AWS Highlights: WhatsApp Integration, Lambda Updates, and More (Oct 2024)

In an exciting series of events last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted complimentary half-day conferences in London and Paris, showcasing innovative ways developers can leverage generative AI tools to enhance various stages of their workflow. These events, held at the GenAI Lofts, provided insights into how these tools can expedite design, analysis, coding, debugging, and deployment tasks. These lofts will remain open until October 25 in London and November 5 in Paris, featuring a packed schedule of events, conferences, workshops, and meetups. If you’re nearby, it’s worth checking out the agenda for these events.

A highlight of these conferences was a live demonstration by Veliswa, a co-author of the AWS News blog. During the event, she successfully built a Duolingo-like application from scratch, using suggestions and feedback from Amazon Q Developer. This demonstration showcased the powerful capabilities of AWS tools in simplifying and streamlining the app development process.

Key AWS Launches

Several notable AWS launches took place last week, capturing the attention of many in the tech community. Here’s a closer look at these developments:

WhatsApp Integration with AWS End User Messaging
AWS has now integrated WhatsApp into its End User Messaging platform. This enhancement allows developers to reach users on WhatsApp with multimedia and interactive messages, complementing the existing SMS and push notification features. Getting started with this feature is straightforward through the AWS Management Console.

Amazon Redshift Data Sharing
Amazon Redshift now allows for secure and convenient data sharing of live data lake tables across various Redshift warehouses. This integration with the AWS Glue Data Catalog ensures that users have access to the most current and consistent data as it updates in the data lake.

Network Load Balancer Enhancements
The Network Load Balancer (NLB) has introduced zonal shift and zonal autoshift features, supported by the Amazon Application Recovery Controller. These features enable traffic redirection away from impaired zones, facilitating recovery from issues like faulty application deployments and grey failures. Zonal autoshift automatically redirects traffic when AWS detects potential impacts on an availability zone.

Console to Code Feature
This feature simplifies transitioning from prototyping in the AWS Management Console to building production-ready code. Console to Code allows users to generate code for their console actions in their preferred format with a single click. This code generation supports the bootstrapping of automation pipelines for tasks, enhancing productivity and efficiency.

AWS CodePipeline New User Experience
AWS Data Pipeline has introduced a streamlined experience for creating new pipelines, simplifying the process in the CodePipeline console. Users can now select from a variety of pipeline templates and configure them quickly, resulting in a fully operational pipeline ready for deployment.

AWS Lambda Recursive Loop Detection
AWS Lambda now includes a feature to automatically detect and halt recursive loops between Lambda and Amazon S3. This built-in guardrail prevents unintended recursive invocations, safeguarding against unexpected billing charges from runaway workloads.

Amazon MemoryDB for Valkey
Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, compatible with Valkey and Redis OSS, offers a fully managed database service with multi-AZ durability and high throughput. It’s ideal for use cases such as caching, leaderboards, and session stores, providing the fastest vector search performance at the highest recall rates among popular vector databases on AWS.

Amazon Polly Enhancements
Amazon Polly has expanded its portfolio with four new synthetic generative English voices: an Australian English voice named Olivia and three US English voices—Joanna, Danielle, and Stephen. These voices offer more natural pronunciation and prosody, suitable for various applications across industries like education, publishing, and marketing.

For a comprehensive list of AWS announcements, visit the AWS What’s New Feed page.

Upcoming AWS Events

Mark your calendars for these upcoming AWS events:

AWS Cloud Day Prague
Join AWS experts for a free technical conference in Prague on October 23. The event will include a session titled “The Art of Transforming a Foundation Model into a Domain Expert.” Registration is open now.

AWS Innovate: Migrate, Modernize, and Build
This free online conference offers opportunities for learning, whether you’re new to cloud computing or an experienced user. Register for sessions tailored to North America on October 15 or Europe, the Middle East & Africa on October 24.

AWS Community Days
These community-led conferences feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by AWS users and industry experts. Don’t miss the AWS Community Days on October 19 in Vadodara, Spain, and Guatemala.

AWS re:Invent 2024
Registration is open for AWS’s annual tech extravaganza, taking place from December 2 to 6 in Las Vegas. The event will feature podcast recordings and sessions on topics like accelerating CI/CD pipeline testing with EC2 Mac instances, transforming foundation models into domain experts, and exploring server-side, serverless Swift applications. Seats for these sessions are limited, so be sure to secure your spot.

Explore more upcoming AWS events, both in-person and virtual, as well as developer-focused gatherings.

Stay tuned for more updates next Monday in the Weekly Roundup series. For a regular dose of AWS news and announcements, keep an eye on the AWS blog.

For more detailed information and updates, visit the AWS News Blog.

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