AWS Community Days have been in full swing around the world. I’m going to put the focus on AWS Argentina Community Day where Jeff Barr gave the keynote speech, spoke and shared his knowledge with the community, including a funny story of how he once followed Bill Gates to a McDonald’s.
I encourage you to read about their experience.
Last week’s releases
These are the releases that caught my attention, starting with the GA releases.
Amazon EC2 X8g Instances Now Generally Available – x8g instances They are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and deliver up to 60% better performance than Amazon EC2 X2gd instances based on AWS Graviton2. These instances offer larger sizes with up to 3x more vCPU (up to 48xlarge) and memory (up to 3TiB) than Graviton2-based X2gd instances.
Amazon Q Generative SQL for Amazon Redshift Now Generally Available – Generative SQL from Amazon Q on Amazon Redshift Query Editor is a ready-to-use web-based SQL editor for Amazon Redshift. Uses generative AI to analyze user intent, query patterns, and schema metadata to identify common SQL query patterns directly within Amazon Redshift, speeding up the query creation process for users and reducing the time required to create queries. obtain useful information about the data.
AWS SDK for Swift is now generally available – AWS SDK for Swift provides a modern, easy-to-use, and native Swift interface for accessing Amazon Web Services from Apple platforms, AWS Lambda, and Linux-based Swift on Server applications. Now that it is GA, customers can use the AWS SDK for Swift for production workloads. Get more information in the AWS SDK for Swift Developer Guide.
AWS Amplify now supports long-running tasks with asynchronous server-side function calls – Developers can use AWS amplify to invoke the Lambda function asynchronously for operations such as generative AI model inference, batch processing jobs, or message queues without blocking the GraphQL API response. This improves responsiveness and scalability, especially in scenarios where immediate responses are not required or where long-running tasks need to be offloaded.
Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports adding columns for multi-region tables – With this release, you can modify the schema of your existing multi-region tables in Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) to add new columns. Simply modify the schema in one of your replication regions and keyspaces will replicate the new schema to the other regions where the table exists.
Amazon Corretto 23 is now generally available – amazon corretto is a free, cross-platform, production-ready OpenJDK distribution. Corretto 23 is a feature release of OpenJDK 23 that includes an updated vector API, expanded pattern matching and shift expression, and more. It will be supported until April 2025.
Use OR1 instances for existing Amazon OpenSearch Service domains – With OpenSearch 2.15, you can leverage OR1 instances for your existing Amazon Open Search Service domains by simply updating your existing domain configuration and choosing OR1 instances for the data nodes. This will seamlessly move domains running OpenSearch 2.15 to OR1 instances using a blue/green deployment.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports AWS KMS with customer-managed keys – Default, S3 Express One Zone Encrypts all objects with server-side encryption using S3 Managed Keys (SSE-S3). With S3 Express One Zone support for customer-managed keys, you have more options for encrypting and managing the security of your data. S3 Bucket Keys are always enabled when you use SSE-KMS with S3 Express One Zone, at no additional cost.
Use AWS Chatbot to interact with Amazon Bedrock agents from Microsoft Teams and Slack – Previously, customers had to develop custom chat apps in Microsoft Teams or Slack and integrate them with Amazon Bedrock Agents. You can now invoke your Amazon Bedrock agents from chat channels by connecting the agent alias to an AWS Chatbot channel configuration.
AWS CodeBuild support for managed GitLab runners – Customers can configure their AWS CodeBuild Projects to receive job events from GitLab CI/CD and execute them on ephemeral hosts. This feature allows GitLab jobs to natively integrate with AWS, providing security and convenience through features like IAM, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon VPC.
We launched existing services in additional regions:
Other AWS News
Here are some additional projects, blog posts and news that you may find interesting:
Secure communication between clusters in EKS – Demonstrates how you can use Amazon VPC Lattice and Pod Identity to secure application communication between EKS clusters, along with an example that you can use as a reference to adapt to your own microservices applications.
Improve RAG performance with Cohere Rerank – This post focuses on improving search efficiency and accuracy in RAG systems using Cohere Rerank.
AWS Open Source News and Updates – My colleague Ricardo Sueiras writes about open source projects, tools, and events in the AWS community; verify Ricardo’s page for the latest updates.
Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and register for upcoming AWS events:
AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences including technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. The next days of the AWS community are underway Italy (September 27), Taiwan (September 28), Saudi Arabia (September 28)), Netherlands (October 3), and Romania (October 5).
Explore all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.
That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another weekly recap!
— Abhishek
This post is part of our weekly summary series. Check back each week for a quick summary of interesting AWS news and announcements.
