
In the final episode of the year Simon takes you through over 160 new updates! It is "pre:Invent"!
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Simon
This is episode 702 of the AWS podcast, released on December 15, 2024. Hello everyone and welcome to the AWS Podcast. Simon here with you. Great to have you back. Flying solo today for our last episode of the year, and this one is a monumental one because we're catching up with all the things that happened before Re invent that we didn't get to update you about. It's often called pre invent because lots of stuff gets put in place just before the actual event and all the cool announcements from. Hope you enjoyed that coverage, but we have lots of updates, you may say. How many updates? Simon? Well over 160. So not going to dive deep on all of those, let me tell you, but I'm going to move you through so you can get a sense of what's happened. Of course all the links are in the show notes so you can dive deep where you want to. So without any further ado, let's talk about analytics and Amazon Redshift Multidata warehouse rights through data sharing is now generally available, so you can now start writing to Amazon Redshift databases from multiple Amazon Redshift data warehouses in just a few clicks, and the written data is available to all Redshift warehouses as soon as it's committed. It's pretty cool. Amazon Redshift has also announced support for Confluent Cloud and Apache Kafka, and Amazon Redshift Query Editor v2 has increased the maximum result set and export size to 100 meg, so you can upgrade that significantly from the previous limit that was 5 mega. Amazon Redshift is also now enhancing security by changing default behavior. Three changes will take place after January 10th. Public accessibility will be disabled by default for all new provisioned clusters and clusters restored from snapshots. By default. Connections to clusters will only be permitted from client applications within the same vpc. Database encryption will be enabled by default, and the third one is that it will enforce SSL connections by default as well. Amazon Quicksight now supports prompted reports and regis scheduling for Pixel Perfect reports. Previously, only dashboard owners could create schedules, and only on the default author published view of the dashboard. Now, if an author has added controls to the Pixel Perfect report, schedules can be created or updated to respect selections on the filter control. Amazon Quicksight has also launched highcharts Visual in Preview. This is using the highcharts core library. This new feature extends your visualization capabilities beyond the standard chart offerings, which means you can create bespoke charts such as Sunburst charts, network graphs, 3D charts, and many more because a picture does tell a thousand words. Amazon Quicksight also now supports import visual capability in Preview. This feature streamlines dashboard and report creation by allowing you to transfer associated dependencies like datasets, parameters, calculated fields, filter definitions and visual properties including conditional formatting rules. And Quicksight has also launched an image component that lets you incorporate static images into your dashboards as well as a new layer map. With layer maps you can visualize data using custom geographic boundaries like congressional districts or sales territories or user defined regions. There is also now support for font customization for visuals so you can customize fonts for tables and pivot tables and specific properties like titles et cetera. And it also now supports fine grained permissions for capabilities with APIs for IAM identity center users and they're not done. There is also now self serve brand customization so this means you can create your Quicksight user interface with your organization's brand by modifying visual elements like brand colors and logos. We're happy to announce Amazon EMR 7.4 release. This updates a whole lot of capabilities and I remind you to keep your stuff up to date. There is new advanced scaling in Amazon EMR Managed Scaling so this gives you increased control. With advanced scaling customers will be able to configure the desired resource utilization or performance levels for their cluster, and Amazon EMR Managed Scaling will leverage their customers intent to intelligently scale the cluster and optimize cluster compute resources. Some updates for AWS Glue Data Catalog it now supports Apache Iceberg Automatic Table Optimization through Amazon vpc. It also now supports scheduled generation of column level statistics and AWS Glue has expanded connectivity to 19 native connectors for enterprise applications. So these are things like Facebook ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics 4 Google Sheets, HubSpot, Instagram Ads, ServiceNow, Slack, Snapchat Ads, Stripe, Zendesk a bunch more and Amazon datazone now enhances data access governance with enforced metadata rules. This new feature allows domain owners to define and enforce mandatory metadata requirements, ensuring data consumers provide essential information when requesting access to data assets in Amazon Data Zone. Let's talk application integration. Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink now delivers to Amazon Sqs queues and it also now supports Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus as a destination and it also now releases a new Amazon Kinesis Data Streams connector and it also now supports Amazon DynamoDB streams as a source. So lots of integration improvements there. Amazon OpenSearch ingestion now supports writing security data to Amazon Security Lake so you can roll that straight in using the Open Cybersecurity Schema framework. Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion also now supports AWS Lambda for custom data transformation, so this gives you more flexibility in terms of how you prepare your data. And it also now supports ingesting data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. And speaking of data streams, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams on demand mode now supports streams running up to 10 gig per, so that's 10 gig per write and for readers 20 gig per second. This is five times increased from the previous limits of two and four. And Kinesis data Streams has also launched cloud formation support for resource policies as well. Amazon EventBridge has announced up to 94% improvement in end to end latency for event buses. That's fantastic. So this really means that you can absolutely detect and respond to critical events really, really fast. For latency sensitive mission critical applications, even small delays can have a big impact. So to address this, Amazon EventBridge event bus has been able to significantly reduce its average latency from 2,235.23 milliseconds measured in January 23rd to just 129.33 milliseconds measured in August 2024 at p.99. So this means good things have happened. AWS Step Functions has simplified the developer experience with variables and jsonata transformations. So with support for jsonata, an open source query and transformation language, customers can now perform advanced data manipulation and transformation like date and time formatting. My goodness, how I love doing that. And mathematical operations. We've also simplified input and output processing by reducing the number of JSON transformation fields required to call services and pass data onto the next stage. We're also happy to announce infrastructure as code template generation for AWS Step Functions. So now you can export and customize your templates from existing workflows, easily provision, limit other accounts, or jumpstart new ones. AWS AppSync now supports cross account sharing of GraphQL APIs and it has also launched AI Gateway capabilities with new Amazon Bedrock integration into AppSync GraphQL. This integration supports calling the Converse and Invoke model APIs. Developers can interact with anthropic models like Claude 3.5 hey Ku and Claude 3.5 Sonnet for data analysis and structured object generation. You can also use Amazon Titan models to generate embeddings, create summaries, or extract action items from meeting minutes. Amazon OpenSearch now supports custom plugins so now you can run custom plugins on your Amazon OpenSearch service that let you extend the search and analysis functions. And you can use the OpenSearch Service Console or APIs to upload and associate your search and analysis plugins with your domains and the service also now supports OpenSearch version 2.17, so lots of improvements in the areas of vector search, query performance and machine learning. It also now scales to 1,000 data nodes in a single cluster, so you can enable up to 25 petabytes of data, 10 petabytes in hot nodes and a further 15 petabytes in warm nodes and you don't have to have multiple clusters to do that. It also now supports the 4th generation Intel C7M7 and R7I instances and Amazon OpenSearch serverless now includes SQL API support as well. Now this allows you to leverage your existing SQL skills as I'm always banging on about Learn SQL and it means you can access your data really easily. This service also now supports Point in Time search or pit so you can access a stable view of what you're searching on. It also now supports binary vector and FP16 cost savings features to improve your speed and expenditure and disk Optimized Vector engine is also now available on the Amazon OpenSearch service, so this allows you to run modern search applications at a third of the cost on your OpenSearch 2.17 domains and finally OpenSearch's Vector Engine add support for Ultrawarm on the Amazon Open Search service. Let's talk artificial intelligence Amazon QBusiness is now available as a browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge. And QBusiness now supports integrations to Asana in Preview as well as Google Calendar also in Preview. And Amazon Q Business now supports answers from tables embedded in documents, so a lot of our data is in tables gets it out of there. It also now has the ability to reuse recently uploaded files in a conversation so you can refer back to them without having to reshare them. And we're happy to introduce Amazon Q apps with private sharing. This new feature enables app creators to restrict app access to select Amazon Q Business users, which means you have more granular control. And Amazon qapps has introduced Data collection in Preview. This enhancement enables users to collate data across multiple users within their organizations, which helps you with the collaborative quality of the apps that you build. Amazon Q Java Transformation has launched step by step and library upgrades, so this new feature allows developers to review and accept code changes in multiple diffs and to test proposed changes in each diff step by step. You can also upgrade libraries for applications already on Java 17. Amazon SageMaker has introduced scale down to zero for AI inference to help you save cost, Amazon SageMaker has also launched Multi Adapter Model Interface so this is a new capability that unlocks some really exciting possibilities for customers using pre trained language models. This feature allows you to deploy hundreds of fine tuned Lora or low rank adapter models behind a single endpoint, dynamically