It has been a busy couple of days ahead of re:Invent 2024. As a first-time re:Invent attendee and first-time visitor to Las Vegas, the culture and sheer scale of everything are truly overwhelming. It has been a fun couple of days filled with networking, exciting experiences, and an introduction to some really cool new announcements and capabilities.
Saturday, 30th December
While Saturday was an arrival and orientation day, it was amazing to catch up with my Cevo colleague, Steve Mactaggart, for an awesome burger at the Hard Rock Cafe. This was followed by some exploration, watching the Bellagio Fountains show, and ending with the Vegas Golden Knights vs. Utah Hockey Club ice hockey game at T-Mobile Arena – crossing off a childhood bucket list item of seeing a live NHL game in person.
Sunday, 1st December
As is tradition on the pre-invent day, it began with badge and swag pickup at the Venetian, which is simply stunning. This year’s AWS re:Invent hoodie is epic, featuring free personalisation with a selection of designs to choose from. A lovely touch to make it special.
I bumped into AWS experts I’ve worked with, fellow Brisbane local Alan Blockley, and several other AWS Ambassadors for a coffee, followed by a star-studded lunch with AWS Heroes, AWS Community Builders, and AWS Ambassadors. Imposter syndrome was peaking – being at the same table with the top-tier professionals from around the world was unforgettable and deeply appreciated.
This right here is what re:Invent is all about – I get it now. For all the first timers: using this opportunity to network, socialise and share insights is just as valuable as attending sessions.
This was followed by an afternoon checking out the AWS Sports Forum, learning how AWS is using data and AI generated insights in sports including Formula 1, basketball, soccer, and American football. Finally, the day was rounded out with the AWS ANZ Welcome Gathering where it was an opportunity to catch up with the many faces (old and new), fellow AWS Ambassadors, AWS Heroes, AWS Community Builders and meeting some amazing partners and vendors from ANZ region.
Announcements
Sunday 1st December was an epic day for announcements, with 55 announcements. I have listed a bunch here for reference in case you missed it! The full list is available at AWS What’s New.
AWS Verified Access now supports secure access to resources over non-HTTP(S) protocols (Preview)
Today, AWS announced the preview of AWS Verified Access’ new feature that supports secure access to resources that connect over protocols such as TCP, SSH, and, RDP. With this launch, Verified Access enables you to provide secure, VPN-less access to your corporate applications and resources using AWS zero trust principles.
AWS DMS Schema Conversion now uses generative AI
AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) Schema Conversion with generative AI is now available. The feature is currently available for database schema conversion from commercial engines, such as Microsoft SQL Server, to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL.
Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports custom connectors and ingestion of streaming data
Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports custom connector and ingestion of streaming data, allowing developers to add, update, or delete data in their knowledge base through direct API calls. Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases offers fully-managed, end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows to create highly accurate, low latency, secure, and custom GenAI applications by incorporating contextual information from your company’s data sources. With this new capability, customers can easily ingest specific documents from custom data sources or Amazon S3 without requiring a full sync, and ingest streaming data without the need for intermediary storage.
Amazon S3 launches storage classes for AWS Dedicated Local Zones
You can now use the Amazon S3 Express One Zone and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access storage classes in AWS Dedicated Local Zones. Dedicated Local Zones are a type of AWS infrastructure that is fully managed by AWS, built for exclusive use by you or your community, and placed in a location or data centre specified by you to help you comply with regulatory requirements.
PartyRock improves app discovery and announces upcoming free daily use
Starting today, PartyRock is supporting improved app discovery using search, making it even easier to explore and build with generative AI. In addition, a new and improved daily free usage model will replace the current free trial grant in 2025. This will further empower everyone to build AI apps on PartyRock with daily recurring free use.
Previously, AWS offered new PartyRock users a free trial for a limited time, but starting in 2025 you can access and experiment with PartyRock apps, without the worry of exhausting the free trial credits through a free daily use grant.
Announcing AWS Transfer Family web apps
AWS Transfer Family web apps are a new resource that you can use to create a simple interface for accessing your data in Amazon S3 through a web browser. With Transfer Family web apps, you can provide your workforce with a fully managed, branded, and secure portal for your end users to browse, upload, and download data in S3.
AWS announces Invoice Configuration
Today, AWS announces the general availability of Invoice Configuration, which enables you to customise your invoicing experience to receive separate AWS invoices based on your organisational structure. This enables you to group AWS accounts according to your internal business entities such as legal entities, subsidiaries, cost centres etc., and receive separate AWS invoices for each of your business entities, within the same AWS Organization.
AWS simplifies the use of third-party block storage arrays with AWS Outposts
Starting today, customers can attach block data volumes backed by NetApp® on-premises enterprise storage arrays and Pure Storage® FlashArray™ to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances on AWS Outposts directly from the AWS Management Console. This makes it easier for customers to leverage third-party storage with Outposts.
