AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon DynamoDB, AWS AppSync, Storage Browser for Amazon S3, and more (September 9, 2024)

Last week, the latest AWS Heroes arrived! AWS Heroes are amazing technical experts who generously share their insights, best practices, and innovative solutions to help others.

The AWS GenAI Lofts are in full swing with San Francisco and São Paulo open now, and London, Paris, and Seoul coming in the next couple of months. Here’s an insider view from a workshop in San Francisco last week.

Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention.

Storage Browser for Amazon S3 (alpha release) – An open source Amplify UI React component that you can add to your web applications to provide your end users with a simple interface for data stored in S3. The component uses the new ListCallerAccessGrants API to list all S3 buckets, prefixes, and objects they can access, as defined by their S3 Access Grants.

AWS Network Load Balancer – Now supports a configurable TCP idle timeout. For more information, see this Networking & Content Devliery Blog post.

AWS Gateway Load Balancer – Also supports a configurable TCP idle timeout. More info is available in this blog post.

Amazon ECS – Now supports AWS Graviton-based Spot compute with AWS Fargate. This allows to run fault-tolerant Arm-based applications with up to 70% lower costs compared to on-demand.

Zone Groups for Availability Zones in AWS Regions – We are working on extending the Zone Group construct to Availability Zones (AZs) with a consistent naming format across all AWS Regions.

Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink – Now supports Apache Flink 1.20. You can upgrade to benefit from bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the Flink community.

AWS Glue – Now provides job queuing. If quotas or limits are insufficient to start a Glue job, AWS Glue will now automatically queue the job and wait for limits to free up.

Amazon DynamoDB – Now supports Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) for tables and indexes (limited preview). ABAC is an authorization strategy that defines access permissions based on tags attached to users, roles, and AWS resources. Read more in this Database Blog post.

Amazon Bedrock – Stability AI’s top text-to-image models (Stable Image Ultra, Stable Diffusion 3 Large, and Stable Image Core) are now available to generate high-quality visuals with speed and precision.

Amazon Bedrock Agents – Now supports Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet, including Anthropic recommended tool use for function calling which can improve developer and end user experience.

Amazon Sagemaker Studio – You can now use Amazon EMR Serverless directly from your Studio Notebooks to interactively query, explore and visualize data, and run Apache Spark jobs.

Amazon SageMaker – Introducing sagemaker-core, a new Python SDK that provides an object-oriented interface for interacting with SageMaker resources such as TrainingJob, Model, and Endpoint resource classes.

AWS AppSync – Improves monitoring by including DEBUG and INFO logging levels for its GraphQL APIs. You now have more granular control over log verbosity to make it easier to troubleshoot your APIs while optimizing readability and costs.

Amazon WorkSpaces Pools – You can now bring your Windows 10 or 11 licenses and provide a consistent desktop experience when switching between on-premise and virtual desktops.

Amazon SES – A new enhanced onboarding experience to help discover and activate key SES features, including recommendations for optimal setup and the option to enable the Virtual Deliverability Manager to enhance email deliverability.

Amazon Redshift – Now the Amazon Redshift Data API support session reuse to retain the context of a session from one query execution to another, reducing connection setup latency on repeated queries to the same data warehouse.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that you might find interesting:

Amazon Q Developer Code Challenge – At the 2024 AWS Summit in Sydney, we put two teams (one using Amazon Q Developer, one not) in a battle of coding prowess, starting with basic math and string manipulation, up to including complex algorithms and intricate ciphers. Here are the results.

AWS named as a Leader in the first Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants – It’s great to see how new technologies make the whole software development lifecycle easier and increase developer productivity.

Build powerful RAG pipelines with LlamaIndex and Amazon Bedrock – A deep dive tutorial that covers simple and advanced use cases.

Evaluating prompts at scale with Prompt Management and Prompt Flows for Amazon Bedrock – To implement an automated prompt evaluation system to streamline prompt development and improve the overall quality of AI-generated content.

Amazon Redshift data ingestion options – An overview of the available ingestion methods and how they work for different use cases.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. AWS Summits for this year are coming to an end. There are two more left that you can still register: Toronto (September 11), and Ottawa (October 9).

AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs driven by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Upcoming AWS Community Days are in the SF Bay Area (September 13), where our own Antje Barth is a keynote speaker, Argentina (September 14), Armenia (September 14), and DACH (in Munich on September 17).

AWS GenAI Lofts – Collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS’s cloud and AI expertise, while providing startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.

Browse all upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events here.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Danilo

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!