketplace now allows sellers to manage their single AMI product availability in the AWS Gov cloud regions through a self service experience. AWS Marketplace announces support for sellers and channel partners to create contract pricing private offers in four new currencies and choose non US bank accounts for disbursement.

[A]

Next up we have analytics and we have quite a few updates in this Amazon Redshift launches Query Profiler for enhanced query monitoring and diagnostics. AWS announces general availability of Amazon DynamoDB0ETL integration with Amazon Redshift. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL0ETL integration with Amazon Redshift is now generally available. Amazon Redshift now supports refresh interval in a zero ETL integration. Amazon QuickSight now supports more events using Amazon EventBridge as an update to previously launched integration with Amazon EventBridge. By subscribing to QuickSight events in EventBridge you can automate your workflows such as continuous deployment and backups. These events are delivered to EventBridge in near real time. Developers can write simple rules to indicate which events are of interest to them and what actions to take when an event matches a rule. QuickSight reporting now supports triggering scheduled reports via API. Amazon QuickSight now supports Programmatic export and import of shared folders as an update to previously launched Star Asset Bundle Export Job and Star Asset Bundle Import Job APIs. This enables you to backup and Restore continuously replicate and migrate quicksight folders along with its member assets and subfolders. Amazon Quicksight now supports subfolders in restricted folders for asset organization and permissions management. Quicksight assets created in restricted folders and subfolders cannot be removed from the folder tree, creating a data sharing boundary. Enterprise administrators can deploy restricted folders and subfolders to govern sharing of data in business intelligence assets across their organizations. With this launch, users with the Folder Contributor permission can create content in restricted folders and subfolders, but cannot manage permissions on folders and assets contained in the restricted folders. AWS Data Exchange now provides APIs for data grants, enabling programmatic data sharing. Amazon Datazone launches new project designations, allowing customers to configure project members to do specific tasks while collaborating with other members in a project. Amazon datazone introduces new designations in projects for members to perform specific tasks. Amazon Managed workflow for Apache Airflow now supports a simplified mechanism for interacting with the Apache Airflow REST API using AWS credentials. Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink now supports per second billing.

[B]

