AWS Weekly Roundup: AI21 Labs’ Jamba-Instruct in Amazon Bedrock, Amazon WorkSpaces Pools, and more (July 1, 2024)

AWS Summit New York is 10 days away, and I am very excited about the new announcements and more than 170 sessions. There will be A Night Out with AWS event after the summit for professionals from the media and entertainment, gaming, and sports industries who are existing Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers or have a keen interest in using AWS Cloud services for their business. You’ll have the opportunity to relax, collaborate, and build new connections with AWS leaders and industry peers.

Let’s look at the last week’s new announcements.

Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention.

AI21 Labs’ Jamba-Instruct now available in Amazon Bedrock – AI21 Labs’ Jamba-Instruct is an instruction-following large language model (LLM) for reliable commercial use, with the ability to understand context and subtext, complete tasks from natural language instructions, and ingest information from long documents or financial filings. With strong reasoning capabilities, Jamba-Instruct can break down complex problems, gather relevant information, and provide structured outputs to enable uses like Q&A on calls, summarizing documents, building chatbots, and more. For more information, visit AI21 Labs in Amazon Bedrock and the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.

Amazon WorkSpaces Pools, a new feature of Amazon WorkSpaces – You can now create a pool of non-persistent virtual desktops using Amazon WorkSpaces and save costs by sharing them across users who receive a fresh desktop each time they sign in. WorkSpaces Pools provides the flexibility to support shared environments like training labs and contact centers, and some user settings like bookmarks and files stored in a central storage repository such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Amazon FSx can be saved for improved personalization. You can use AWS Auto Scaling to automatically scale the pool of virtual desktops based on usage metrics or schedules. For pricing information, refer to the Amazon WorkSpaces Pricing page.

API-driven, OpenLineage-compatible data lineage visualization in Amazon DataZone (preview) – Amazon DataZone introduces a new data lineage feature that allows you to visualize how data moves from source to consumption across organizations. The service captures lineage events from OpenLineage-enabled systems or through API to trace data transformations. Data consumers can gain confidence in an asset’s origin, and producers can assess the impact of changes by understanding its consumption through the comprehensive lineage view. Additionally, Amazon DataZone versions lineage with each event to enable visualizing lineage at any point in time or comparing transformations across an asset or job’s history. To learn more, visit Amazon DataZone, read my News Blog post, and get started with data lineage documentation.

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now offers observability logs – You can now monitor knowledge ingestion logs through Amazon CloudWatch, S3 buckets, or Amazon Data Firehose streams. This provides enhanced visibility into whether documents were successfully processed or encountered failures during ingestion. Having these comprehensive insights promptly ensures that you can efficiently determine when your documents are ready for use. For more details on these new capabilities, refer to the Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock documentation.

Updates and expansion to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Lens Catalog – We announced updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Lens Catalog to provide expanded guidance and recommendations on architectural best practices for building secure and resilient cloud workloads. The updates reduce redundancies and enhance consistency in resources and framework structure. The Lens Catalog now includes the new Financial Services Industry Lens and updates to the Mergers and Acquisitions Lens. We also made important updates to the Change Enablement in the Cloud whitepaper. You can use the updated Well-Architected Framework and Lens Catalog to design cloud architectures optimized for your unique requirements by following current best practices.

Cross-account machine learning (ML) model sharing support in Amazon SageMaker Model Registry – Amazon SageMaker Model Registry now integrates with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM), allowing you to easily share ML models across AWS accounts. This helps data scientists, ML engineers, and governance officers access models in different accounts like development, staging, and production. You can share models in Amazon SageMaker Model Registry by specifying the model in the AWS RAM console and granting access to other accounts. This new feature is now available in all AWS Regions where SageMaker Model Registry is available except GovCloud Regions. To learn more, visit the Amazon SageMaker Developer Guide.

AWS CodeBuild supports Arm-based workloads using AWS Graviton3 – AWS CodeBuild now supports natively building and testing Arm workloads on AWS Graviton3 processors without additional configuration, providing up to 25% higher performance and 60% lower energy usage than previous Graviton processors. To learn more about CodeBuild’s support for Arm, visit our AWS CodeBuild User Guide.

