AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Bedrock, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon CodeCatalyst, and more (April 29, 2024)

This was a busy week for Amazon Bedrock with many new features! Using GitHub Actions with AWS CodeBuild is much easier. Also, Amazon Q in Amazon CodeCatalyst can now manage more complex issues.

I was amazed to meet so many new and old friends at the AWS Summit London. To give you a quick glimpse, here’s AWS Hero Yan Cui starting his presentation at the AWS Community stage.

Last week’s launches
With so many interesting new features, I start with generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) and then move to the other topics. Here’s what got my attention:

Amazon Bedrock – For supported architectures such as Llama, Mistral, or Flan T5, you can now import custom models and access them on demand. Model evaluation is now generally available to help you evaluate, compare, and select the best foundation models (FMs) for your specific use case. You can now access Meta’s Llama 3 models.

Agents for Amazon Bedrock – A simplified agent creation and return of control, so that you can define an action schema and get the control back to perform those action without needing to create a specific AWS Lambda function. Agents also added support for Anthropic Claude 3 Haiku and Sonnet to help build faster and more intelligent agents.

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – You can now ingest data from up to five data sources and provide more complete answers. In the console, you can now chat with one of your documents without needing to set up a vector database (read more in this Machine Learning blog post).

Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock – The capability to implement safeguards based on your use cases and responsible AI policies is now available with new safety filters and privacy controls.

Amazon Titan – The new watermark detection feature is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock. In this way, you can identify images generated by Amazon Titan Image Generator using an invisible watermark present in all images generated by Amazon Titan.

Amazon CodeCatalyst – Amazon Q can now split complex issues into separate, simpler tasks that can then be assigned to a user or back to Amazon Q. CodeCatalyst now also supports approval gates within a workflow. Approval gates pause a workflow that is building, testing, and deploying code so that a user can validate whether it should be allowed to proceed.

Amazon EC2 – You can now remove an automatically assigned public IPv4 address from an EC2 instance. If you no longer need the automatically assigned public IPv4 (for example, because you are migrating to using a private IPv4 address for SSH with EC2 instance connect), you can use this option to quickly remove the automatically assigned public IPv4 address and reduce your public IPv4 costs.

Network Load Balancer – Now supports Resource Map in AWS Management Console, a tool that displays all your NLB resources and their relationships in a visual format on a single page. Note that Application Load Balancer already supports Resource Map in the console.

AWS CodeBuild – Now supports managed GitHub Action self-hosted runners. You can configure CodeBuild projects to receive GitHub Actions workflow job events and run them on CodeBuild ephemeral hosts.

Amazon Route 53 – You can now define a standard DNS configuration in the form of a Profile, apply this configuration to multiple VPCs, and share it across AWS accounts.

AWS Direct Connect – Hosted connections now support capacities up to 25 Gbps. Before, the maximum was 10 Gbps. Higher bandwidths simplify deployments of applications such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), media and entertainment (M&E), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB – A revamped operation builder user interface to help you better navigate, run operations, and browse your DynamoDB tables.

Amazon GameLift – Now supports in preview end-to-end development of containerized workloads, including deployment and scaling on premises, in the cloud, or for hybrid configurations. You can use containers for building, deploying, and running game server packages.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that you might find interesting:

GQL, the new ISO standard for graphs, has arrived – GQL, which stands for Graph Query Language, is the first new ISO database language since the introduction of SQL in 1987.

Authorize API Gateway APIs using Amazon Verified Permissions and Amazon Cognito – Externalizing authorization logic for application APIs can yield multiple benefits. Here’s an example of how to use Cedar policies to secure a REST API.

Build and deploy a 1 TB/s file system in under an hour – Very nice walkthrough for something that used to be not so easy to do in the recent past.

Let’s Architect! Discovering Generative AI on AWS – A new episode in this amazing series of posts that provides a broad introduction to the domain and then shares a mix of videos, blog posts, and hands-on workshops.

Building scalable, secure, and reliable RAG applications using Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – This post explores the new features (including AWS CloudFormation support) and how they align with the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Using the unified CloudWatch Agent to send traces to AWS X-Ray – With added support for the collection of AWS X-Ray and OpenTelemetry traces, you can now provision a single agent to capture metrics, logs, and traces.

The executive’s guide to generative AI for sustainability – A guide for implementing a generative AI roadmap within sustainability strategies.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes about open source projects, tools, and events from the AWS Community. Check out Ricardo’s page for the latest updates.

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. Register in your nearest city: Singapore (May 7), Seoul (May 16–17), Hong Kong (May 22), Milan (May 23), Stockholm (June 4), and Madrid (June 5).

AWS re:Inforce – Explore 2.5 days of immersive cloud security learning in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce, June 10–12 in Pennsylvania.

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: Turkey (May 18), Midwest | Columbus (June 13), Sri Lanka (June 27), Cameroon (July 13), Nigeria (August 24), and New York (August 28).

GOTO EDA Day London – Join us in London on May 14 to learn about event-driven architectures (EDA) for building highly scalable, fault tolerant, and extensible applications. This conference is organized by GOTO, AWS, and partners.

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

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!