Amazon Q Developer has agents that can generate real-time code suggestions based on your comments and existing code, bootstrap new projects from a single prompt (/dev), automate the process of upgrading and transforming legacy Java applications with the Amazon Q Developer transformation capability (/transform), generate customized code recommendations from your private repositories securely, and quickly understand what resources are running in your AWS account with a simple prompt.
Today, we’re expanding Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities for: 1) enhanced documentation in codebases (/doc), 2) supporting code reviews to detect and resolve security and code quality issues (/review), and 3) generating unit tests automatically and improving test coverage (/test) across the software development lifecycle in your preferred IDE or GitLab Duo with Amazon Q (in preview), which is one of the most popular enterprise DevOps platforms.
Get started with Amazon Q Developer agents for software development capabilities To get started with all the new capabilities, you can install the latest Amazon Q IDE extension for your favorite IDEs. Sign in for the Free or Pro Tier of Amazon Q Developer, and open your project in your IDE. You can authenticate for the Free Tier with AWS Builder ID or for the Pro Tier with AWS IAM Identity Center.
1. Enhanced documentation in codebases You can now generate comprehensive documentation, such as readmes and data flow diagrams about the codebase in your preferred IDE. With Amazon Q Developer handling the labor-intensive task of documentation, you can focus your efforts on designing and authoring code—all while maintaining quality based on software engineering best practices.
To start the documentation with your IDE, open the chat panel and type /doc.
Now you can create a README or update an existing README in your project. It will scan source files, create knowledge graph, summarize source files, and generation documents. When complete, check out the created REAME file and choose Accept to use this document in the code editor.
2. Supporting code reviews to detect and resolve code quality issues You can identify and resolve a spectrum of code quality issues pertaining to code smells, anti-patterns, naming convention violations, potential bugs, logical errors, code duplication, poor documentation and security vulnerabilities, as well as AWS best practices across your IDE or GitLab repository.
This automated code review process empowers your development teams to save substantial time, improve productivity, and maintain consistency in code quality, ultimately enabling faster feature releases while adhering to security standards and best practices.
To start the code reviews with your IDE, open the chat panel and type /review.
Amazon Q Developer will review your project or a particular file you select and identify issues before code commit, provide a list of findings from where you can follow up with Amazon Q to find solution, and generate on-demand code fixes inline. When complete, check out the suggested code fixes for code issues and choose Accept Fix to apply the changes in the code editor.
3. Generating unit tests automatically and improving test coverage You can automate the unit test process from identifying test cases to writing unit tests for your project files. Within unit tests, you can generate basic cases such as boundary conditions, null values, off-by-1 cases, and checking multiple input types.
To start the unit test workflow with your IDE, open the chat panel and type /test.
Amazon Q Developer will generate unit tests in your specific source file, place them into the relevant test file and self-debug test errors. When complete, choose View diff to check out the generated unit tests in the code editor. Then, you can accept or reject the generated unit tests.
Now available Three new Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities for software development are now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Q Developer is available.
.NET Framework, introduced in 2002, runs only on Windows and although it’s still supported, it’s no longer in active development. However, cross-platform .NET, launched in 2016, is open source, runs on Linux, and is lightweight and higher performing. It receives regular updates, with new features and performance improvements every year. By porting your .NET applications from .NET Framework to cross-platform .NET, you can migrate from Windows to Linux. As a result, you can not only take advantage of the latest innovations in the .NET platform, you can also reduce your Microsoft licensing spend.
Amazon Q Developer transform for .NET automatically analyzes the codebase, generates a transformation plan, and executes transformation tasks. These tasks include upgrading and replacing NuGet packages and APIs, rewriting deprecated and inefficient code components, and porting to cross-platform .NET.
Let’s see it in action!
Porting a .NET Framework application to cross-platform .NET I’m using Visual Studio in this walkthrough because Amazon Q Developer transform for .NET is available as a Visual Studio extension. I install the latest version of AWS Toolkit with Amazon Q and sign in using the AWS IAM Identity Center credentials provided by my organization.
I open a .NET Framework solution that I need to port to the latest long-term support (LTS) version of supported cross-platform .NET, which is currently .NET 8. In the Solution Explorer, the option to transform is available as a context menu item for both the entire solution and individual projects. Depending on the size and complexity of the application, I can transform the entire application at once or transform the projects in the application step-by-step. In this walkthrough, I showcase the transformation of one of the projects of the solution.
I choose the context menu for one of the projects, and then choose Port Project with Amazon Q Developer.
This opens a dialog where I choose additional projects to transform and select the target .NET version. I select .NET 8 and choose Confirm to proceed with the transformation.