loading the appropriate adapters in milliseconds based on the request. This enables you to efficiently host many specialized Lora adapters built on common base model, delivering high throughput and cost savings compared to deploying lots of separate ones. Amazon SageMaker Notebook instances now support Trainium 1 and Inferentia 2 based instances and SageMaker also now provides a new setup experience for Amazon Data zone projects. The SageMaker model registry now supports Model Lineage to improve model governance as you go along and it also now supports defining machine learning model lifecycle stages as well. And finally on this topic, Amazon Bedrock Agents now support custom orchestration so this capability enables developers to define custom orchestration logic for their agents using AWS Lambda, providing with the flexibility to tailor agents behavior to fit specific use cases. Some updates for the AWS Marketplace AWS Marketplace has introduced AI powered product summaries and comparisons so it's even easier for you to understand what you get to choose from. And the Marketplace has also announced improved offer and agreement management capabilities for sellers and an enhanced account linking experience across AWS Marketplace and AWS Partner Central. There's also now a financing program available for select US customers as well. Let's talk Business Applications Simple Email Service Mail Manager has added delivery of email to Amazon Q Business applications. Amazon Connect now allows agents to self assign tasks. Amazon Connect Contact Lens has launched calibrations for agent performance evaluations. It also now has its generative AI powered post contact summarization available in five new regions and Amazon Connect email is now generally available so this provides you with built in capabilities that makes it easy for you to prioritize, assign and automate the resolution of customer service emails and Connect now provides a granular disconnect reasons for chats so you can understand why chat has ended. For example, if the agent disconnects due to a network issue, you can route the chat to the next best agent or if the customer disconnects due to idleness, you can proactively send an SMS to re engage them. Amazon Connect now supports nine additional languages for forecasting, capacity planning and scheduling and it also provides new personalization and proactive engagement capabilities. AWS End User Messaging has announced cost allocation tags for SMS and it also introduces phone number block and allow rules as well as well as message feedback tracking and has integration with Amazon EventBridge. Let's talk compute AWS Lambda now supports customer managed key encryption for zip function code artifacts, so this makes it easy for you to encrypt your data before you send it anyway. AWS Lambda also now announces provision mode for Kafka event source mappings and it supports application performance monitoring via CloudWatch application signals and we've also added support for some new runtimes node JS22, Python 3.13 and AWS. Lambda also now supports Snapstart for Python and. NET functions so this is really great for handling unpredictable bursts of traffic and high start latencies as well. And Lambda also Now supports Amazon S3 as a failed event destination for asynchronous and stream event sources, so when things go wrong you can put it there Amazon EC2 capacity blocks now supports instant start times and extensions so you can start straight away or you can also reserve your capacity blocks for longer periods of time of up to six months. Amazon EC2 now provides lineage information for your AMIs, so you can now easily trace any copied or derived AMI back to the original AMI source. We're now also introducing EC2 provisioning control to launch instances on on demand capacity, so this means you can easily target your instant launches onto your on demand capacity reservations. EC2 has added new CPU performance attributes for instance type selection, so this allows you to manage your targeting even better based upon the number of VCPU cores and other things. Now in addition to the quantitative resource requirements, customers can also identify an instance family that will be used as a baseline to automatically select instance types that offer similar or better CPU for performance, so just makes it Easy to choose AWS. Elastic Beanstalk has added support for Ruby 3.3 and Node JS22 and AWS Batch now supports multiple EC2 launch templates per compute environment. And finally on this topic, AWS has launched user based subscription of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, so now you can purchase a user based subscription directly from aws. So this gives you licensing flexibility and business continuity for customers running GUI based applications on EC2 window instances. Let's talk about cost management, AWS billing and cost management. Data Exports for Focus 1.0 is now generally available. It's been in public preview Since June of 2024 now Focus 1.0 is an open source cloud cost and usage specification that provides standardization to simplify cloud financial management across multiple sources. Data Exports for Focus 1.0 enables customers to export their AWS cost and usage data with the Focus 1.0 schema to Amazon S3 and this really allows you to get even better control over your cost and growth. AWS Billing and Cost Management has announced Savings Plan Purchase Analyzer so you can make informed purchase decisions in just a few clicks. The enhanced Pricing Calculator now supports discounts and purchase commitments in preview and AWS has delivered enhanced root cause insights to help