AWS Week in Review – Step Functions Versions and Aliases, EC2 Instances with Graviton3E Processors, and More – June 26, 2023

It’s now summer in the northern hemisphere, and you can feel it in London where I live. But let’s not get distracted by the nice weather and go through your AWS updates from the previous seven days.

Last Week’s Launches
Another interesting week with many announcements! Here are some that got more of my attention:

AWS Step Functions – You can now use versions and aliases to maintain multiple versions of your workflows, track which version was used for each execution, and create aliases that route traffic between workflow versions. To learn more, refer to this blog post.

AWS SAM – You can now simplify the way you define an AppSync GraphQL API in AWS SAM with the new a resource abstraction that includes everything necessary for a typical AppSync GraphQL API definition, including the API schema, the resolver pipeline functions, and data sources.

AWS Amplify – With the new Amplify UI Builder Figma plugin, you can theme your components, upgrade to new Amplify UI kit versions, and generate and preview React code from your designs directly in Figma.

AWS Local Zones – Now available in Manila, Philippines. You can use AWS Local Zones for applications that require single-digit millisecond latency or local data processing.

AWS Control Tower – The integration with Security Hub is now generally available. You can now enable over 170 Security Hub detective controls that map to related control objectives from AWS Control Tower. AWS Control Tower also detects drifts when you disable a control from Security Hub.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose – You can now deliver streaming data to Amazon Redshift Serverless. In this way, you can build an analytics platform without having to manage ingestion infrastructure or data warehouse clusters.

Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor – Now available in all standard AWS Regions. Internet Monitor helps you diagnose internet issues between your AWS hosted applications and your application’s end users.

AWS Verified Access – Now provides improved logging functionality. With that, It’s easier to author and troubleshoot application access policies by reviewing the end-user context received from third-party services.

Amazon Managed Grafana – Now supports Trace Analytics with the OpenSearch Grafana data source plugin in addition to the existing support for Log Analytics. You can simplify the correlation and analysis of logs and trace data stored in OpenSearch along with metrics from other data sources.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights – You can now use the new dedup command in your queries to view unique results based on one or more fields. Duplicates are discarded based on the sort order so that only the first result is kept.

AWS Config – Now supports 21 more resource types for services such as AWS Amplify, AWS App Mesh, AWS App Runner, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and Amazon SageMaker.

Amazon EC2 – Announcing the new EC2 C7gn and Hpc7g instances that use Graviton3E processors. The Graviton3E processor delivers higher memory bandwidth and compute performance than Graviton2, and higher vector instruction performance than Graviton3. Read more in Jeff’s C7gn and Channy’s Hpc7g blog posts.

Amazon EFS – Provisioned Throughput now supports up to 10 GiB/s (from 3 GiB/s) for reads and 3 GiB/s (from 1 GiB/s) for writes.

Other AWS News
A few more news items and blog posts you might have missed:

Good tips – Mitigate Common Web Threats with One Click in Amazon CloudFront

A nice series – Let’s Architect! Open-source technologies on AWS

An interesting solution – Deploy a serverless ML inference endpoint of large language models using FastAPI, AWS Lambda, and AWS CDK

For AWS open-source news and updates, check out the latest newsletter curated by Ricardo to bring you the most recent updates on open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Here are some opportunities to meet and learn:

AWS Applications Innovation Day (June 27) – Learn how product teams across applications, security, and artificial intelligence (AI) are collaborating with AWS Partners like Asana, Slack, Splunk, Atlassian, Okta, and more to help organizations work smarter together. For more information on the event, refer to this blog post.

AWS Summits – Get together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS in Hong Kong (July 20), New York (July 26), Taiwan (Aug 2 & 3), Sao Paulo (Aug 3).

AWS re:Invent (Nov 27 – Dec 1) – Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community. Registration is now open.

Amazon Prime Day (July 11-12) is coming, and you can learn more in this blog post. We should keep an eye out for Jeff’s annual Prime Day post following the event.

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

— Danilo