#705: AWS News Update, January 27, 2025

Summary

AWS Podcast Episode #705: AWS News Update, January 27, 2025 - Detailed Summary

Hosted by Amazon Web Services, Episode #705 delivers the latest updates and insights tailored for developers and IT professionals. Simon Lee Sheen, Julian Ford, and Shruti Kopaka guide listeners through significant product launches, strategic partnerships, and enhancements across various AWS services.

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Introduction

The episode opens with Simon Lee Sheen welcoming listeners back to the AWS Podcast. He introduces his co-hosts, Julian Ford and Shruti Kopaka, setting the stage for an engaging discussion on the latest AWS updates.

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Major Launches and Strategic Partnerships

Amazon Bedrock and Luma AI's Ray 2 Video Model

Timestamp [00:43] - [05:22]

A significant highlight of this episode is the discussion around Amazon Bedrock's enhanced visual capabilities through a partnership with Luma AI. This collaboration introduces Ray 2, a cutting-edge video model unveiled at re:Invent 2024.

• Simon Lee Sheen explains the innovation:

  "You can generate videos up to 1 minute long, up from just 5 seconds in the previous version, all in 720p at 24 frames per second." (04:15)

• Julian Ford explores potential applications:

  "I could totally imagine just wanting to have your own, like creating a character... Movies are like books for kids." (01:53)

• Shruti Kopaka details the AWS infrastructure supporting Luma AI:

  "Luma will also be bringing their models to AWS Trainium and Inferentia, our purpose-built AI chips for cost-effective training and inference." (03:13)

The hosts delve into practical use cases, including marketing, education, and creative content creation. Simon shares a personal anecdote about experimenting with the tool, highlighting its addictive potential:

"Once you start putting prompts in and creating stuff... What if I wanted to turn a picture of my friend into a ventriloquist doll?" (04:44)

Launch of AWS Mexico Central Region

Timestamp [06:08] - [09:49]

AWS announces the launch of the Mexico Central Region, a substantial investment aimed at boosting Mexico’s digital economy.

• Simon Lee Sheen outlines the investment:

  "This is a $5 billion investment over 15 years... expected to deliver $10 billion into Mexico's GDP." (06:16)

• Julian Ford highlights key customers benefiting from the region:

  "BBVA, they're a leading multinational financial services company... Sky Alert is protecting millions of people in earthquake-prone areas." (07:15)

• Shruti Kopaka emphasizes workforce development and sustainability:

  "We've been partnering with Mexican universities to make sure that the tech force there is really tech-savvy... our new region is using air cooling technology... shrinking carbon footprints." (08:14)

Simon concludes by noting the global reach of AWS:

"This now brings us to 114 availability zones across 36 regions." (09:47)

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AWS Marketplace Update

Timestamp [09:49] - [10:19]

The AWS Marketplace introduces disbursement pause notifications, a quality-of-life improvement that alerts sellers when payments are paused due to invalid bank account information. This ensures timely action to maintain uninterrupted cash flow.

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Analytics Enhancements

Timestamp [10:19] - [11:11]

• Amazon Redshift now supports the Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial indexing system (H3), enhancing spatial query performance through pre-indexed location data.

• Amazon MSK Connect enables updating connector configurations with a single API call, allowing seamless modifications to source or sync destinations.

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Application Integration

Timestamp [11:11] - [12:33]

AWS Step Functions sees a major expansion with support for 36 additional AWS services, including AWS End User Messaging and Amazon Q Apps.

• Julian Ford praises the update:

  "It's an unlock code... it totally does." (11:27)

The expansion allows orchestration of over 14,000 API actions from 220+ services, simplifying architecture and reducing costs for distributed applications.

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Artificial Intelligence Advances

Timestamp [12:33] - [14:25]

Two key updates related to Amazon Q Developer:

1. Plugin for Cloud Zero: Now generally available for Q Developer Pro tier users, enabling cost insights and billing information directly within the AWS Management Console.