explain cost anomalies. By creating anomaly monitors, you can analyze spend across services, member accounts, a whole bunch of tab tags and categories. Once a cost anomaly is detected, it now analyzes and ranks all the possible combinations of services, accounts, regions and usage types by cost impact, surfacing up to the top 10 root causes with their corresponding cost contributions. Interesting. Now let's Talk databases Amazon DynamoDB has reduced prices we love a price reduction for on demand throughput and global tables. In fact, we made it even more cost effective by reducing prices for on demand throughput by 50% and global tables by up to 67%. Again, you don't have to do anything, you just save money. Speaking of saving money, Amazon Key Spaces for Apache Cassandra has reduced prices by up to 75%. That's pretty cool. Valkey Glide 1.2 has added new features from Valkey 8.0 including availability zone awareness, Neptune analytics has added support for customer managed private link endpoints. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports PGVector 0.8.0 and Amazon Aurora now supports Graviton 4 based R8G database instances. Always check your instances are good. These ones provide up to a 40% performance improvement and up to 29% price performance improvement compared to Graviton 3. So again stop change, start profit. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB now support M8G and RHG instance types. Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports minor versions in November 2024. Upgrade your stuff and if you're running Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL more minor versions there 7.2, 17.2 I should say 16.6, 15, 10, 14, 15, 13, 18 and 1222. We also now support the latest MySQL 8.4 long term support release and Amazon RDS Blue Green deployments now supports minor version upgrades for RDS for postgres SQL. It also now supports the managed initialization of green storage volumes that accelerates the loading of storage blocks from Amazon S3 so it means you fully performant before you Switch over. And RDS for MySQL also now supports a minor version 8.0.4.0 and Amazon Aurora MySQL 3.08, which is compatible with MySQL 8.0.39 is generally available as well and a couple of new instance supports Amazon Aurora MySQL now supports R7.I instances and Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports M7.I and R7.I instance types. Let's talk developer tools. AWS CodePipeline now supports publishing ECR image and AWS Inspector scan as new actions, so you can now activate your information depending on what's going on with your docker images. AWS CodeBuild now supports Windows Docker builds in reserved capacity fleets. The AWS Fault Injection service now generates experiment reports. This is cool. It will now generate a report that you can download from the console that's automatically delivered to your S3 bucket of your choice and this shows you the impact of the experimentation for your key application and resource metrics Amazon Q Developer has launched Java Upgrade Transformation CLI in public preview. Now this allows you to do things like transform your java applications from Java 8, Java 11 to Java 17. It allows you to do a lot of customization and you can also now build on a local environment and it will perform the verification build on your local environment, which means you can run your unit tests and integration tests during your validations. Amazon Q Developer for the Eclipse IDE is now in public preview and Amazon Q Developer can now provide more personalized chat answers based on console context. So for example, if you're working within the Amazon ECS console, you can ask how can I create a cluster? And it will know you're meaning an ECS cluster. And Amazon Q Developer now transforms embedded SQL from Oracle to postgres SQL. So this is a savings because instead of having to do it manually, it'll do it for you, which is nice. Let's talk end user computing. We're happy to announce Idle disconnect timeout for Amazon Workspaces, so this allows administrators to configure how long a user can be inactive while connected to a personal workspace before they disconnect. And Amazon Workspaces has introduced support for Rocky Linux. So if you're a Rocky Linux desktop person, that's good news. And the Amazon Workspaces Secure browser now supports inline data redaction, so this allows administrators to create policies to help predict and redact certain types of data before it's displayed on the screen. Quick update for front end web and mobile AWS Amplify has introduced passwordless authentication with Amazon Cognito an update for game tech, Amazon gamelift has added containers for faster developer iteration and simplified management. And in terms of the Internet of things AWS IoT SiteWise has announced a new generative AI powered industrial assistant that you can easily interact with your operational data by clicking on alarms on the monitor dashboard and asking things like what assets have active alarms or how do I fix the wind turbine's low RPM issue. Questions I'm always asking myself. Let's talk about management and governance. AWS Control Tower has added prescriptive backup plans to landing zone capabilities. Control Tower has also improved hooks management for proactive controls and it extends proactive control support in additional regions. Control Tower has also launched configurable managed controls implemented using resource control policies so you can spread your policies far and wide in a much easier way, and also has now launched the ability to resolve drift for optional controls so if things have changed you can fix them up. AWS also announces Amazon Q Account Resources chat in the AWS Console mobile app, so with this capability you can use your device's voice input and output capabilities along with natural language prompts to list resources in your account, get specific resource details and ask about related resources while on the go. And the AWS Chatbot has added support for chatting about AWS resources with Amazon Q Developer in Microsoft Teams and Slack and AWS Repost Private is now integrated with Amazon Bedrock to offer contextual knowledge to organizations as well. Let's talk Media Services we are now announcing Media Quality Aware Resiliency for live streaming. This is built for customers that need a always on Eyes on Glass to deliver live events and 24. 