AWS Week In Review – June 6, 2022

I’ve just come back from a long (extended) holiday weekend here in the US and I’m still catching up on all the AWS launches that happened this past week. I’m particularly excited about some of the data, machine learning, and quantum computing news. Let’s have a look!

Last Week’s Launches
The launches that caught my attention last week are the following:

Amazon EMR Serverless is now generally available – Amazon EMR Serverless allows you to run big data applications using open-source frameworks such as Apache Spark and Apache Hive without configuring, managing, and scaling clusters. The new serverless deployment option for Amazon EMR automatically scales resources up and down to provide just the right amount of capacity for your application, and you only pay for what you use. To learn more, check out Channy’s blog post and listen to The Official AWS Podcast episode on EMR Serverless.

AWS PrivateLink is now supported by additional AWS services – AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between your virtual private cloud (VPC), AWS services, and your on-premises networks without exposing your traffic to the public internet. The following AWS services just added support for PrivateLink:

• Amazon S3 on Outposts has added support for PrivateLink to perform management operations on your S3 storage by using private IP addresses in your VPC. This eliminates the need to use public IPs or proxy servers. Read the June 1 What’s New post for more information.
• AWS Panorama now supports PrivateLink, allowing you to access AWS Panorama from your VPC without using public endpoints. AWS Panorama is a machine learning appliance and software development kit (SDK) that allows you to add computer vision (CV) to your on-premises cameras. Read the June 2 What’s New post for more information.
• AWS Backup has added PrivateLink support for VMware workloads, providing direct access to AWS Backup from your VMware environment via a private endpoint within your VPC. Read the June 3 What’s New post for more information.

Amazon SageMaker JumpStart now supports incremental model training and automatic tuning – Besides ready-to-deploy solution templates for common machine learning (ML) use cases, SageMaker JumpStart also provides access to more than 300 pre-trained, open-source ML models. You can now incrementally train all the JumpStart models with new data without training from scratch. Through this fine-tuning process, you can shorten the training time to reach a better model. SageMaker JumpStart now also supports model tuning with SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning from its pre-trained model, solution templates, and example notebooks. Automatic tuning allows you to automatically search for the best hyperparameter configuration for your model.

Amazon Transcribe now supports automatic language identification for multi-lingual audio – Amazon Transcribe converts audio input into text using automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. If your audio recording contains more than one language, you can now enable multi-language identification, which identifies all languages spoken in the audio file and creates a transcript using each identified language. Automatic language identification for multilingual audio is supported for all 37 languages that are currently supported for batch transcriptions. Read the What’s New post from Amazon Transcribe to learn more.

Amazon Braket adds support for Borealis, the first publicly accessible quantum computer that is claimed to offer quantum advantage – If you are interested in quantum computing, you’ve likely heard the term “quantum advantage.” It refers to the technical milestone when a quantum computer outperforms the world’s fastest supercomputers on a well-defined task. Until now, none of the devices claimed to demonstrate quantum advantage have been accessible to the public. The Borealis device, a new photonic quantum processing unit (QPU) from Xanadu, is the first publicly available quantum computer that is claimed to have achieved quantum advantage. Amazon Braket, the quantum computing service from AWS, has just added support for Borealis. To learn more about how you can test a quantum advantage claim for yourself now on Amazon Braket, check out the What’s New post covering the addition of Borealis support.

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

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news that you may have missed:

New AWS Heroes – A warm welcome to our newest AWS Heroes! The AWS Heroes program is a worldwide initiative that acknowledges individuals who have truly gone above and beyond to share knowledge in technical communities. Get to know them in the June 2022 introduction blog post!

AWS open-source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo Sueiras writes this weekly open-source newsletter in which he highlights new open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Read edition #115 here.

Upcoming AWS Events
Join me in Las Vegas for Amazon re:MARS 2022. The conference takes place June 21–24 and is all about the latest innovations in machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I will deliver a talk on how machine learning can help to improve disaster response. Say “Hi!” if you happen to be around and see me.

We also have more AWS Summits coming up over the next couple of months, both in-person and virtual.

In Europe:

In North America:

In South America:

Find an AWS Summit near you, and get notified when registration opens in your area.

You can now register for IMAGINE 2022 (August 3, Seattle). The IMAGINE 2022 conference is a no-cost event that brings together education, state, and local leaders to learn about the latest innovations and best practices in the cloud.

Sign up for the SQL Server Database Modernization webinar on June 21 to learn how to modernize and cost-optimize Microsoft SQL Server on AWS.

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

— Antje