We launched existing services and instance types in additional Regions:

• Amazon RDS now supports integration with AWS Secrets Manager in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. RDS integration with AWS Secrets Manager improves your database security by ensuring your RDS master user password is not visible in plaintext to administrators or engineers during your database creation workflow.
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now available in Canada (Central) Region. OpenSearch Serverless is a serverless deployment option for Amazon OpenSearch Service that makes it simple to run search and analytics workloads without the complexities of infrastructure management.
• Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling is now available in the AWS Europe (Spain, Zurich) and Middle East (UAE) Regions. Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling elastically scales query processing power to provide consistently fast performance for hundreds of concurrent queries.
• Amazon ElastiCache now supports Graviton3-based M7g and R7g node families in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon, N. California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris (M7g only), Spain, Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Hyderabad, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo). These new nodes deliver up to 28% increased throughput, 21% improved P99 latency, and 25% higher networking bandwidth compared to Graviton2 nodes for improved price performance.
• Amazon EC2 C6a instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. C6a instances are powered by third-generation AMD EPYC processors with a maximum frequency of 3.6 GHz. C6a instances deliver up to 15% better price performance than comparable C5a instances.
• Amazon Redshift Serverless with lower base capacity is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Europe (Stockholm), and US West (N. California) Regions. Amazon Redshift Serverless now has a lower minimum base capacity of 8 RPUs, down from 32 RPUs, providing more flexibility to support a diverse range of small to large workloads based on price-performance requirements by measuring capacity in RPUs paid per second.
• Amazon Athena Provisioned Capacity is now available in South America (São Paulo) and Europe (Spain) Regions. Provisioned Capacity is a feature of Athena that allows you to run SQL queries on fully managed, dedicated serverless resources for a fixed price and no long-term commitments.
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs account-level subscription filter is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East, US-West) Regions, as well as Israel (Tel Aviv), and Canada West (Calgary) Regions. With this new capability, you can deliver real-time log events that are ingested into Amazon CloudWatch Logs to a Kinesis Data Streams data stream, an Amazon Data Firehose delivery stream, or an AWS Lambda function for custom processing, analysis, or delivery to other destinations using a single account level subscription filter.
• Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (Route 53 ARC) zonal autoshift is now generally available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East, US-West) Regions. With this feature, you can safely and automatically shift an application’s traffic away from an Availability Zone when AWS identifies a potential failure affecting that Availability Zone.
• AWS Backup support for Amazon S3 is now available in AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region. AWS Backup is a policy-based, fully managed, and cost-effective solution that enables you to centralize and automate data protection of Amazon S3 along with other AWS services (spanning compute, storage, and databases) and third-party applications.
• Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with 3TiB of memory are now available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. You can start using these new High Memory instances with On Demand and Savings Plan purchase options.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional news items that you might find interesting:

Top reasons to build and scale generative AI applications on Amazon Bedrock – Check out Jeff Barr’s video, where he discusses why our customers are choosing Amazon Bedrock to build and scale generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) applications that deliver fast value and business growth. Amazon Bedrock is becoming a preferred platform for building and scaling generative AI due to its features, innovation, availability, and security. Leading organizations across diverse sectors use Amazon Bedrock to speed their generative AI work, like creating intelligent virtual assistants, creative design solutions, document processing systems, and a lot more.

Four ways AWS is engineering infrastructure to power generative AI – We continue to optimize our infrastructure to support generative AI at scale through innovations like delivering low-latency, large-scale networking to enable faster model training, continuously improving data center energy efficiency, prioritizing security throughout our infrastructure design, and developing custom AI chips like AWS Trainium to increase computing performance while lowering costs and energy usage. Read the new blog post about how AWS is engineering infrastructure for generative AI.

AWS re:Inforce 2024 re:Cap – It’s been 2 weeks since AWS re:Inforce 2024, our annual cloud-security learning event. Check out the summary of the event prepared by Wojtek.

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. To learn more about future AWS Summit events, visit the AWS Summit page. Register in your nearest city: New York (July 10), Bogotá (July 18), and Taipei (July 23–24).

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. Upcoming AWS Community Days are in Cameroon (July 13), Aotearoa (August 15), and Nigeria (August 24).

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!

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