Now we've got artificial intelligence anthropic's upgraded Claude 3.5 sonnet model is now available in Amazon Bedrock. According to Anthropic, the model delivers across the board improvements over its predecessor with significant gains in coding, an area where it already has led the field. The upgraded Claude 3.5 sonnet model shows wide ranging improvements on industry benchmarks. On coding. The model improved performance on SWE bench verified from 33% to 49%, scoring higher than all publicly available models. According to Anthropic. It also improved performance on Tau bench. Tau in a Gentic tool used task from 62.6% to 69.2% in the retail domain and from 36% to 46% in the airline domain. The new Claude 3.5 Sonet offers these advancements in the same price of its predecessors. Additionally, Claude 3.5 Sonet now offers computer use capabilities in Amazon Bedrock in a public beta, allowing Claude to perceive and interact with computer interactions. Developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons and typing text. Given this technology is early, developers are encouraged to explore lower risk tasks. The upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet model is now available in the US West 2 region, Oregon. Let me repeat that again if you're trying to look for it right now in Virginia, in Frankfurt. Right now it's only in US west too. But keep listening to the show. Keep your Eyes on the AWS what's New page because things are always moving really quickly. Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import is now generally available. You can now import custom weights for a variety of supported model architectures such as Metal Llama 3.2 and Mixtral 8x7b without the overhead of model lifecycle and infrastructure management. Now customers can access their imported custom models in an on demand serverless manner without having to manage instances. They can accelerate generative AI application development by integrating their imported custom models seamlessly with native Bedrock tools and features like agents, knowledge bases, guardrails, prompt flows, and more. Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation now supports evaluating custom model import models. Amazon Bedrock offers a choice of automatic evaluation and human evaluation. 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 your brand voice, you can set up a human evaluation workflow with a few clicks. Human evaluation workflows can leverage your own employees or or an AWS managed team as reviewers. Model Evaluation provides built in curated data sets, or you can bring your own data sets. AWS announces the general availability of Conversational Builder for Amazon Bedrock Agents, which provides a chat interface for you to use to build your Bedrock agents. With the Conversational Builder, you can chat with an assistant that will guide you through building an agent and create your agent based off of natural language instructions. The Conversational Builder is available to be used through the Amazon Bedrock Agents management console. Amazon QBusiness now offers an analytics dashboard and integration with Amazon CloudWatch logs, providing comprehensive insights into the usage of your Amazon QBusiness application environments and Amazon Q apps. The new Analytics Dashboard in the Amazon QBusiness console offers insights through interactive charts and visualizations, enabling administrators to monitor key metrics such as usage trends, user conversations, query trends, and user feedback. Additionally, user chat conversation and feedback information is now available in Amazon CloudWatch logs S3Amazon data firehose, which all allows you to ingest and analyze this data to build custom dashboards if you need them. Amazon QBusiness launches the ability to use connector metadata to improve search relevance. So one example of when you'd want to use this is let's say you need to answer a user query such as list, the document authored by John Doe in September 2024. When the metadata search is enabled. For this use case, QBusiness will use two connector metadata fields, the authors and the created at and that's going to help be able to provide more relevant responses so definitely check that out if you're already using QBusiness. Thousands of enterprises use Amazon QBusiness today to empower their employees to be more creative, data driven and productive. Now application developers can extend the power of Amazon QBusiness to their end users by embedding an AI powered assistant into their user interface. This new feature for Amazon QBusiness offers a no code setup process where application developers quickly index their application data to technical documentation and public website content. Once data is indexed authenticated, end users who are logged into an application can use the assistant to summarize projects, ask UI navigation questions, or get answers to technical support questions. Customer data is isolated across the data ingestion, indexing and querying workflows to prevent data exposure to unauthorized parties. This enables software vendors to create an assistant that recognizes the end user, their application instance and designated permissions. And of course, this new feature inherits the same security, privacy and guardrails as Amazon Q Business. We're excited to announce support for 30 additional languages for streaming audio transcriptions. Bring the total number of supported languages to 54 in Amazon transcribe. AWS Cloud Shell now supports Amazon q in the CLI. Amazon SageMaker Studio notebooks now support G6E instance types. The G6E instances are powered by up to eight Nvidia L40s tensor core GPUs with 48 gigabytes of memory per GPU and third generation AMD Epyc processors. G6E instances deliver up to 2.5x better performance compared to EC2 G5 instances. Customers can use G6E instances to interactively test model deployment and for interactive model training. Use cases such as generative AI fine tuning. You can use G6E instances to deploy large language models with up to 13 billion parameters and diffusion models for generating images, video and audio. The G6E instances are available in SageMaker Studio notebooks in the US east ones. That's the Northern Virginia and the Ohio regions and the US West Oregon regions. We're excited to announce Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain. This is an interactive generative AI assistant that helps you operate your supply chain more efficiently by analyzing the data in your AWS supply chain data lake. This provides really important and operational and financial insights and helps you answer urgent supply chain questions. It's going to help you reduce the time users spend searching for relevant information. It's going to simplify the process of finding answers and minimizes the time spent to learn, deploy and configure or troubleshoot AWS Supply chain.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Shruti that was a long list of really big launches that we had in generative AI thing from from the hardware level, the EC2 instance, the G6E. That's super exciting for a lot of customers that have been using the G5 and then even those who want to use generative AI but want to be able to do so in like the fastest way. They like the ui, the drag and drop types of different features, making it super easy to get something up and running. What do you think?

[A]

Yeah, no, this is a really long list of extremely useful updates. I mean it's so awesome that the custom model import is now generally available. We know a lot of customers were asking for that. I mean, I couldn't agree with you more about the G6E instances since I was part of the launch of the EC2 launch that is. And it's nice to see now that the SageMaker Studio supports these. It's all about choice, especially when it comes to our instances and making that available to our SageMaker customers is just great. Awesome. Okay, so next up we have actually quite a bit of updates under compute, so let's get started. AWS Lambda now supports using a custom serializer with Java runtimes. AWS Lambda Console now features a new code editor based on Code OSS or VS code open source. This integration brings new interface and productivity features directly into the Lambda Console, giving customers a more intuitive coding environment when building serverless applications. AWS Lambda Console now supports real time log analytics via Amazon cloudwatch Logs Library Tail. AWS Lambda Console now surfaces key function Insights via built in Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights Dashboard EC2 Image Builder now supports Apple macOS operating system, allowing customers to use macOS as base images for their image pipelines. This capability enables customers to create and manage custom macOS images with the same ease as they do today for supported Windows and linux distributions. Amazon EC2 dedicated hosts now supports Live migration based host maintenance. Assign billing of Your shared Amazon EC2 on demand capacity reservations is now available, which means that you can assign the billing of unused Amazon EC2 ODCR or on demand Capacity reservations to any one of your organization accounts with which the reservation is shared. Amazon EKS now supports Amazon Application Recovery Controller. AWS announces the general availability of Amazon EKS optimized Accelerated AMIS or Amazon Machine Images for Amazon Linux 2023. EKS customers can now enjoy the improved security features, optimized boot times and newer kernel versions of AL 2023 for their workloads using Nvidia GPU AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium powered instances. Amazon EKS introduces Dual Stack support for the EKS Management API Endpoint and the Kubernetes API Server endpoint in IPv6 EKS clusters, enabling you to connect using IPv6, IPv4 or dual stack clients. AWS announces enhanced monitoring for applications hosted in Amazon ECs with Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals, an application performance monitoring feature in CloudWatch that makes it easy to automatically instrument and track application performance against their most important business or service level objectives with no manual effort or custom code required. Application Signals support for ECS already offered service operators a pre built standardized dashboard showcasing essential application performance metrics such as volume or availability, latency, faults and error for each application. You can now launch Amazon EC2 spot instances using Ubuntu Pro based Amazon Machine Images. You can now easily deploy Ubuntu Pro Spot instances and get five additional years of security updates from Canonical AWS. Beanstalk adds support for Python 3.12 on Amazon Linux 2023 Beanstalk environments. Nvidia GPU Time slicing now available for Bottle Rocket to enhance AI ML workload efficiency. This new feature addresses the challenge of maximizing GPU utilization in multitenant and resource constrained environments by enabling more efficient GPU resource sharing for AI workloads running on containers. AWS announces EFA update for scalability with AI ML applications. EFA provides high bandwidth low latency networking crucial for scaling AI ML workloads. The new interface EFA only allows you to create a standalone EFA device on secondary interfaces. This allows you to scale your compute clusters to run AIML applications without straining your private IPv4 address space or encountering IP routing challenges associated with Linux.

