Amazon EC2 Trn2 Instances and Trn2 UltraServers

Amazon EC2 Trn2 instances, powered by 16 AWS Trainium2 chips, are purpose-built for generative AI and are the most powerful EC2 instances for training and deploying models with hundreds of billions to trillion+ parameters.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-ec2-trn2-instances-available/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-trn2-instances-and-trn2-ultraservers-for-aiml-training-and-inference-is-now-available/

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/trn2/

Amazon S3 Tables

Amazon S3 Tables deliver the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support, and the easiest way to store tabular data at scale. S3 Tables are specifically optimized for analytics workloads, resulting in up to 3x faster query throughput and up to 10x higher transactions per second compared to self-managed tables.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-s3-tables-apache-iceberg-tables-analytics-workloads/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-s3-tables-storage-optimized-for-analytics-workloads/

Amazon S3 Metadata (Preview)

Amazon S3 Metadata is the easiest and fastest way to help you instantly discover and understand your S3 data with automated, easily-queried metadata that updates in near real-time. This helps you to curate, identify, and use your S3 data for business analytics, real-time inference applications, and more.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-s3-metadata-preview/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-queryable-object-metadata-for-amazon-s3-buckets-preview/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/metadata-tables-overview.html

Amazon Aurora DSQL (Preview)

Aurora DSQL allows you to build always available applications with virtually unlimited scalability, the highest availability, and zero infrastructure management. It is designed to make scaling and resiliency effortless for your applications and offers the fastest distributed SQL reads and writes.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-aurora-dsql-preview/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-amazon-aurora-dsql/

Amazon DynamoDB global tables multi-region strong consistency (Preview)

DynamoDB global tables is a fully managed, serverless, multi-Region, and multi-active database used by tens of thousands of customers. With this new capability, you can now build highly available multi-Region applications with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero, achieving the highest level of resilience.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-dynamodb-global-tables-previews-multi-region-strong-consistency/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/GlobalTables.html

Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation (Preview)

Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation automates the process needed to generate synthetic data from the teacher model, trains and evaluates the student model, and then hosts the final distilled model for inference.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-bedrock-model-distillation-preview/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/build-faster-more-cost-efficient-highly-accurate-models-with-amazon-bedrock-model-distillation-preview/

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails now supports Automated Reasoning checks (Preview)

With the launch of the Automated Reasoning checks safeguard in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, AWS becomes the first and only major cloud provider to integrate automated reasoning in our generative AI offerings. Automated Reasoning checks help detect hallucinations and provide a verifiable proof that a large language model (LLM) response is accurate.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-bedrock-guardrails-automated-reasoning-checks-preview/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/prevent-factual-errors-from-llm-hallucinations-with-mathematically-sound-automated-reasoning-checks-preview/

Amazon Bedrock multi-agent collaboration (preview)

Amazon Bedrock now supports multi-agent collaboration, allowing organizations to build and manage multiple AI agents that work together to solve complex workflows. This feature allows developers to create agents with specialized roles tailored for specific business needs, such as financial data collection, research, and decision-making.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-bedrock-multi-agent-collaboration/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-multi-agent-collaboration-capability-for-amazon-bedrock/

Amazon Nova

Amazon Nova, a new generation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) foundation models (FMs) that deliver frontier intelligence and industry leading price performance.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-nova-foundation-models-bedrock/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-nova-frontier-intelligence-and-industry-leading-price-performance/

Amazon Q Developer

Q Developer is a generative AI-powered assistant for designing, building, testing, deploying, and maintaining software. Its agents for software development have a deep understanding of your entire code repos, so they can accelerate many tasks beyond coding. With this new capability, Q Developer can help you understand your existing code bases faster, or quickly document new features, so you can focus on shipping features for your customers.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-q-developer-generate-documentation-source-code/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-q-developer-agent-capabilities-include-generating-documentation-code-reviews-and-unit-tests/

GitLab Duo with Amazon Q (Preview)

AWS announces a preview of GitLab Duo with Amazon Q, embedding advanced agent capabilities for software development and workload transformation directly in GitLab's enterprise DevSecOps platform. Using GitLab Duo, developers can delegate issues to Amazon Q agents using quick actions. to build new features faster, maximize quality and security with AI-assisted code reviews, create and execute unit tests, and upgrade a legacy Java codebase.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/gitlab-duo-amazon-q-preview/

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-q-developer-automatic-unit-test-generation/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-gitlab-duo-with-amazon-q/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-q-developer-agent-capabilities-include-generating-documentation-code-reviews-and-unit-tests/