2. Integration with SageMaker Code Editor: Enhances the SageMaker IDE with expert guidance, code generation, and troubleshooting capabilities.

Shruti Kopaka reflects on the synergy between AI tools:

"AI is becoming the new operating system on top of which everything is being built." (14:16)

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Compute Enhancements

Timestamp [14:25] - [15:17]

• Introduction of larger sizes for Amazon EC2 Flex instances, specifically C7i Flex and M7i Flex, catering to more demanding workloads.

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk adds new spot allocation strategies: Lowest Price and Price Capacity Optimized, allowing better cost management.

• Amazon EC2 Image Builder now supports direct conversion of Microsoft Windows ISO files to Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), streamlining the use of custom Windows images and leveraging existing licenses with Amazon Workspaces.

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Customer Engagement Tools

Timestamp [15:17] - [17:47]

AWS End User Messaging expands self-service sender ID registration to 19 new countries, ensuring high deliverability and compliance with local regulations.

Amazon Connect introduces several enhancements:

• Outbound Campaigns can now connect calls with agents in under two seconds.

• Persistent Agent Connections (public preview) reduce connection times further.

• Contact Lens upgrades include a new real-time dashboard, configurable groupings and filters, agent performance evaluations for email contacts, and free trials for conversational analytics and performance evaluations.

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Database Services Updates

Timestamp [17:47] - [19:26]

• Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB now support service quotas, allowing customers to manage quotas directly via the AWS Service Quotas console.

• Amazon RDS for MariaDB introduces Innovation Release 11.7 in the preview environment.

• Amazon DynamoDB adds configurable Point in Time Recovery (PITR) periods from one to 35 days per table, enhancing data recovery flexibility.

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Developer Tools Advancements

Timestamp [19:26] - [20:40]

• AWS Encryption SDK for GO: An open-source release facilitating easier encryption and decryption for Go developers.

• AWS CodeBuild introduces test splitting and parallelism, optimizing the CI process by distributing tests across parallel environments.

• AWS CodePipeline features a new debugging experience, offering a dedicated debugging page in the AWS Management Console for streamlined troubleshooting.

• AWS CodeBuild expands batch build capabilities to include Reserved Capacity Fleets and Lambda Compute, allowing a mix of On-Demand and reserved resources in build batches.

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End User Computing

Timestamp [20:40] - [21:30]

Amazon Workspaces announces larger general-purpose bundles for both Workspaces Personal and Workspaces Core:

• General Purpose 4x Large: 16 vCPUs, 64 GB RAM, 175 GB root volume, 100 GB user volume.

• General Purpose 8x Large: 32 vCPUs, 128 GB RAM, same storage specifications.

These bundles cater to developers, scientists, financial analysts, and engineers running demanding applications, offering scalable and on-demand pricing.

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Management and Governance

Timestamp [21:30] - [25:23]

Several updates enhance management and governance capabilities:

• Multi Session Support: Allows AWS customers to access up to five AWS accounts simultaneously in a single browser session, facilitating easier management across multiple environments.

  "I'm so excited about this one because it's one that I've had to hack around for a while." (22:28)

• Customer Carbon Footprint Tool relocates to a new dedicated page under Cost and Usage Analysis, providing users with visibility into the carbon footprint of their AWS services.

• User Notifications in AWS CloudFormation become generally available, enabling configurable notifications via the Console Notification Center, Email, AWS Chatbot, or the AWS Console mobile app.

• AWS Compute Optimizer expands idle and right-sizing recommendations for Amazon EC2 auto scaling groups, empowering users to optimize cost and performance without specialized knowledge.

• AWS Systems Manager launches 20 additional automation runbook recommendations, integrating contextual action buttons within AWS Chatbot for seamless automation from collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack.

• AWS Resource Explorer adds support for 29 new resource types across all commercial regions, including services like Amazon FSX, Amazon Route 53, and AWS Glue.

• AWS accepts payments in eight new local currencies, enhancing the localization of the payment experience for customers worldwide.

