AWS Weekly Roundup: Global AWS Heroes Summit, AWS Lambda, HAQM Redshift, and more (July 22, 2024)

Last week, AWS Heroes from around the world gathered to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the AWS Heroes program at Global AWS Heroes Summit. This program recognizes a select group of AWS experts worldwide who go above and beyond in sharing their knowledge and making an impact within developer communities.

Matt Garman, CEO of AWS and a long-time supporter of developer communities, made a special appearance for a Q&A session with the Heroes to listen to their feedback and respond to their questions.

Here’s an epic photo from the AWS Heroes Summit:

As Matt mentioned in his Linkedin post, “The developer community has been core to everything we have done since the beginning of AWS.” Thank you, Heroes, for all you do. Wishing you all a safe flight home.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that caught my attention last week:

Announcing the July 2024 updates to HAQM Corretto — The latest updates for the Corretto distribution of OpenJDK is now available. This includes security and critical updates for the Long-Term Supported (LTS) and Feature (FR) versions.

New open-source Advanced MYSQL ODBC Driver now available for HAQM Aurora and RDS — The new AWS ODBC Driver for MYSQL provides faster switchover and failover times, and authentication support for AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), making it a more efficient and secure option for connecting to HAQM RDS and HAQM Aurora MySQL-compatible edition databases.

Productionize Fine-tuned Foundation Models from SageMaker Canvas — HAQM SageMaker Canvas now allows you to deploy fine-tuned Foundation Models (FMs) to SageMaker real-time inference endpoints, making it easier to integrate generative AI capabilities into your applications outside the SageMaker Canvas workspace.

AWS Lambda now supports SnapStart for Java functions that use the ARM64 architecture — Lambda SnapStart for Java functions on ARM64 architecture delivers up to 10x faster function startup performance and up to 34% better price performance compared to x86, enabling the building of highly responsive and scalable Java applications using AWS Lambda.

HAQM QuickSight improves controls performance — HAQM QuickSight has improved the performance of controls, allowing readers to interact with them immediately without having to wait for all relevant controls to reload. This enhancement reduces the loading time experienced by readers.

HAQM OpenSearch Serverless levels up speed and efficiency with smart caching — The new smart caching feature for indexing in HAQM OpenSearch Serverless automatically fetches and manages data, leading to faster data retrieval, efficient storage usage, and cost savings.

HAQM Redshift Serverless with lower base capacity available in the Europe (London) Region — HAQM Redshift Serverless now allows you to start with a lower data warehouse base capacity of 8 Redshift Processing Units (RPUs) in the Europe (London) region, providing more flexibility and cost-effective options for small to large workloads.

AWS Lambda now supports HAQM MQ for ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ in five new regions — AWS Lambda now supports HAQM MQ for ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ in five new regions, enabling you to build serverless applications with Lambda functions that are invoked based on messages posted to HAQM MQ message brokers.

From community.aws
Here’s my top 5 personal favorites posts from community.aws:

• A Developer’s Guide to Advanced Chunking and Parsing with HAQM Bedrock by Suman Debnath.
• Enhancing Document Analysis with Embedding Adapters on AWS by Mehdi Nemlaghi.
• De-Bugging with HAQM Q and Generative AI by Kasun de Silva.
• Using HAQM Q Developer to update Valkey client code by Ricardo Sueiras.
• Software coding practices in an AI assistant world by cak Derek Bingham.

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. To learn more about future AWS Summit events, visit the AWS Summit page. Register in your nearest city: AWS Summit Taipei (July 23–24), AWS Summit Mexico City (Aug. 7), and AWS Summit Sao Paulo (Aug. 15).

AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Upcoming AWS Community Days are in Aotearoa (Aug. 15), Nigeria (Aug. 24), New York (Aug. 28), and Belfast (Sept. 6).

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

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

— Donnie

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