|
Happy 20th Anniversary to the AWS News Blog! 🎉🥳🎊 On November 9, 2004, Jeff Barr published his first blog post. At that time, he started a personal blog using TypePad. He wanted to speak to his readers in his personal voice, not a company or team.
On April 29, 2014, we created a new AWS blog site and moved all posts to this site. There are currently over 4,300 posts on the AWS News blog, with Jeff contributing over 3,200.
New writers have been added to the AWS News blog since December 2016, but we still follow Jeff’s guiding principles for AWS News bloggers in line with day one. What’s unique about the AWS News blog is that blog writers can use product team features in advance, in line with the Customer Obsession leadership principle, and focus on tutorials on how customers can use them quickly to save time. The principle of parsimony.
I am very grateful for Jeff’s essential and pivotal role over the past 20 years and I look forward to the next 20 years!
Last week’s launch
Here are some launches that caught my eye:
New Express Brokers for Amazon MSK – Express brokers are a new type of broker for Amazon MSK Provisioned designed to deliver up to three times the throughput per broker, scale up to 20x faster, and reduce refresh times by 90 percent compared to standard Apache Kafka brokers. Express brokers come preconfigured with Kafka best practices by default, support all Kafka APIs, and provide the same performance with low latency, so you can continue to use your existing client applications without any changes.
The new Amazon Kinesis 3.0 client library – With Kinesis Client Library (KCL) 3.0, you can now reduce the computational cost of processing streaming data by up to 33 percent compared to previous KCL versions. KCL 3.0 introduces an improved load balancing algorithm that continuously monitors the resource utilization of flow workers and automatically redistributes the load from overloaded workers to other underutilized workers. To learn more, read the AWS Big Data Blog post.
Microsoft Windows Server 2025 images on Amazon EC2 – We now support Microsoft Windows Server 2025 with Amazon Machine Images (AMI) Licensed Images (LI), which provide customers with an easy and flexible way to run the latest version of Windows Server. By running Windows Server 2025 on Amazon EC2, customers can enjoy the security, performance, and reliability of AWS with the latest Windows Server features. To learn more about running Windows Server 2025 on Amazon EC2, visit Windows Workloads on AWS.
Claude 3.5 Haiku model by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock – Claude 3.5 Haiku is the next generation of Anthropic’s fastest model, combining quick response with enhanced reasoning abilities, making it ideal for tasks that require both speed and intelligence. The Claude 3.5 Haiku improves across all skills, outperforming even the Claude 3 Opus, the largest model of the previous Anthropic generation, in many intelligence benchmarks – including coding. To learn more, read the AWS News blog post.
Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management GA – You can simplify the creation, testing, versioning, and sharing of prompts in Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management. In general availability, we’ve added new features that provide enhanced options for configuring your prompts and enable seamless integration for invoking them in your generative AI applications, such as structured prompts and Converse and InvokeModel API integration. To learn more, read the AWS Machine Learning blog post.
Six new synthetic generative voices for Amazon Polly – The generative engine is Amazon Polly’s most advanced text-to-speech (TTS) model using generative AI technology. Added six new synthetic female generative voices: Ayanda (South African English), Léa (French), Lucia (European Spanish), Lupe (American Spanish), Mía (Mexican Spanish), and Vicki (German). This expands thirteen voices and nine locations to give you more options for highly expressive and engaging voices.
Enhanced support for Amazon OpenSearch – Announcing the end of the standard support and extended support timelines for legacy Elasticsearch and OpenSearch releases. Standard support ends on November 7, 2025 for older Elasticsearch versions up to 6.7, Elasticsearch versions 7.1 through 7.8, OpenSearch versions 1.0 through 1.2, and OpenSearch versions 2.3 through 2.9. With extended support, you get important security updates even after standard support ends for an incremental flat fee over regular instance prices. To learn more, read the AWS Big Data Blog post.
See the What’s New on AWS page for a full list of AWS announcements.
More AWS news
Here’s some other news you might be interested in:
The CEO is visiting an AWS data center – Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, recently enjoyed a visit to one of our AWS data centers and was able to see the constant innovation the team is delivering. Of course, it’s no surprise that Amazon executives visit fulfillment centers, contact centers and data centers to do real work for customers. AWS data centers are designed for customers in every respect with maximum resiliency, performance and energy efficiency in mind.
AWS supports small businesses, creates jobs, implements sustainability initiatives, and develops educational programs near AWS data centers. Get the latest updates – AWS in your community: Here’s what’s happening near data centers across the US on About Amazon News.
Amazon Q Business at Amazon – Presented Amazon’s story of using code transformation in Amazon Q Developer to migrate more than 30,000 Java applications to Java 17. Compared to previous manual jobs, this saved more than 4,500 years of developer effort and saved the company a year by moving to the latest version of Java 260 million dollars.
Here’s another story about testing Amazon Q Business on Amazon. Amazon built an internal chatbot with Amazon Q Business and solved more than 1 million internal questions from Amazon developers, reducing the time spent on manual technical investigations by more than 450,000 hours.
Our team has integrated Amazon Q Business with millions of internal documents and integrated Q Business into the tools our team uses every day. Now, instead of waiting hours for answers to complex technical questions on Q&A boards or Slack channels, developers can get answers in seconds.
TOURCast on the PGA TOUR – If you like golf, you will be interested in this news. The PGA TOUR debuted TOURCast in Japan at the 2024 ZOZO Championship to capture and disseminate better statistical data and bring fans closer to the game based on a new scoring system called ShotLink, powered by CDW. This is the first time the PGA TOUR has been able to bring this technology to Asia and leverage the flexibility and scalability of AWS to overcome unique challenges.
The PGA TOUR is voluntarily setting up a ZOZO Championship fairway GPS device that will input specific shot data and retrieve Shotlink Select Plus. (PIC: PGA TOUR)
Over the past two years, they have completely rebuilt their rating system on a new cloud stack. With the AWS cloud, whether the data comes from high-tech radar systems, cameras, or manual input, the system handles it all seamlessly.
Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:
AWS GenAI Lofts – AWS GenAI Lofts are more than just technology, they bring together startups, developers, investors and industry experts. Whether you want to gain deep insight or get your questions answered by generative AI professionals, our GenAI Lofts have you covered, providing everything you need to start building your next innovation. Join the events in São Paulo (until November 20) and Paris (until November 25).
AWS Community Days – Join community conferences that include technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by AWS expert users and industry leaders from around the world: Jakarta, Indonesia (November 23), Kochi, India (December 14).
AWS re:Invent – You can still register for the annual educational event, which takes place 2-6 December in Las Vegas. Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, surprisingly said that he will be back to attend AWS re:Invent this year. He said: “As always, the priority is to make this an educational event so that customers can take back the nuggets and transform their own customer experience and business. We’ll also have lots of goodies for you to announce that we think people will love.” See you there!
You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.
That’s it for this week. Check back next Monday for another weekly recap!
— Channy
This post is part of ours Weekly overview series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of exciting news and announcements from AWS!