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Media Services Update

Timestamp [25:23] - [25:44]

AWS Elemental Media Tailor now permits users to filter captured logs, allowing selection of specific log types or individual events. This feature aids in reducing costs and complexity by collecting only necessary data.

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Security, Identity and Compliance

Timestamp [25:44] - [26:54]

AWS Security Hub integrates with Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, enabling the receipt of security findings for DNS queries from Amazon VPCs associated with malicious or low-reputation domains. This integration provides a centralized view of security alerts and compliance across AWS accounts, supporting governance and threat management.

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Conclusion and Contact Information

In the closing segment, the hosts share contact information for further inquiries:

• Shruti Kopaka: Available on LinkedIn or X as Shruti GoPalkar.

• Julian Ford: Available on LinkedIn as Gillian Ford.

Simon encourages listeners to visit AWSPodcast.com for more information and concludes with:

"Until next time, keep on building." (27:07)

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This episode of the AWS Podcast underscores AWS's commitment to innovation, customer-centric solutions, and global expansion. From advanced AI capabilities and new regional infrastructures to enhanced security integrations and developer tools, AWS continues to empower its users with robust and scalable solutions.

Transcript

[Simon Lee Sheen]

This is episode 705 of the AWS.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Podcast released on January 27th, 2025.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

Hello everyone and welcome back to the AWS Podcast. Simon Lee Sheen with you. Great to have you back. And I'm joined by my regular co host, firstly, Julian Ford. G'day, Julian. How you doing?

[Julian Ford]

I'm so excited. This is my first update show of 2025, so I'm really pumped. I know I was on vacation before, so really excited to be.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

That was a lad. But there you go. And Shruti Kopaka, how you going?

[Shruti Kopaka]

Good, good, I'm doing well. And Happy New Year to everyone. I don't know how long we can keep saying Happy New Year. I know in January that that's, that's okay.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

Still acceptable. Now we're tweaking, we're tweaking our update show episodes a little bit because, you know, we always want to experiment and try and make things better. And what we're going to do is you'll still get all the updates, don't worry. But what we thought we might do is start with talking about a couple of releases or new things that we think are really interesting and have a bit of a chat about them before we get into the regular sort of updates. And so the first one we want to talk about is a pretty big launch that was pre announced at re invent 2024 and it's pretty significant. It's an update to Amazon Bedrock's visual capabilities in the form of Luma AI's Ray 2 video model. Now this is pretty incredible technology. I've been playing with this myself. Basically lets you create high quality lifelike video clips in seconds using nothing but texts and images. You can generate videos up to 1 minute long, up from just 5 seconds in the previous version, all in 720p at 24 frames per second. So you can do some interesting stuff with this. Gillian, maybe kick us off with a bit of a sort of, you know how you might use this? What, what can you do?

[Julian Ford]

Well, I mean, if I were creating a startup, I could totally imagine just wanting to have your own, like creating a character, creating your own different, like novels. And then it's like a software subscription where now you've got anyone can create their own, like toy, not toy, like character. Movies are like books for kids. Yeah, that's exactly what I was trying to say.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

It's pretty amazing because one of the things that this model has going for it in particular is it understands the physical interactions between people, animals and objects. So it uses a multimodal transformer architecture based on video data. And if you've ever played with these models, the feet and the way they walk and people are floating across, et cetera. And so this is really trying to make that whole process easier. And it's not just a model release, it's also a strategic partnership between aws and Luma AI. And Luma AI's Dream Machine service already has over 25 million users since it was launched just back in June 2024, which is pretty amazing. And so AWS is now Luma's preferred compute partner. And Shruti, where are they training their foundation models? I think, you know.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Yeah, well, as you said, they are, or rather AWS is Luma's preferred compute partner. And AWS offers such a wide variety of choice when it comes to compute for AI. Of course we have the best of Nvidia GPUs, but Luma will also be bringing their models to AWS Trainium and Inferentia, our purpose built AI chips for cost effective training and inference. And moreover, not only do we offer the compute options, but we also have managed service such as SageMaker Hyperpod, which makes model training so much easier. So Luma are training, they're training their foundation models on Amazon SageMaker Hyperpod. And that's why, once again, it goes beyond just a model release. It's a really strategic partnership where they are leveraging the entirety of our stack. Right? Like they are leveraging the infrastructure to be able to then provide capabilities at the top of the stack with bedrock.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