7 programming channels. MQIR automatically switches between regions in seconds to recover from video quality degradation in one of those regions, so it's designed to help deliver a high quality of experience to viewers and AWS deadline. Cloud now supports GPU accelerated EC2 instance types, so this is a fully managed service that simplifies render management for teams creating computer generated 2D and 3D graphics. So now you can use them on a whole bunch of other type of instances. Let's talk migration and modernization. AWS Application Discovery Service now supports AWS PrivateLink the AWS application Discovery Service also now supports data from commercially available discovery tools. So you can now take an export from Dell Technologies RV Tools and load it straight in without any file manipulation. And the service has also added integration with AWS Migration service so now you can take data collected about your on premises workloads to directly feed into your migration execution plan. So this provides a one click export of the on premises configuration tags, application grouping, EC2 recommendations, et cetera and sends it across to the migration service. Let's move on to networking and content delivery. AWS PrivateLink now supports cross region connectivity until now Interface VPC endpoints only supported connectivity to VPC Endpoint services in the same region. This launch allows customers to connect to VPC Endpoint services hosted in other AWS regions in the same AWS partition over interface endpoints, so this is very handy. Amazon VPC IPAM now supports enabling IPAM for organizational units within AWS organizations, so this is how you track your IP addresses. AWS Cloud WAN has simplified on premises connectivity via AWS Direct Connect and Amazon Cloudfront announces origin modifications using CloudFront functions. This enables you to conditionally change or update origin servers on each request. You can now write custom logic in cloudfront functions to overwrite origin properties or use another origin in your Cloudfront distribution or even forward request to any public HTTP endpoint and Amazon Cloudfront now supports anycast static IPs so this allows you to have a dedicated list of IP addresses for connecting to all cloudfront Edge locations worldwide. Now a lot of you wanted that one and Cloudfront now supports additional log formats and destinations for access logs, so you can now select from expanded list of formats including JSON and Apache Parquet for logs delivered to S3. That's pretty cool. You can also directly enable automatic partitioning of logs delivered to S3, select specific log fields and set the order in which they included in the logs. And cloudfront has got a few other things in store. It now supports GRPC delivery, so if you've not come across this this is a modern open source remote procedure call framework that allows bidirectional communication between a client and a server over HTTP 2 connections. We're also happy to announce VPC Origins. This is a new feature that allows customers to use Cloudfront to deliver content from applications hosted in VPC private subnets. This is cool. With VPC Origins customers can now have their ALB, NLB and EC2 instances in a private subnet which is accessible only through their cloudfront Conscious distributions. This makes it easy for you to secure your web application because you don't have to open anything up to anything, you just allow Cloudfront to do all the work. AWS Transit Gateway and AWS Cloud WAN have enhanced visibility metrics and path MTU support, and the AWS Network Firewall has expanded the list of supported protocols and keywords in Firewall rules. Let's talk Quantum Technologies we're happy to announce the Quantum Embark Advisory Program for customers new to quantum computing. With this program, customers can explore the value of quantum computing for their business, understand the pace of development of the technology and prepare for its impact. And it's designed to cut through the hype and really focus on actionable outcomes. Let's talk about security, identity and compliance and we have announced Block Public Access for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. This is a new centralized declarative control that enables network and security administrators to authoritatively block Internet traffic for their VPCs. VPC block public Access or BPA supersedes any other setting and ensures your VPC resources are protected from unfettered Internet access in compliance with your organization's security and governance policy. AWS Artifact has enhanced agreements with improved access control and tracking. So when you need to understand what things are being certified, etc. And what those documents look like, that's the place to do it. AWS IAM Identity center now supports Search by Permission, set name and AWS controllers for Kubernetes for aws. Private CA is now generally available, so