HanaByte attended their first re:Invent last week, and got a ton of announcements to share! In this article, we will highlight some of our favorite announcements! The HanaByte team is very grateful for the opportunity to attend re:Invent in person, and had a lot of fun while covering some great new announcements.
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch, AWS’s flagship service when it comes to logging, received some new features that help with cost, querying, and alarming.
Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Metrics Querying and Alarming: AWS announced that CloudWatch now supports hybrid and multi-cloud metrics querying and alarming. This provides a single solution for logging.
New Infrequent Access Log Class: In addition, there is a new log class for infrequent access logs at a reduced price. This log class allows for a 50 percent lower per GB ingestion price than the Standard log class. Note that this log class does not allow for features such as Live Tail, alarms, data protection, or Live Tail.
Natural Language Query Generation (Preview): AWS is using AI to allow for natural language query generation for query summarization, detection of pattern differentials, and anomaly detection. This feature is currently in preview.
AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager is a favorite at HanaByte’s since it’s an essential security service allowing for the management and access of EC2 instances and more within AWS’s ecosystem.
Low-code visual designer for runbooks: AWS has a low-code visual designer for Runbooks, which supports Python script integration.
AWS Config
AWS Config is another essential security service, which tracks changes over time and contains an inventory of all cloud assets within an organization. One major pain point for customers is the cost of this service, and luckily at re:Invent with the announcement of Periodic Recording, customers now have more granularity when it comes to recording changes (and reducing cost).
Periodic Recording: AWS Config has added support for periodic recording of changes, which allows for a reduced volume of changes that are captured and delivered. This in turn reduces the cost of collecting config changes and allows an organization to scale, track, and enforce compliance across resources that change infrequently.
myApplications
General Release of myApplications: myApplications allows users to “easily manage and monitor the cost, health, security posture, and performance of applications on AWS”. This adds tags for reporting/dashboards, and supports applications via infrastructure as code (IaC) such as CloudFormation and Terraform.
Amazon Bedrock
Amazon Bedrock was announced with general availability back in September, and during re:Invent, AWS has built on this service with some interesting new additions.
Improved Control of Orchestration and Visibility Into Reasoning: The need to know how an AI makes decisions is imperative with generative AI services such as Amazon Bedrock. AWS announced that Agents for Amazon Bedrock are available which allows users to view reasoning steps and modify agent-created prompts.
Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock (Preview): AWS has announced Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock, allowing safeguards for use cases and responsible AI policies.
Access to Anthropic’s Latest Model (Claude 2.1): AWS announced the availability of Anthropic’s Claude 2.1 foundational model (FM) in BedRock, allowing capabilities for organizations such as larger context windows, strong accuracy upgrades, system prompts, function calling, and workflow orchestration.
CodeWhisperer
CodeWhisperer is AWS’s AI-powered code generator, aimed at increasing developer productivity in both integrated developer environments (IDEs) and command line. At HanaByte, we are fans of the fine-grained access control and code training abilities that it has. We were excited to hear at re:Invent 2023 that, Infrastructure as Code lovers such as ourselves, now have support.
Support for Infrastructure as Code: Amazon CodeWhisperer now has support for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) including AWS CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), and HashiCorp Terraform (HCL).
IAM Access Analyzer
Unused Access Analyzer: with the unused access analyzer, permissions that are not actually used will now be presented so that security teams can remove unused permissions, roles, and IAM users.
Custom Policy Checks: custom policy checks allow validation that new policies don’t grant excessive permissions. This can be integrated into automated CI/CD checks and custom tooling.
Amazon S3
HanaByte is excited about the new Express Zone One storage class, and even took a picture with the S3 bucket at the conference!
New Express Zone One Storage Class: with the new S3 Express One Zone storage class, the fastest object storage has been created allowing for request latency that are measured in single milliseconds. This is an important feature when data needs to be accessed quickly, such as for AI/ML workloads and analytics workloads.
Amazon EC2
At HanaByte, we’re excited about new innovations when it comes to cloud computing. This re:Invent did not disappoint, as new innovations with AWS-designed chips specifically geared towards AI/ML workloads have been announced.
New Graviton4 Processors: Graviton4 processors provide better compute performance, additional cores, more memory bandwidth, and overall efficiency.
New Trainium2 Instances: Trainum2 processors were announced, boasting faster training than the first generation chips, as well as having the ability to be deployed into EC2 UltraClusters with the goal of training foundation models (FMs) and large language models (LLMs) in a more efficient manner.