And the nice thing is, again, it's just bedrock so you don't have to learn anything new. The only thing you need, you need an S3 bucket for the videos to go into. That's the thing. And I will warn you, it's addictive. Once you start putting prompts in and creating stuff. And then of course you get into the funny jokes that you do with your friends about, well, what if, you know, what if I wanted to turn a picture of my friend into a ventriloquist doll? What, what would that look like?

[Julian Ford]

I was just gonna ask Simon what you started to play with Luma for.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

That's where it ended up. That's right. Well, you're sort of sitting there and you're trying to think, what prompt can I use to try this out? And so, yeah, turning people into a puppet is interesting, but also I've been playing with sort of trying to make different scenes and I have some ideas in my mind of things I wanna represent as part of a presentation. I thought, wow, it'd be good to use this to do that. And I haven't quite got the prompt right yet to the level that I'm happy with. But then again, I'm not really good at prompting. So it's going to be interesting to see the advice that comes out around how to use this.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Yeah, there's going to be so many applications and I mean there's already companies that are building for marketing use cases, advertising use cases. And today a lot of us, like I'm a marketer, we use the stock images and stock videos. Now you can really get creative and create something very custom. And the other one definitely is education, I think, like I have a three year old and every time I tell him something he asks me why, why, why, why, why? And now, you know, I could potentially maybe create a video that shows the consequences of a particular action. Just play out. This is what you have. This is what happens when you don't brush your teeth. So anyway, so I think there's just.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

So much teeth that haven't been brushed. Scary.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Yeah.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

The other thing we wanted to talk about was the launch of a new AWS region. So this is the Mexico central region. It's now live and it has three availability zones. And you know, the thing with Amazon regions is their significant infrastructure investments in the country that they happen in. So this is a $5 billion investment over 15 years it'll create 7,000 jobs annually and is expected to deliver $10 billion into Mexico's GDP. The other thing, it's not just about servers and data centers which are all cool, we like those. But it's about really supercharging Mexico's digital economy with cutting edge AI and machine learning capabilities. So, you know, can businesses in Mexico get access to this technology at lower latency and take advantage of all the stuff we talk about? And this is pretty cool, isn't? I mean there's a lot of customers using this already who use AWS already, who for them this is a big deal, isn't it?

[Julian Ford]

It's pretty fascinating. Bbva, they're a leading multinational financial services company and Mexico's largest financial institution. I mean, so now imagine empowering a thousand data scientists that are going to be able to use Betrock and now.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

Or just make videos of people. Puppets.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Yeah, that's a possibility.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

But it's very cool. Sky Alert is another interesting customer who is protecting millions of people in earthquake prone areas and they transform their earthquake alerts from sort of sluggish to really fast with aws and they predict that this new infrastructure will improve their ability to deliver critical alerts and save lives, which is kind of important. You know, you want an alert quick, and so this is important. I think also the skills piece, Trudy, is really important too, of sort of what we're doing with folks locally there.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, just investing in infrastructure is not always sufficient. Right. You need a workforce who can then take advantage of this infrastructure and build cool new applications. And so we are investing in training over half a million individuals in Mexico in cloud tech since 2017. So it's been an ongoing investment for a very long time. And we've been partnering with Mexican universities to make sure that the tech force there is, you know, or the workforce there is really tech savvy. So this is an additional sort of investment in terms of now also providing infrastructure right there that they can use. And then of course, I think sustainability has always been a core kind of value for us here at aws. And that's also interesting what we are doing there, where our new region is using air cooling technology when needed, ditching water cooling and shrinking carbon footprints because, you know, liquid cooling, water cooling sounds cool, but air cooling can be more efficient. And so at aws, it's always been about efficiency and innovating on behalf of our customers so that we create a very sustainable sort of infrastructure.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

