AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon EC2 G6 instances, Mistral Large on Amazon Bedrock, AWS Deadline Cloud, and more (April 8, 2024)

We’re just two days away from AWS Summit Sydney (April 10–11) and a month away from the AWS Summit season in Southeast Asia, starting with the AWS Summit Singapore (May 7) and the AWS Summit Bangkok (May 30). If you happen to be in Sydney, Singapore, or Bangkok around those dates, please join us.

Last Week’s Launches
If you haven’t read last week’s Weekly Roundup yet, Channy wrote about the AWS Chips Taste Test, a new initiative from Jeff Barr as part of April’ Fools Day.

Here are some launches that caught my attention last week:

New Amazon EC2 G6 instances — We announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 G6 instances powered by NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs. G6 instances can be used for a wide range of graphics-intensive and machine learning use cases. G6 instances deliver up to 2x higher performance for deep learning inference and graphics workloads compared to Amazon EC2 G4dn instances. To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 G6 instance page.

Mistral Large is now available in Amazon Bedrock — Veliswa wrote about the availability of the Mistral Large foundation model, as part of the Amazon Bedrock service. You can use Mistral Large to handle complex tasks that require substantial reasoning capabilities. In addition, Amazon Bedrock is now available in the Paris AWS Region.

Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift now in additional Regions — Zero-ETL integration announcements were my favourite launches last year. This Zero-ETL integration simplifies the process of transferring data between the two services, allowing customers to move data between Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift without the need for manual Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes. With this announcement, Zero-ETL integrations between Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift is now supported in 11 additional Regions.

Announcing AWS Deadline Cloud — If you’re working in films, TV shows, commercials, games, and industrial design and handling complex rendering management for teams creating 2D and 3D visual assets, then you’ll be excited about AWS Deadline Cloud. This new managed service simplifies the deployment and management of render farms for media and entertainment workloads.

AWS Clean Rooms ML is Now Generally Available — Last year, I wrote about the preview of AWS Clean Rooms ML. In that post, I elaborated a new capability of AWS Clean Rooms that helps you and your partners apply machine learning (ML) models on your collective data without copying or sharing raw data with each other. Now, AWS Clean Rooms ML is available for you to use.

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports private network policies for OpenSearch Serverless — Here’s exciting news for you who are building with Amazon Bedrock. Now, you can implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock using Amazon OpenSearch Serverless (OSS) collections that have a private network policy.

Amazon EKS extended support for Kubernetes versions now generally available — If you’re running Kubernetes version 1.21 and higher, with this Extended Support for Kubernetes, you can stay up-to-date with the latest Kubernetes features and security improvements on Amazon EKS.

AWS Lambda Adds Support for Ruby 3.3 — Coding in Ruby? Now, AWS Lambda supports Ruby 3.3 as its runtime. This update allows you to take advantage of the latest features and improvements in the Ruby language.

Amazon EventBridge Console Enhancements — The Amazon EventBridge console has been updated with new features and improvements, making it easier for you to manage your event-driven applications with a better user experience.

Private Access to the AWS Management Console in Commercial Regions — If you need to restrict access to personal AWS accounts from the company network, you can use AWS Management Console Private Access. With this launch, you can use AWS Management Console Private Access in all commercial AWS Regions.

From community.aws 
The community.aws is a home for us, builders, to share our learnings with building on AWS. Here’s my Top 3 posts from last week:

• 14 LLMs fought 314 Street Fighter matches. Here’s who won by Banjo Obayomi
• Build an AI image catalogue! – Claude 3 Haiku by Alan Blockley
• Following the path of Architecture as Code by Christian Bonzelet

Other AWS News 
Here are some additional news items, open-source projects, and Twitch shows that you might find interesting:

Build On Generative AI – Join Tiffany and Darko to learn more about generative AI, see their demos and discuss different aspects of generative AI with the guest speakers. Streaming every Monday on Twitch, 9:00 AM US PT.

AWS open source news and updates – If you’re looking for various open-source projects and tools from the AWS community, please read the AWS open-source newsletter maintained by my colleague, Ricardo.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these 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: Amsterdam (April 9), Sydney (April 10–11), London (April 24), Singapore (May 7), Berlin (May 15–16), Seoul (May 16–17), Hong Kong (May 22), Milan (May 23), Dubai (May 29), Thailand (May 30), Stockholm (June 4), and Madrid (June 5).

AWS re:Inforce – Explore cloud security in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce, June 10–12 in Pennsylvania for two-and-a-half days of immersive cloud security learning designed to help drive your business initiatives.

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: Poland (April 11), Bay Area (April 12), Kenya (April 20), and Turkey (May 18).

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Donnie

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