this allows you to provision and manage your private CA certificate authorities and private certificates directly from Kubernetes. Moving on to storage, we are really happy to announce the Elastic Block Store Amazon EBS capability for Time based Copy for EBS Snapshots this is really cool. This means that you can ensure that your EBS snapshots are copied within and across AWS regions within a specific time frame. So when you do the copy you can specify a desired completion duration ranging from 15 minutes to 48 hours for individual copy requests. So this is really important in terms of meeting your duration requirements or your recovery point objectives. And you can now also monitor your copy operations via EventBridge and the new snapshot copy bytes transferred CloudWatch metrics available by default at a 1 minute frequency at no additional charge. This is a cool function and Amazon EBS now supports detailed performance statistics on EBS volume health. You can access 11 metrics at up to a per second granularity to understand the health of your storage. Amazon EFS have done some things. In fact they now Support up to 2.5 million IOPS per second for read and up to 500,000 write IOPS per file system. That's a 10 times increase over previous limits. So it means this can address way more use cases that you have. Again you don't have to change anything, it just can do more. And Amazon EFS now supports cross account replication as well. So this means you can meet your business continuity multi account disaster recovery and compliance requirements by automatically keeping replicas with your file data in separate accounts. S3 has also been very busy and some cool things have been added and the number one thing from my perspective is new functionality for conditional writes. In fact, Amazon S3 can now perform conditional writes that evaluate if an object is unmodified before dating it. This helps you coordinate simultaneous writes to the same object and prevents multiple concurrent writers from unintentionally overriding the object without knowing the state of its content. You can use this capability by providing the etag of that object using S3 put object or complete multi part upload API requests in both S3 general purpose and directory buckets. Speaking of those, Amazon S3 now supports enforcement of conditional write operations for S3 general purpose buckets. So you can mandate this to make sure this happens all the time. And there is a new limit increase. We have now increased the default bucket quota for an account to 10,000 from 100, so that's a big job. Additionally, any customer can request a quota increase of up to 1 million buckets. So now you can really take advantage of the number of buckets you need to get stuff done versus having to get across stuff now. Just a reminder, you can create up to your first 2,000 buckets at no cost. Above 2,000 buckets you're charged a small monthly fee. Mount point for Amazon S3 now supports a high performance shared cache. The cache can be shared by multiple compute instances and can elastically scale to any data set size. Mount point for S3 is a file client that transfers local file system API calls to REST API calls on S3 objects. With this launch, Mount Point for S3 can cache data in S3 Express 1 zone after it's read, making the subsequent read requests up to seven times faster compared to reading data from S3. Standard Amazon S3 access grants now integrate with Amazon Redshift and as I touched on before, Amazon S3 Express 1 zone also now supports conditional deletes now now expanding upon the conditional rights. Amazon S3 Express 1 Zone now supports conditional deletes, so you can now evaluate whether an object is unchanged before deleting it. So this helps you improve data durability and reduce errors from accidental deletions in really high concurrency. Multiple writer scenarios. Amazon S3 Express 1 zone now supports S3 lifecycle expirations and AWS backup for Amazon S3 has added a new restore parameter offering you the ability to choose how many versions of an object to restore and backup. Also now supports copying Amazon S3 backups across regions or accounts in opt in regions. It also now supports resource type and multiple tag selections in backup policies. And Amazon FSX for Lustre now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter and Nvidia GPU direct storage. So with this launch, Amazon FSX for Lustre provides the fastest storage performance for GPU instances in the cloud, which means you can get up to 12 times higher throughput per client instance. That's 1200 Gbps compared to the previous FSX Filuster systems, so you can get your work done quicker. So that is everything. My goodness, there was a lot Are you still with me? Did you listen to it in one go? We got through it in a reasonable amount of time actually. I couldn't dive deep on a lot of stuff obviously, but as you can tell, lots has happened. You can always check the show notes to find out what's going on. Again, this is our last episode for 2024. I want to thank you all for listening. I know that many of you dip in, dip out. Many of you have listened to every episode. I often get emails from folks saying hey, this is really great. Or can you do this? Can you do that? Of course we do love to get your feedback. AWspodcastmazon.com is the reminder. But generally I really appreciate the time you spend listening to the podcast. It really means a great deal and I'm really happy if you get any value from it at all. All. So have a restful holiday period. Great time to catch up on podcasts and work on some projects you may have been putting off. So until 2025, keep on building.