It's some pretty cool tech at play there, that's for sure. And this, if you're counting at home, this now brings us to 114 availability zones across 36 regions. So chances are, wherever you're sitting listening to this episode, there's something close to you that you can build with.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Yeah, talk about global.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So let's move on to all the other updates that have been happening as well. So we'll start with the AWS Marketplace. And the AWS Marketplace has launched disbursement pause notifications. This is one of those little quality of life improvements. It basically means that if your disbursements have been paused due to invalid bank account information, you can be alerted to it and you can take action to it because people want to get paid. So this allows you to do it nice and easily. Small but important change.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Next up, we have analytics. So within that, Amazon Redshift extends support for, and I want to get this right, Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial indexing system, or H3 for short, by adding two new H3 functions to its previously announced H3 indexing support. Now, H3 indexing increases the performance of spatial queries at Scale since the location information is pre indexed. Second is Amazon MSK Connect now supports updating connector configuration. So with this launch you can change the configuration of your connector using a single update connector API call. You can make changes to your connector settings such as updating source or sync destinations or processing configurations.

[Julian Ford]

We've got one update in application integration in AWS Step Functions which if you haven't used it by now, which has been around for a while, it's definitely one that I think is underrated. So let me tell you more about it.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

It's an unlock code, isn't it? It unlocks the power.

[Julian Ford]

Yeah, it totally does. So it's expanded to AWS SDK integrations with support for 36 additional AWS services including AWS End user Messaging and Amazon Q apps and Amazon Q Business capability. So even more reasons to use it. So if you're not familiar, it's actually a visual workflow service and it's capable of orchestrating over 14,000 plus API actions from over 220 services to help customers build distributed applications at scale. So by directly invoking AWS services or their API actions from AWS Step Functions, customers can write less code, as Simon called out, simplify their architecture and save costs. In addition to these 36 newly added services, Step Functions also has added Support for over 1,000 new API actions from new and existing AWS services such as AWS transfer family, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda and Glue. Really exciting stuff.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

It is. And Gillian will now recite all 1000 API actions.

[Julian Ford]

That's when everyone stop listening.

[Shruti Kopaka]

All right, next up we have two updates under Artificial Intelligence and they're both about Amazon Q Developer. So first off, Amazon Q Developer plugin for Cloud zero is now generally available, which means administrators on the Q Developer Pro tier can enable the new Cloud Zero plugin in the AWS Management console by configuring the credentials to access these third party services. And builders can now easily get cost insights, billing information and learn more about Cloud Zero directly inside the console using Q Developer. So that's one and then the second one. Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in Amazon SageMaker Code Editor Integrated Development Environment. And so again with Q Developer Data scientists and ML engineers, we'll be able to access expert guidance on SageMaker, its features, any kind of code generation they might want to do as well as troubleshooting.

[Julian Ford]

It's a good call out. I mean I think just the minor productivity of it just being like right in there, the Q Developer right in the IDE just makes it so much easier just to be able to quickly iterate. So definitely worth checking out.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Yeah. I also like how weirdly meta it is like AI is going to help you do better AI like Q developer is going to help build better AI in SageMaker. So it's kind of cool. Speaks to this kind of notion that AI is becoming the new operating system on top of which everything sort of is being built.

[Julian Ford]

I agree. And now we'll talk about compute. So we're now introducing new larger sizes on Amazon EC2 Flex instances which are the C7i Flex and the M7. Iflex Abus Elastic Beanstalk adds additional spot allocation strategies for the lowest price and price capacity Optimized Capacity Optimized Prioritized in addition to the existing default capacity optimized strategy, Amazon EC2 image builder now supports direct conversion of Microsoft Windows ISO files to Amazon machine images, streamlining the process of using your own Windows amis. This also simplifies the process of leveraging your existing Windows licenses with Amazon workspaces.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

