AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Q, Amazon QuickSight, AWS CodeArtifact, Amazon Bedrock, and more (May 6, 2024)

April has been packed with new releases! Last week continued that trend with many new releases supporting a variety of domains such as security, analytics, devops, and many more, as well as more exciting new capabilities within generative AI.

If you missed the AWS Summit London 2024, you can now watch the sessions on demand, including the keynote by Tanuja Randery, VP & Marketing Director, EMEA, and many of the break-out sessions which will continue to be released over the coming weeks.

Last week’s launches
Here are some of the highlights that caught my attention this week:

Manual and automatic rollback from any stage in AWS CodePipeline – You can now rollback any stage, other than Source, to any previously known good state in if you use a V2 pipeline in AWS CodePipeline. You can configure automatic rollback which will use the source changes from the most recent successful pipeline execution in the case of failure, or you can initiate a manual rollback for any stage from the console, API or SDK and choose which pipeline execution you want to use for the rollback.

AWS CodeArtifact now supports RubyGems – Ruby community, rejoice, you can now store your gems in AWS CodeArtifact! You can integrate it with RubyGems.org, and CodeArtifact will automatically fetch any gems requested by the client and store them locally in your CodeArtifact repository. That means that you can have a centralized place for both your first-party and public gems so developers can access their dependencies from a single source.

Create a repository in AWS CodeArtifact and choose “rubygems-store” to connect your repository to RubyGems.org on the “Public upstream repositories” dropdown.

Amazon EventBridge Pipes now supports event delivery through AWS PrivateLink – You can now deliver events to an Amazon EventBridge Pipes target without traversing the public internet by using AWS PrivateLink. You can poll for events in a private subnet in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without having to deploy any additional infrastructure to keep your traffic private.

Amazon Bedrock launches continue. You can now run scalable, enterprise-grade generative AI workloads with Cohere Command R & R+. And Amazon Titan Text V2 is now optimized for improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

AWS Trusted Advisor – last year we launched Trusted Advisor APIs enabling you to programmatically consume recommendations. A new API is available now that you can use to exclude resources from recommendations.

Amazon EC2 – there have been two new great launches this week for EC2 users. You can now mark your AMIs as “protected” to avoid them being deregistered by accident. You can also now easily discover your active AMIs by simply describing them.

Amazon CodeCatalyst – you can now view your git commit history in the CodeCatalyst console.

General Availability
Many new services and capabilities became generally available this week.

Amazon Q in QuickSight – Amazon Q has brought generative BI to Amazon QuickSight giving you the ability to build beautiful dashboards automatically simply by using natural language and it’s now generally available. To get started, head to the Quicksight Pricing page to explore all options or start a 30-day free trial which allows up to 4 users per QuickSight account to use all the new generative AI features.

With the new generative AI features enabled by Amazon Q in Amazon QuickSight you can use natural language queries to build, sort and filter dashboards. (source: AWS Documentation)

Amazon Q Business (GA) and Amazon Q Apps (Preview) – Also generally available now is Amazon Q Business which we launched last year at AWS re:Invent 2023 with the ability to connect seamlessly with over 40 popular enterprise systems, including Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Gmail, and so many more. This allows Amazon Q Business to know about your business so your employees can generate content, solve problems, and take actions that are specific to your business.

We have also launched support for custom plug-ins, so now you can create your own integrations with any third-party application.

With general availability of Amazon Q Business we have also launched the ability to create your own custom plugins to connect to any third-party API.

Another highlight of this release is the launch of Amazon Q Apps, which enables you to quickly generate an app from your conversation with Amazon Q Business, or by describing what you would like it to generate for you. All guardrails from Amazon Q Business apply, and it’s easy to share your apps with colleagues through an admin-managed library. Amazon Q Apps is in preview now.

Check out Channy Yun’s post for a deeper dive into Amazon Q Business and Amazon Q Apps, which guides you through these new features.

Amazon Q Developer – you can use Q Developer to completely change your developer flow. It has all the capabilities of what was previously known as Amazon CodeWhisperer, such as Q&A, diagnosing common errors, generating code including tests, and many more. Now it has expanded, so you can use it to generate SQL, and build data integration pipelines using natural language. In preview, it can describe resources in your AWS account and help you retrieve and analyze cost data from AWS Cost Explorer.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the ‘What’s New with AWS?‘ page.

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

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes about open source projects, tools, and events from the AWS Community.

Discover Claude 3 – If you’re a developer looking for a good source to get started with Claude 3 them I recommend this great post from my colleague Haowen Huang: Mastering Amazon Bedrock with Claude 3: Developer’s Guide with Demos.

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!

— Matheus Guimaraes

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