AWS Weekly Roundup — New models for HAQM Bedrock, CloudFront embedded POPs, and more — March 4, 2024

This has been a busy week – we introduced a new kind of HAQM CloudFront infrastructure, more efficient ways to analyze data stored on HAQM Simple Storage Service (HAQM S3), and new generative AI capabilities.

Last week’s launches
Here’s what got my attention:

HAQM Bedrock – Mistral AI’s Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral 7B foundation models are now generally available on HAQM Bedrock. More details in Donnie’s post. Here’s a deep dive into Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B models, by my colleague Mike.

Knowledge Bases for HAQM Bedrock – With hybrid search support, you can improve the relevance of retrieved results, especially for keyword searches. More information and examples in this post on the AWS Machine Learning Blog.

HAQM CloudFront – We announced the availability of embedded Points of Presence (POPs), a new type of CloudFront infrastructure deployed closest to end viewers, within internet service provider (ISP) and mobile network operator (MNO) networks. Embedded POPs are custom-built to deliver large scale live-stream video, video-on-demand (VOD), and game downloads. Today, CloudFront has 600+ embedded POPs deployed across 200+ cities globally.

HAQM Kinesis Data Streams – To help you analyze and visualize the data in your streams in real-time, you can now run SQL queries with one click in the AWS Management Console.

HAQM EventBridge – API destinations now supports content-type header customization. By defining your own content-type, you can unlock more HTTP targets for API destinations, including support for CloudEvents. Read more in this X/Twitter thread by Nik, principal engineer at AWS Lambda.

HAQM MWAA – You can now create Apache Airflow version 2.8 environments on HAQM Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA). More in this AWS Big Data blog post.

HAQM CloudWatch Logs – With CloudWatch Logs support for IPv6, you can simplify your network stack by running HAQM CloudWatch log groups on a dual-stack network that supports both IPv4 and IPv6. You can find more information on AWS services that support IPv6 in the documentation.

SQL Workbench for HAQM DynamoDB – As you use this client-side application to help you visualize and build scalable, high-performance data models, you can now clone tables between development environments. With this feature, you can develop and test your code with HAQM DynamoDB tables in the same state across multiple development environments.

AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)  – The new AWS AppConfig Level 2 (L2) constructs simplify provisioning of AWS AppConfig resources, including feature flags and dynamic configuration data.

HAQM Location Service – You can now use the authentication libraries for iOS and Android platforms to simplify the integration of HAQM Location Service into mobile apps. The libraries support API key and HAQM Cognito authentication.

HAQM SageMaker – You can now accelerate HAQM SageMaker Model Training using the HAQM S3 Express One Zone storage class to gain faster load times for training data, checkpoints, and model outputs. S3 Express One Zone is purpose-built to deliver the fastest cloud object storage for performance-critical applications, and delivers consistent single-digit millisecond request latency and high throughput.

HAQM Data Firehose – Now supports message extraction for CloudWatch Logs. CloudWatch log records use a nested JSON structure, and the message in each record is embedded within header information. It’s now easier to filter out the header information and deliver only the embedded message to the destination, reducing the cost of subsequent processing and storage.

HAQM OpenSearch – Terraform now supports HAQM OpenSearch Ingestion deployments, a fully managed data ingestion tier for HAQM OpenSearch Service that allows you to ingest and process petabyte-scale data before indexing it in HAQM OpenSearch-managed clusters and serverless collections. Read more in this AWS Big Data blog post.

AWS Mainframe Modernization – AWS Blu Age Runtime is now available for seamless deployment on HAQM ECS on AWS Fargate to run modernized applications in serverless containers.

AWS Local Zones – A new Local Zone in Atlanta helps applications that require single-digit millisecond latency for use cases such as real-time gaming, hybrid migrations, media and entertainment content creation, live video streaming, engineering simulations, and more.

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, programs, and news items that you might find interesting.

The PartyRock Hackathon is closing this month, and there is still time to join and make apps without code! Here’s the screenshot of a quick app that I built to help me plan what to do when I visit a new place.

Use RAG for drug discovery with Knowledge Bases for HAQM Bedrock – A very interesting use case for generative AI.

Here’s a complete solution to build a robust text-to-SQL solution generating complex queries, self-correcting, and querying diverse data sources.

A nice overview of .NET 8 Support on AWS, the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of cross-platform .NET.

Introducing the AWS WAF traffic overview dashboard – A new tool to help you make informed decisions about your security posture for applications protected by AWS WAF.

Some tips on how to improve the speed and cost of high performance computing (HPC) deployment with Mountpoint for HAQM S3, an open source file client that you can use to mount an S3 bucket on your compute instances, accessing it as a local file system.

My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter, in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community.

Upcoming AWS events
You can feel it in the air–the AWS Summits season is coming back! The first ones will be in Europe, you can join us in Paris (April 3), Amsterdam (April 9), and London (April 24). On March 12, you can meet public sector industry leaders and AWS experts at the AWS Public Sector Symposium in Brussels.

AWS Innovate are an online events designed to help you develop the right skills to design, deploy, and operate infrastructure and applications. AWS Innovate Generative AI + Data Edition for Americas is on March 14. It follows the ones for Asia Pacific & Japan and EMEA that we held in February.

There are still a few AWS Community re:Invent re:Cap events organized by volunteers from AWS User Groups and AWS Cloud Clubs around the world to learn about the latest announcements from AWS re:Invent.

You can browse all upcoming 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.