AWS Podcast Episode #702: AWS News Update, December 16, 2024
Released on December 15, 2024
Hosted by Simon Elisha, the AWS Podcast Episode #702 offers a comprehensive update on the latest developments across Amazon Web Services. This summary encapsulates the key announcements, feature launches, and enhancements discussed throughout the episode, providing valuable insights for developers and IT professionals.
Amazon Redshift Multidata Warehouse Rights Through Data Sharing
Integration Enhancements
Security Enhancements in Redshift
Amazon QuickSight Updates
Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink
Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion Enhancements
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (On-Demand Mode)
Amazon EventBridge
AWS Step Functions
AWS AppSync Enhancements
Amazon OpenSearch Service Improvements
Amazon QBusiness Enhancements
Amazon Q Apps
Amazon Q Developer Tools
Amazon SageMaker Updates
Simple Email Service (SES) Mail Manager: Adds email delivery capabilities to Amazon Q Business applications.
Amazon Connect Enhancements:
AWS End User Messaging
AWS Lambda Enhancements
Amazon EC2 Updates
Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Batch
Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Subscription: Launches user-based subscriptions for licensing flexibility and business continuity on EC2 Windows instances.
Data Exports for Focus 1.0: General availability of an open-source cloud cost and usage specification for standardized financial management.
Savings Plan Purchase Analyzer: Facilitates informed purchasing decisions with a few clicks.
Enhanced Pricing Calculator: Now supports discounts and purchase commitments (in preview).
Root Cause Insights for Cost Anomalies: Implements anomaly monitors that identify and rank the top cost contributing factors upon detecting spend anomalies.
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon Key Spaces for Apache Cassandra: Reduces prices by up to 75%, enhancing cost-effectiveness.
Valkey Glide 1.2: Adds features from Valkey 8.0, including availability zone awareness.
Neptune Analytics: Supports customer-managed private link endpoints.
Amazon RDS Enhancements
RDS Blue/Green Deployments: Supports minor version upgrades and managed initialization of green storage volumes for accelerated performance pre-switchover.
AWS CodePipeline
AWS CodeBuild: Now supports Windows Docker builds within reserved capacity fleets.
AWS Fault Injection Service: Generates downloadable experiment reports detailing the impact of chaos engineering experiments on key metrics.
Amazon Q Developer
Amazon WorkSpaces Enhancements
Frontend Web and Mobile
Game Tech
Internet of Things (IoT)
AWS Control Tower
Amazon Q Account Resources Chat (AWS Console Mobile App): Enables voice-based resource listing and detail retrieval on-the-go.
AWS Chatbot Enhancements
AWS Re:Post Private Integration
Media Quality Aware Resiliency (MQIR): Ensures high-quality live streaming by automatically switching regions to recover from video quality issues, ideal for live events and 24/7 programming.
AWS Deadline Cloud Support for GPU-Accelerated EC2: Simplifies render management for teams working with computer-generated graphics by supporting a broader range of GPU instance types.
AWS PrivateLink Enhancements
Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM)
AWS Cloud WAN Improvements
Amazon CloudFront Updates
AWS Transit Gateway and AWS Cloud WAN: Enhances visibility metrics and introduces path MTU support.
AWS Network Firewall: Expands supported protocols and keywords within firewall rules for better security management.
Block Public Access for Amazon VPC
AWS Artifact Enhancements: Improves access control and tracking for better management of compliance documents.
AWS IAM Identity Center
AWS Private CA: General availability of a service to provision and manage private certificate authorities and certificates directly from Kubernetes.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
Amazon S3 Enhancements
Amazon FSx for Lustre
Simon Elisha wraps up the episode by acknowledging the extensive range of updates, emphasizing the importance of staying informed through the show's comprehensive show notes. He extends gratitude to the listeners for their support throughout the year and encourages them to enjoy the holiday season while continuing to build and innovate with AWS services.
Final Quote [Last 2:22]: "I really appreciate the time you spend listening to the podcast. It really means a great deal and I'm really happy if you get any value from it at all. So have a restful holiday period... until 2025, keep on building."
This episode underscores AWS's commitment to continuous innovation and enhancement across its vast suite of services, catering to the evolving needs of developers and IT professionals alike. For detailed information and to explore specific updates further, listeners are encouraged to refer to the episode's show notes.