Technical Write-up on AWS re:Invent 2023
Published: 2023-12-19 09:32:26

This year at re:Invent, we saw a number of services launches in the Generative AI Stack, Developer Tools, CI/CD & DevOps, Systems Management, Cloud Operations, Storage as well as Database. PartyRock, an Amazon bedrock playground was launched days before re:Invent to kickstart the announcements in the GenAI space.

The launch of Amazon Q was the highlight of the GenAI stack which assists in every area of work be it console, IDE or documentation. It has been trained with 17 years of AWS knowledge and works with the user to build new features, refactor and troubleshoot on AWS. From seamless integration in your IDE to Code Catalyst and also in Code transformation to upgrade Java applications in a fraction of the time or enhance the security and performance of your code, Amazon Q promises an enhanced AI assistant experience to the user. Amazon CodeWhisperer also has new enhancements such as customization capabilities and support for Cloud Formation.

With these launches, the Generative AI Stack’s applications that leverage FMs are Amazon Q, Q in QuickSight, Q in Connect and also Amazon CodeWhisperer.  Amazon Bedrock offers the tools to build with FMs and LLMs through Guardrails, Agents and customization capabilities. Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock are also generally available now which helps in automatically converting text documents into embeddings and store them in your vector database and also to retrieve embeddings and augment prompts. Vector support for Amazon DocumentDB and Amazon DynamoDB are also generally available now, with Amazon Aurora and MongoDB vector databases to also be available soon for Amazon Bedrock. Finally, model evaluation on Amazon Bedrock is also in preview which helps evaluate, compare and select the best foundation model for any use case.

Moving on to Developer Tools, AWS Application Composer in VS Code is now generally available with which the user can visually compose infrastructure as code directly on their IDE. A new GenAI CDK construct has also been launched along with AWS SDKs for Rust and Kotlin. AWS SageMaker Studio Code Editor is now generally available which serves as a new IDE option based on Code-OSS.

The CI/CD & DevOps space saw quite a few launches this year such as Amazon CloudWatch Pattern Analysis and Anomaly Detection, Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals, AWS Secrets Manager batch-retrieval of secrets, Amazon Inspector Lambda code scanning with generative AI, Amazon Inspector container image security and agentless vulnerability assessments for EC2, AWS Guard Duty ECS and EC2 runtime monitoring and also the IAM Access Analyzer simplified access inspection. The Systems Management & Cloud Operations tools category welcomed the launch of Unified Billing and Cost management along with AWS Free Tier usage API, Amazon CloudWatch Infrequent Access Class and AWS Systems Manager Automation low-code Runbook design.

An awaited update in the Storage section was the launch of Amazon S3 Express One Zone and the Databases section saw the launch of Amazon Aurora Limitless Database that is a managed horizontal scale-out beyond the limits of a single database instance. Amazon Elasticache Serverless configuration was also launched for Redis and Memcached along with Amazon Q generative SQL in Amazon Redshift which helps simplify query authoring by expressing queries in natural language.

Finally, for the space geeks, Project Kuiper’s private connectivity to AWS was also announced.