Happy New Year! AWS Weekly Roundup – January 8, 2024

Happy New Year! Cloud technologies, machine learning, and generative AI have become more accessible, impacting nearly every aspect of our lives. Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels offers four tech predictions for 2024 and beyond:

• Generative AI becomes culturally aware
• FemTech finally takes off
• AI assistants redefine developer productivity
• Education evolves to match the speed of technology

Read how these technology trends will converge to help solve some of society’s most difficult problems. Download the Werner Vogels’ Tech Predictions for 2024 and Beyond ebook or read Werner’s All Things Distributed blog.

To hear insights from AWS and industry thought leaders, grow your skills, and get inspired, watch AWS re:Invent 2023 videos on demand for keynotes, innovation talks, breakout sessions, and AWS Hero guide playlists.

Launches from the last few weeks
Since our last week in review on December 18, 2023, I’d like to highlight some launches from year end, as well as last week:

New AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region – We are opening a new and second Region and in Canada, AWS Canada West (Calgary). At the end of 2023, AWS had 33 AWS Regions and 105 Availability Zones (AZs) globally. We preannounced 12 additional AZs in four future Regions in Malaysia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. We will share more information on these Regions in 2024. Please stay tuned.

DNS over HTTPS in Amazon Route 53 Resolver – You can use the DNS over HTTPS (DoH) protocol for both inbound and outbound Route 53 Resolver endpoints. As the name suggests, DoH supports HTTP or HTTP/2 over TLS to encrypt the data exchanged for Domain Name System (DNS) resolutions.

Automatic enrollment to Amazon RDS Extended Support – Your MySQL 5.7 and PostgreSQL 11 database instances running on Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS will be automatically enrolled into Amazon RDS Extended Support starting on February 29, 2024. You can have more control over when you want to upgrade the major version of your database after the community end of life (EoL).

New Amazon CloudWatch Network Monitor – This is a new feature of Amazon CloudWatch that helps monitor network availability and performance between AWS and your on-premises environments. Network Monitor needs zero manual instrumentation and gives you access to real-time network visibility to proactively and quickly identify issues within the AWS network and your own hybrid environment. For more information, read Monitor hybrid connectivity with Amazon CloudWatch Network Monitor.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL integrations with Amazon Bedrock – You can use two methods to integrate Aurora PostgreSQL databases with Amazon Bedrock to power generative AI applications. You can use the SQL query with Aurora ML integration with Amazon Bedrock and Aurora vector store with Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

New WordPress setup on Amazon Lightsail – Set up your WordPress website on Amazon Lightsail with the new workflow to eliminate complexity and time spent configuring your website. The workflow allows you to complete all the necessary steps, including setting up a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate to secure your website with HTTPS.

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 other news items that you may find interesting in the new year:

Book recommendations for AWS customer executives – Plan for the new year and catch up on what others are doing and thinking. AWS Enterprise Strategy team recommends what books are most important for our AWS customer executives to read.

Best practices for scaling AWS CDK adoption with Platform Engineering – A recent evolution in DevOps is the introduction of platform engineering teams to build services, toolchains, and documentation to support workload teams. This blog post introduces strategies and best practices for accelerating CDK adoption within your organization. You can learn how to scale the lessons learned from the pilot project across your organization through platform engineering.

High performance running HPC applications on AWS Graviton instances – When running the Parallel Lattice Boltzmann Solver (Palabos) on Amazon EC2 Hpc7g instances to solve computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems, performance increased by up to 70% and price performance was up to 3x better than on the previous generation of Graviton instances.

The new AWS open source newsletter, #181 – Check up on all the latest open source content, which this week includes AWS Amplify, Amazon Corretto, dbt, Apache Flink, Karpenter, LangChain, Pinecone, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events in the new year:

AWS at CES 2024 (January 9-12) – AWS will be representing some of the latest cloud services and solutions that are purpose built for the automotive, mobility, transportation, and manufacturing industries. Join us to learn about the latest cloud capabilities across generative AI, software define vehicles, product engineering, sustainability, new digital customer experiences, connected mobility, autonomous driving, and so much more in Amazon Experience Area.

APJ Builders Online Series (January 18) – This online conference is designed for you to learn core AWS concepts, and step-by-step architectural best practices, including demonstrations to help you get started and accelerate your success on AWS.

You can browse all upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, and developer-focused events such as AWS DevDay.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Channy

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