AWS Community News and Recent Developments

The AWS (Amazon Web Services) community never ceases to amaze with its talent and dedication, especially in areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the tech industry. Recently, there have been several noteworthy events and launches that deserve attention. This article will cover these updates, providing you with detailed insights into the latest advancements and community efforts within AWS.

Empowering Women in Tech

Last week, I had the privilege of speaking at the AWS User Group Women Bay Area meetup, led by Natalie. This group focuses on empowering and connecting women in the tech industry, offering a supportive environment to explore cloud computing. In Latin America, AWS supported 12 women-led AWS User Groups from 10 countries in organizing two regional AWSome Women Community Summits. These events reached over 800 female tech enthusiasts, highlighting the power of community in fostering an inclusive and diverse tech environment.

Recent AWS Launches

Meta Llama 3.1 Models

One of the most exciting launches last week was the introduction of Meta’s Llama 3.1 models. These models are Meta’s most advanced to date, featuring parameter sizes of 8 billion, 70 billion, and 405 billion. They offer state-of-the-art performance across various industry benchmarks and bring new capabilities to generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The Llama 3.1 models are now available in Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart.

For those interested in a deeper dive, my colleagues Tiffany and Mike explored Llama 3.1 in last week’s episode of the Build On Generative AI live stream. You can watch the full episode here.

Mistral Large 2 Model

Another significant launch was the Mistral Large 2 model by Mistral AI. This updated version offers improvements in multilingual capabilities, math, reasoning, coding, and more. The Mistral Large 2 foundation model is now available in Amazon Bedrock. For more details, including code examples, you can visit the Mistral-on-AWS repo and the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.

Faster Auto Scaling for Generative AI Models

Amazon SageMaker introduced a new capability for faster auto-scaling of generative AI models. This enhancement reduces the time it takes for models to scale automatically, using sub-minute metrics to significantly lower overall scaling latency. This improvement helps in making generative AI applications more responsive to fluctuating demand.

AWS Step Functions Support for Customer Managed Keys

AWS Step Functions now supports the use of customer-managed keys with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). This new feature allows you to encrypt your workflow definitions and execution data using your own encryption keys, providing an additional layer of security. For more information, visit the AWS Step Functions documentation and the AWS KMS documentation.

Other AWS News

New Exam Question Types in AWS Certification

If you’re planning to take the AWS Certified AI Practitioner or AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate exams, note that new question types have been added. These exams now include ordering, matching, and case study question types. This update aims to provide a more comprehensive assessment of your skills. For more details, read the AWS Certification blog post on the new exam question types.

Amazon’s Migration from Apache Spark to Ray

The Business Data Technologies (BDT) team at Amazon Retail has started migrating some of their largest production business intelligence (BI) datasets from Apache Spark to Ray. This shift aims to reduce data processing time and costs. They’ve also contributed a critical component of their work, The Flash Compactor, to Ray’s open-source DeltaCAT project. For the full story, visit Amazon’s Exabyte-Scale Migration from Apache Spark to Ray on Amazon EC2.

Upcoming AWS Events

AWS Summits

The 2024 AWS Summit season is nearing its end. These events, both online and in-person, bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Upcoming summits include:

• Mexico City (August 7)
• São Paulo (August 15)
• Jakarta (September 5)
  

  AWS Community Days
  

  AWS Community Days are community-led conferences featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders. Upcoming events include:

• New Zealand (August 15)
• Colombia (August 24)
• New York (August 28)
• Belfast (September 6)
• Bay Area (September 13)

  For a complete list of upcoming in-person and virtual events, you can browse the AWS events page.

  Conclusion
  

  The AWS community continues to drive innovation and inclusivity within the tech industry. From empowering women in tech to launching advanced AI models, AWS is making significant strides. Keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page for the latest announcements and check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup.

  — Antje

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

For more Information, Refer to this article.