[B]

We've got two updates on the topic of cost management. Avis Billing Conductor Customers can view pro forma data in reservation and savings plans, coverage and utilization reports. AWS Billing Conductor customers can also monitor their pro forma spend and be alerted when they have exceeded their desired pro forma spending limit. Now onto customer engagement, Amazon SES has released a feature which gives customers the visibility into the TLS version used in the messages sent through Sesame. Amazon SES enhances configurability with maximum delivery time for emails. Amazon Connect now offers screen sharing. Amazon Connect launches iOS and Android Chat SDKs to support in app chat experiences.

[A]

Moving on to databases, Amazon Aurora Global Database now supports applying tags to your global clusters, enabling you to associate metadata information with your overall global database cluster. For instance, you can apply a tag to organize resource costs for your entire global database cluster, making it easier to categorize and track your AWS costs. Amazon Relational Database Service for Oracle now supports version 24.1 of Oracle Application Express for 19C and 21C versions of Oracle Database. Using Apex or the Oracle Application Express, developers can build applications entirely within their browser. To learn more about the latest features of Apex 24.1, you can refer to Oracle's documentation Amazon Timestream for Live Analytics Introduces query insights Amazon Aurora launches Global Database Writer Endpoint this highly available and fully managed endpoint simplifies routing for your applications and eliminates the need to make application code changes to establish connectivity after initiating a cross region global database switchover or failover operation. Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server now supports Windows Authentication, allowing you to use your existing active directory to manage access to your RDS custom databases. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL compatible edition now lets you forward write requests from Aurora Read replicas to the Writer instance, simplifying scaling read workloads that required read after write consistency. With this launch, local write forwarding is now available for both Aurora MySQL and Aurora PostgreSQL. Amazon Relational Database Service or Amazon RDS multi AZ deployments with two readable standbys now supports using AWS Identity and access management for database authentication. Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB 11.4 with new password validation options and Amazon Dynamodb announces User experience enhancements to organize your tables. These enhancements allow customers to easily find frequently used tables. Customers can favorite their tables in the Consoles Tables page for quicker tables access.

[B]

Now onto developer tools AWS announces the general availability of Linux support for finch. This is an open source command line tool that allows developers to build, run, and publish Linux containers. FINCH simplifies the container development by bundling a minimal native client with a curated selection of open source components, allowing developers to build and manage containers without the hassle of managing intricate details. On October 15, Amazon announced quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Koreno long term supported and feature Release versions of OpenJDK AWS CodePipeline v2 type pipelines introduces the ability to automatically retry a stage if there is a failure in the stage. AWS CodeBuild now supports managed Network access control lists for reserved capacity fleets. Customers can define rules to control network traffic in and out of their build environment. Next topic is end user computing. Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports custom Shared network storage as a new storage option for your Windows AppStream 2.0 users. With the launch of this feature, users can easily access and collaborate on shared files without transferring files manually.

