AWS Week in Review – June 27, 2022

It’s the beginning of a new week, and I’d like to start with a recap of the most significant AWS news from the previous 7 days. Last week was special because I had the privilege to be at the very first EMEA AWS Heroes Summit in Milan, Italy. It was a great opportunity of mutual learning as this community of experts shared their thoughts with AWS developer advocates, product managers, and technologists on topics such as containers, serverless, and machine learning.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are the launches that got my attention last week:

Amazon Connect Cases (available in preview) – This new capability of Amazon Connect provides built-in case management for your contact center agents to create, collaborate on, and resolve customer issues. Learn more in this blog post that shows how to simplify case management in your contact center.

Many updates for Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora – Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle now supports Oracle database 12.2 and 18c, and Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments with one primary and two readable standby database instances now supports M5d and R5d instances and is available in more Regions. There is also a Regional expansion for RDS Custom. Finally, PostgreSQL 14, a new major version, is now supported by Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition.

AWS WAF Captcha is now generally available – You can use AWS WAF Captcha to block unwanted bot traffic by requiring users to successfully complete challenges before their web requests are allowed to reach resources.

Private IP VPNs with AWS Site-to-Site VPN – You can now deploy AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections over AWS Direct Connect using private IP addresses. This way, you can encrypt traffic between on-premises networks and AWS via Direct Connect connections without the need for public IP addresses.

AWS Center for Quantum Networking – Research and development of quantum computers have the potential to revolutionize science and technology. To address fundamental scientific and engineering challenges and develop new hardware, software, and applications for quantum networks, we announced the AWS Center for Quantum Networking.

Simpler access to sustainability data, plus a global hackathon – The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative catalog of datasets is now searchable and discoverable through AWS Data Exchange. As part of a new collaboration with the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence, under the auspices of UNESCO, you can use the power of the cloud to help the world become sustainable by participating to the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative Global Hackathon.

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

Other AWS News
A couple of takeaways from the Amazon re:MARS conference:

Amazon CodeWhisperer (preview) – Amazon CodeWhisperer is a coding companion powered by machine learning with support for multiple IDEs and languages.

Synthetic data generation with Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth – Generate labeled synthetic image data that you can combine with real-world data to create more complete training datasets for your ML models.

Some other updates you might have missed:

AstraZeneca’s drug design program built using AWS wins innovation award – AstraZeneca received the BioIT World Innovative Practice Award at the 20th anniversary of the Bio-IT World Conference for its novel augmented drug design platform built on AWS. More in this blog post.

Large object storage strategies for Amazon DynamoDB – A blog post showing different options for handling large objects within DynamoDB and the benefits and disadvantages of each approach.

Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS under the hood – Some details of how DevOps Guru for RDS works, with a specific focus on its scalability, security, and availability.

AWS open-source news and updates – A newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo to bring you the latest open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
It’s AWS Summits season and here are some virtual and in-person events that might be close to you:

On June 30, the AWS User Group Ukraine is running an AWS Tech Conference to discuss digital transformation with AWS. Join to learn from many sessions including a fireside chat with Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com.

That’s all from me for this week. Come back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Danilo