Let's talk a bit about customer engagement. If you've ever received a text message or an sms, depends what you call them where you live, you'll know that it can be difficult to understand. Is it legit? Did it come from someone real? Et cetera. So AWS end user messaging has expanded self service sender ID registration support in 19 new countries. Now phone numbers and sender IDs act as an extension of a business's brand and mobile carriers and governments worldwide have implemented SMS registrations as a form of know your customer. And they're doing this to sort of check to protect you, the end users from unwanted and spam messages, which I deeply agree with because I think that's a good idea. And so by registering application developers can ensure a high level of deliverability and ensure their use cases comply with local rules and regulations to avoid being filtered out. So some of the countries include Australia, Hooray, Belarus, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, uae, Vietnam and Zambia. Literally taking us from A to Z. Let's talk a bit about Amazon Connect. There have been a vast amount of updates there so I'm going to move through them at a rapid clip. But what you need to know is Amazon Connect continues to iterate really really fast. And this is your cloud based contact center software. Amazon Connect outbound campaigns can connect a call with an agent in under two seconds. I like that because I hate waiting. Amazon Connect now offers a public preview of persistent agent connections for faster call handling so that again reduces the time it takes to establish a connection. Amazon Connect Contact Lens has launched a new Real time dashboard so you can view and compare real time and historical aggregated performance. Amazon Connect Contact Lens Dashboards also now provides configurable groupings and filters so you can choose how you see your information. Amazon Connect Contact Lens has launched agent performance evaluations for email contacts so you can get aggregated insights for that modality and Amazon Connect Contact Lens now provides free trials for conversational analytics and performance evaluations so you can see if you like it. You can get that free trial with no charge for the first 100,000 voice minutes per month for the first two months. In addition, customers using Contact Lens performance evaluations for the first time will get a 30 day free trial that begins the day they submit their first performance evaluation.

[Shruti Kopaka]

And next up we have databases so Amazon elasticache now supports service quotas. This enhancement provides customers with improved visibility and control over their elasticache service quotas, streamlining the quota management process and reducing the need for any manual intervention. Customers can now view and manage their quota limits directly through the AWS Service Quotas console. Amazon RDS for MariaDB supports innovation release 11.7 in Amazon RDS database preview environment and Amazon DynamoDB now supports configurable point in Time recovery periods, which means you can specify the duration for data recoverability using PITR or Point in Time Recovery on a per table basis ranging from one to 35 days. That gives you a lot of flexibility to specify what data you want recovered. Point in time Recovery protects your Dynamodb data from accidental writes and deletes, and it allows you to restore your data to any second within your recovery period. Amazon MemoryDB now supports service quotas. This enhancement provides customers again with improved visibility and control over their memory DB service quotas and streamlines the quota management process.

[Julian Ford]

Now onto developer tools. Developers can now use the AWS Encryption SDK for GO to help protect their data. This open source release makes it easier for developers to encrypt and decrypt their data when building applications using the GO programming language. AWS CodeBuild now supports test splitting and parallelism. This is based on your sharding strategy. CodeBuild will divide your tests and run them across a specified number of parallel environments. AWS CodeBuild this is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests and produces ready to deploy software packages. AWS CodePipeline introduces new debugging experience in the AWS Management Console. The new Debugging interface introduces a dedicated debugging page accessible through the left navigation's Action Details button. AWS Code Build has expanded its batch build capabilities to include support for Reserved Capacity Fleets and Lambda Compute. This enhancement allows you to select a mix of On Demand instances, Reserved Capacity Fleets or Lambda Compute resources for your build batches.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