Amazon Bedrock now supports Rerank API to improve accuracy of RAG applications
Amazon Bedrock announces support for reranker models through the Rerank API, enabling developers to improve the relevance of responses in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. The reranker models rank a set of retrieved documents based on their relevance to user’s query, helping to prioritise the most relevant content to be passed to the foundation models (FM) for response generation.
Announcing Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes
Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Hybrid Nodes. With Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes, you can use your on-premises and edge infrastructure as nodes in Amazon EKS clusters. Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes unifies Kubernetes management across environments and offloads Kubernetes control plane management to AWS for your on-premises and edge applications.
You can now manage Kubernetes applications running on-premises and in edge environments.
AWS Control Tower launches managed controls using declarative policies
Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of managed, preventive controls implemented using declarative policies in AWS Control Tower. These policies are a set of new optional controls that help you consistently enforce the desired configuration for a service. For example, customers can deploy a declarative, policy-based preventive control that disallows public sharing of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).
AWS announces Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights
AWS announces the general availability of Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights with support for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora MySQL. Database Insights is a database observability solution that provides a curated experience designed for DevOps engineers, application developers, and database administrators (DBAs) to expedite database troubleshooting and gain a holistic view into their database fleet health.
Announcing Amazon EKS Auto Mode
Today at re:Invent, AWS also announced Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Auto Mode, a new feature that fully automates compute, storage, and networking management for Kubernetes clusters. Amazon EKS Auto Mode simplifies running Kubernetes by offloading cluster operations to AWS, improves the performance and security of your applications, and helps optimise compute costs.
Amazon EC2 introduces Allowed AMIs to enhance AMI governance
Amazon EC2 introduces Allowed AMIs, a new account-wide setting that enables you to limit the discovery and use of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) within your AWS accounts. You can now simply specify the AMI owner accounts or AMI owner aliases permitted within your account. This means that only AMIs from these owners will be visible and available to you to launch EC2 instances.
Amazon S3 adds new default data integrity protections
Amazon S3 updates the default behaviour of object upload requests with new data integrity protections that build upon S3’s existing durability posture. The latest AWS SDKs now automatically calculate CRC-based checksums for uploads as data is transmitted over the network. S3 independently verifies these checksums and accepts objects after confirming that data integrity was maintained in transit over the public internet.
Storage Browser for Amazon S3 is now generally available
Amazon S3 is announcing the general availability of Storage Browser for S3, an open source component that you can add to your web applications to provide your end users with a simple interface for data stored in S3. With Storage Browser for S3, you can provide authorised end users, such as customers, partners, and employees, with access to easily browse, download, and upload data in S3 directly from your own applications.
Announcing the general availability of Amazon MemoryDB Multi-Region
Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon MemoryDB Multi-Region, a fully managed, active-active, multi-Region database that lets you build multi-Region applications with up to 99.999% availability and microsecond read and single-digit millisecond write latencies. MemoryDB is a fully managed, Valkey- and Redis OSS-compatible database service providing multi-AZ durability, microsecond read and single-digit millisecond write latency, and high throughput.
Introducing Amazon EC2 next generation high density Storage Optimized I7ie instances
Amazon Web Services is announcing general availability for next generation high density Storage Optimized I7ie instances. Designed for large storage I/O intensive workloads, I7ie instances are powered by 5th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.2 GHz, offering up to 40% better compute performance and 20% better price performance over existing I3en instances.
Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon OpenSearch Service launch an integrated analytics experience
Amazon Web Services announced a new integrated analytics experience and zero-ETL integration between Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon OpenSearch Service for customers to get the best of both services. CloudWatch customers can now leverage OpenSearch’s Piped Processing Language (PPL) and OpenSearch SQL. Additionally, CloudWatch customers can accelerate troubleshooting with out-of-the-box curated dashboards for vended logs like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Web Application Firewall.
Amazon OpenSearch Service zero-ETL integration with Amazon Security Lake
Amazon OpenSearch Service now offers a zero-ETL integration with Amazon Security Lake, enabling you to query and analyse security data in-place directly through OpenSearch. This integration allows you to efficiently explore voluminous data sources that were previously cost-prohibitive to analyse, helping you streamline security investigations and obtain comprehensive visibility of your security landscape.
Amazon Web Services announces declarative policies
Today, AWS announces the general availability of declarative policies, a new management policy type within AWS Organizations. These policies simplify the way customers enforce durable intent, such as baseline configuration for AWS services within their organisation. For example, customers can configure EC2 to allow instance launches using AMIs vended by specific providers and block public access in their VPC with a few simple clicks or commands for their entire organisation using declarative policies.
Announcing Amazon EC2 I8g instances
AWS is announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) storage optimized I8g instances. I8g instances offer the best performance in Amazon EC2 for storage-intensive workloads. I8g instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors that deliver up to 60% better compute performance compared to previous generation I4g instances.