[A]

Next up we have management and governance. We are now enabling AWS customers who pay with their cards or credit cards to make partial payments towards their monthly bill. Until now, customers could only pay their entire bill at once prior to the due date. With partial payments, customers can split the amount due into smaller payments which they can charge on different cards to accommodate their business needs. This functionality, which would have previously required calling AWS customer service, is now available by logging into your Console account. I'm sure that there's going to be a lot of people who will appreciate this, so that's really great to hear. Amazon CloudWatch is excited to announce improvements to its lock pattern analysis and anomaly detection features. First, CloudWatch logs insights pattern and diff commands now use name tokens to make the results easier to read. Second, the default quota for log anomaly detectors has been increased from 10 to 500 per account. AWS Launch wizard for SAP now offers deeper integration with AWS Systems Manager for SAP, simplifying management and operations of your SAP applications on aws. Now you can register your SAP application to AWS Systems Manager and schedule managed backups with AWS Backup for SAP HANA during the deployment process using Launch Wizard. AWS IAM Identity center now provides customers with streamlined first time access to the AWS Console Mobile application, reducing the required user action by more than half. AWS announces a seamless link experience for the AWS Console Mobile application. Links to AWS services and resources can now be opened in the AWS Console mobile app when customers have the app installed on their mobile device. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now supports the ability to configure the minimum duration for which an alert remains active after the condition that triggered the alert is no longer valid. And AWS announces the launch of the new Resiliency Widget on my applications, providing enhanced visibility and proactive control over the resilience posture of each application. In my applications we've got one update.

[B]

In Media Services AWS Deadline Cloud announces new event types delivered through Amazon EventBridge and this allows you to trigger workflows as your job progresses and is complete. Now we have migration and modernization. AWS Transfer Family now provides real time status of file transfer initiated using SFTP connectors. With this capability you can easily monitor the current state of your file transfer operations and orchestrate post transfer actions to automate your managed file transfer workflows in aws. We're excited to announce that the AWS Mainframe Modernization Service now offers new integrations that provide greater flexibility of managed runtime environments running modernized mainframe applications. This new capability includes new integrations with LDAP LRs, print and output management, AWS health events, and Support for Amazon EC2 M7I instances. AWS Database Migration Service Serverless now supports MongoDB and Amazon DocDB as data sources. Using AWS Database Migration Service Serverless, you can now migrate data from MongoDB and DocDB to a variety of data targets.

[A]

Next up we have one quick update under networking Amazon Application Recovery Controller Zonal Shift and Zonal autoshift have expanded their capabilities and now support Amazon EKS and Network Load Balancers with cross zone configuration enabled. ARC Zonal Shift helps customers recover an unhealthy application in an AZ and reduce the duration and severity of impact to the application due to the events such as power outages and hardware or software failures. ARC Zonal Auto Shift safely and automatically shifts an application's traffic away from an AZ when AWS identifies a potential failure affecting that az. So all NLB customers or the network load balancers customers can now shift traffic away from an AZ in the event of a failure. Zonal Shift works with NLB by blocking all traffic to targets in an impaired AZ and removing the zonal IP from DNS responses while it is active. Similarly, Amazon EKS customers can now shift away traffic from an AZ in the event of a failure. Zonal Shift works with Amazon EKS by shifting in cluster traffic to healthy AZs and ensuring that the EKS pods aren't scheduled in the impaired az.

[B]

We've got Security Identity and compliance Next. AWS Firewall Manager now supports retrofitting of existing AWS WAF Web Access control lists. AWS IAM Identity center simplifies calls to AWS services with single identity context. Now we've got storage. Amazon S3 now supports AWS region and bucket name filters for the list Buckets API. And the last update of the day, Amazon EFS now supports up to 60 gigabytes which is a 2x increase of read throughput. Shruti that was a lot. Definitely the AI hands down I think is the winner of today's update show in terms of updates.

[A]

Anything that stands out, I mean I think the custom model import being generally available. That's, that's really cool. I also thought like one of the management ones where you can, you know, charge partial payments on different cards was like you read something like that and you think like why haven't we done this sooner? But obviously you know we always are working back from customer needs. So it's nice to know that we realized that we were probably getting way too many calls about this at the customer service and so decided to make that into a capability they can access themselves. So. Yeah, that's cool. What about you? What stood out for you?

[B]

Yeah, I agree. I love the call outs that you made. Also, embedding Q Business into your application interface, that really is going to make it just super quick for certain use cases, like if you want to have a chatbot for your technical documentation or just like a Q and A on like your public website content. Now it's going to be even easier just to be able to spin up a chatbot for your website. So really cool one.

[A]

Yeah, no, that actually you are right because now you can basically embed a generative AI assistant into whatever application you're building. It's one thing to sort of embed models or embed some sort of AI functionality, but to embed a completely sort of, you know, well put together assistant directly into your application, that's, that's cool.

[B]

Shruti, where can people go if they want to get in touch with you?

[A]

Yeah, either LinkedIn or X Ashratiko Parker.

[B]

And same with me on LinkedIn Jillian Ford or on X Ms. Jill Ford. And a super easy way to get in touch with everyone here on the AWS podcast is go to aws.Amazon.com podcasts there is a big button that says submit questions and feedback. We actually will read your feedback if you send it to us, so please do. And until next time, keep on building.