Amazon Q Developer now provides transformation capabilities for .NET porting (Preview)

AWS announces new generative-AI powered transformation capabilities of Amazon Q Developer in public preview to accelerate porting of .NET Framework applications to cross-platform .NET. Using these capabilities, you can modernize your Windows .NET applications to be Linux-ready up to four times faster than traditional methods and realize up to 40% savings in licensing costs.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-q-developer-transformation-net-porting-preview/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-amazon-q-developer-transformation-capabilities-for-net-preview/

Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for VMware (Preview)

AWS announces the preview of Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for VMware, the first generative AI–powered assistant that can simplify and accelerate the migration and modernization of VMware workloads to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-q-developer-transformation-capabilities-vmware-preview/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/migration-and-modernization/amazon-q-developer-agents-for-transformation-of-vmware-workloads/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/migration-and-modernization/getting-started-with-amazon-q-developer-transform-for-vmware/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-amazon-q-developer-transformation-capabilities-for-net-mainframe-and-vmware-workloads-preview/

Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for mainframe modernization (Preview)

AWS announces new generative AI–powered capabilities of Amazon Q Developer in public preview to help customers and partners accelerate large-scale assessment and modernization of mainframe applications.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-q-developer-transformation-mainframe-modernization/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-amazon-q-developer-transformation-capabilities-for-net-preview/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/transform.html

Amazon Q Developer adds operational investigation capability (Preview)

Amazon Q Developer now helps you accelerate operational investigations across your AWS environment in just a fraction of the time. With a deep understanding of your AWS cloud environment and resources, Amazon Q Developer looks for anomalies in your environment, surfaces related signals for you to explore, identifies potential root-cause hypothesis, and suggests next steps to help you remediate issues faster.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-q-developer-operational-investigation-preview/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/investigate-and-remediate-operational-issues-with-amazon-q-developer/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/Investigations-RecommendedServices.html

Amazon Q Business introduces over 50 actions for popular business applications and platforms

This enhancement allows Amazon Q Business users to complete tasks in other applications without leaving the Amazon Q Business interface, improving the user experience and operational efficiency. The new plugins cover a wide range of widely used business tools, including PagerDuty, Salesforce, Jira, Smartsheet, and ServiceNow.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-q-business-50-actions-business-applications-platforms/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-q-business-is-adding-new-workflow-automation-capability-and-50-action-integrations/

Amazon Q in QuickSight unifies insights from structured and unstructured data

Now generally available, Amazon Q in QuickSight provides users with unified insights from structured and unstructured data sources through integration with Amazon Q Business. With Amazon Q in QuickSight business users can now augment insights from traditional BI data sources such as databases, data lakes and data warehouses, with contextual information from unstructured sources.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-q-quicksight-insights-structured-unstructured-data/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/business-intelligence/integrate-unstructured-data-into-amazon-quicksight-using-amazon-q-business/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/query-structured-data-from-amazon-q-business-using-amazon-quicksight-integration/

Introducing the next generation of Amazon SageMaker

AWS announces the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, a unified platform for data, analytics, and AI. This launch brings together widely adopted AWS machine learning and analytics capabilities and provides an integrated experience for analytics and AI with unified access to data and built-in governance.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/next-generation-amazon-sagemaker/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-the-next-generation-of-amazon-sagemaker-the-center-for-all-your-data-analytics-and-ai/

Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse

AWS announces Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse, a unified, open, and secure data Lakehouse that simplifies your analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse unifies all your data across Amazon S3 data lakes and Amazon Redshift data warehouses, helping you build powerful analytics and AI/ML applications on a single copy of data.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/aws-announces-amazon-sagemaker-lakehouse/

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-sagemaker-lakehouse-redshift-zero-etl-integrations-eight-applications/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplify-analytics-and-aiml-with-new-amazon-sagemaker-lakehouse/

Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio (Preview)

AWS announces the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, including the preview launch of Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, an integrated data and AI development environment that enables collaboration and helps teams build data products faster. SageMaker Unified Studio brings together familiar tools from AWS analytics and AI/ML services for data processing, SQL analytics, machine learning model development, and generative AI application development.

For more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/preview-amazon-sagemaker-unified-studio/

About the author

Eyal Estrin is a cloud and information security architect, an AWS Community Builder, and the author of the books Cloud Security Handbook and Security for Cloud Native Applications, with more than 20 years in the IT industry.

You can connect with him on social media (https://linktr.ee/eyalestrin).

Opinions are his own and not the views of his employer.