Let's talk a bit about end user computing. We're happy to announce larger general purpose bundles for Workspaces Personal and core. General purpose 4x large bundles offer 16 VCPUs a 64 gig of RAM, while general purpose 8x large bundles provide 32 VCPUs and 128 gig of RAM. Both bundles include a 175 gig root volume and 100 gig user volume that are available on both Workspaces Personal and Workspaces Core. And these are really aimed at developers, scientists, financial analysts and engineers who are running really demanding applications. So you can now handle large compilation development tasks. You can use all the tools you want to use, et cetera, and pay as you go. Pricing and on demand scaling means that it's an efficient way to get access to beefy workstations.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Under management and governance. We have a few updates. AWS announces Multi Session Support, which enables AWS customers to access multiple AWS accounts simultaneously in the AWS console. All right, this means, yeah, hooray. Like, yes, this was long overdue. This means customers can sign in up to five sessions in a single browser, and it can be any combination of root, IM or federated roles in different accounts or in the same accounts. Now we all know that customers scale their applications using multiple different accounts. They use one account for development, they another for testing, production, so on and so forth. And this ability to be able to log into all of them simultaneously from a single browser just makes it really easy to switch between the two and see what's going on.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

I'm so excited about this one because it's one that I've had to hack around for a while and now you can now log in simultaneously and at the same time, which is very exciting.

[Shruti Kopaka]

Yeah, indeed. Customer Carbon Footprint Tool has now moved to a new dedicated page. It is available under Cost and Usage Analysis and it is no longer in the Cost and Usage Reports page as that particular page is being deprecated. So if you're trying to find the Carbon Footprint Tool, which is a really cool tool that shows you the carbon footprint of your AWS services and depending on what your usage is, it is now under Cost and Usage Analysis. AWS Announces User Notifications General Availability on AWS Cloud formation. Now you can easily use User Notification to configure notifications to be sent via the Console Notification Center. Email AWS Chatbot or Mobile Push notifications to the AWS Console mobile app to keep you informed about important events like Amazon CloudW, alarms and so on and so forth. AWS Compute Optimizer now expands Idle and Right sizing recommendations for Amazon EC2 auto scaling groups. With the new recommendations, you can take actions to optimize cost and performance of these groups without requiring any specialized knowledge or engineering resources to analyze them. AWS announces General availability of 20 additional AWS Systems Manager automation runbook recommendations so there's 20 new recommendations for the AWS Systems Manager Automation Runbook as Contextual action buttons on event notifications in AWS Chatbot. This launch enables customers to run AWS Systems Manager Automations from Microsoft Teams and Slack channels to address AWS Security Hub and Amazon ECS related events. AWS Resource Explorer now supports 29 new resource types across all AWS commercial regions from services including Amazon FSX, Amazon Route 53 and AWS Glue. And AWS now accepts payments in eight new local currencies. Local currencies are important in localizing the payment experience for customers, and so it's really nice to be able to offer this to an expanded set of customers across eight more local currencies.

[Julian Ford]

One quick update in Media Services AWS Elemental Media Tailor now lets you filter which logs you want to capture. You can choose specific log types like Ad Server Interactions or individual events like Ad Server Responses, which help reduce costs and complexity by only collecting the data you need.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

And last but not least, today we're going to talk about security, identity and compliance. And the AWS Security Hub now supports Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS firewall, which allows you to receive security findings for DNS queries made from your Amazon VPCs. For domains suspected as malicious or identified as low reputation. Route 53 Resolver DNS firewall is a managed firewall that lets you block DNS queries made for malicious domains and allows queries for trusted domains. Now, AWS Security Hub gives you a comprehensive view of your security alerts and compliance across all your AWS accounts. This integration allows you to enable three new finding types. For Security Hub, you can now receive security findings for queries blocked or alerted on for domains associated with AWS managed domain lists, customer domain lists, and threats identified by Route 53 Resolver DNS firewall advanced so basically one place to look for anything scary going on. So some really cool updates. There some, some really interesting, I think, you know, top stories to talk about there. But Shruti, how do folks reach out to you if they want to dive deeper on things like Sagemaker and the like?

[Shruti Kopaka]

Yeah, they can find me as Shruti GoPalkar on either LinkedIn or X Fantastic.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

And Julian, what about yourself?

[Julian Ford]

Gillian Ford on LinkedIn and old school.

[Simon Lee Sheen]

From this side of the world. AWS Podcast.com is the place to do it. And of course, until next time, keep on building.