I see the status in the CodeTransformation Plan window and the progress in Amazon Q Developer Code Transformation Hub window.
Though I have selected only one project to transform, all dependent projects will also be transformed by Amazon Q Developer. The selected project and its dependent projects are combined to form a decomposable buildable unit. This is to make sure that the codebase after the transformation is in a successful build state.
Amazon Q Developer first builds the project locally and then copies the selected code and dependencies to a secure and ephemeral sandbox environment in AWS for processing. You can use customer managed keys for encrypting your code in this environment.
Amazon Q Developer analyzes the codebase and generates a transformation plan. It then kicks off the transformation workflow and steps through the plan iteratively for each project in the transformation plan. For each project, it upgrades NuGet packages and APIs, updates the startup or runtime configuration, rewrites deprecated code, and debugs errors.
After the transformation is complete, I choose Transformation Summary by Q Developer to see the summary. I see the transformation status as succeeded. For each project, it shows Files changed, Packages updated, APIs changed, and Linux porting status. In the Linux porting status column, I can see if the project is ported automatically or needs inputs to resolve any pending issues.
I can download the Linux readiness report to look into the issues that require manual resolution.
All the code changes are done in the sandbox, and I can review them before applying the updates to my local working repository. To manually review the changes done by Amazon Q Developer, I choose View Diff view and then choose Show changes for one of the files in the Amazon Q Developer Transformation Hub window.
After reviewing the changes, I choose Accept suggested changes in the Transformation Summary by Q Developer window to apply changes to my local working repository.
I can now continue to work on my local working repository to fix the pending issues in the Linux readiness report and then use the same steps to transform the remaining projects iteratively.
Things to know
Availability – Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for .NET porting are available today in preview with Amazon Q Developer Pro Tier subscription.
.NET versions supported – Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for .NET supports transforming applications written using .NET Framework versions 3.5+, .NET Core 3.1, and .NET 5+ to the currently supported cross-platform .NET versions such as .NET 8 and .NET 9.
Application types supported – Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for .NET supports porting C# code projects of the following types: console application, class library, unit tests, web API, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service, and business logic layers of Model View Controller (MVC) and Single Page Application (SPA). However, the UI layer such as Razor Views and WebForms are not ported. Also, only the projects with Microsoft authored NuGet package dependencies are supported. For .NET Framework applications dependent on Internet Information Server (IIS), only default IIS configurations are supported for porting to cross-platform .NET.
Amazon Q Developer accelerates large-scale transformation of enterprise workloads with domain-expert generative AI agents supervised by modernization teams in a unified collaborative web experience.
Using the transformation capabilities of Amazon Q Developer, modernization teams can deliver large and complex projects, accelerating .NET porting, mainframe modernization, and VMware migration, while enhancing application security, resilience, performance, and scalability.
Getting started with Amazon Q Developer transformation web experience My organization’s Amazon Q Developer administrator previously provided me access to the web experience. The prerequisites are that I need to be part of the Amazon Q Developer Pro Tier subscription and a member of my organization’s AWS IAM Identity Center.
I sign in to the web experience using my credentials and create a new workspace. I’m presented with a page to create a transformation job with Amazon Q Developer.
I choose Ask Q to create a job, and it presents me with three options to choose from for creating a transformation job: Mainframe modernization, .NET modernization, and VMware migration.
Amazon Q Developer works collaboratively with me throughout the transformation journey spanning assessment, planning, and migration and modernization. I can add other team members to work alongside me, and Amazon Q Developer seamlessly integrates as a dependable part of my team. Amazon Q Developer helps me through every step of the transformation, including asset discovery, codebase analysis, wave planning, code refactoring, addressing incompatibilities, and implementing network automation.
Let’s have a closer look at the transformation process of each of the three workloads.
Porting of .NET applications from Windows to Linux To start, I ask Amazon Q Developer to create a job for .NET modernization.
Amazon Q Developer provides a default name for the .NET modernization job and asks me if I would like to change anything before it creates the job. I continue with the default name and choose Create Job.
After the request is initiated, I can see the transformation steps and their progress in the left-side pane labeled Job Plan. On the right-side pane, I can see the details in the Dashboard section, any activities pending for me to act on in the Collaboration section, and the sequence of actions that have occurred in the Worklog section.
To begin the assessment, I connect Amazon Q Developer to my source code repositories using the steps outlined in the documentation. I was able to ask Amazon Q Developer about these steps, to receive in-product guidance as I progressed.
After connecting the source code repositories, Amazon Q Developer discovers the supported .NET applications. It then prepares for the transformation process by requesting from me specific inputs, such as selecting the target .NET version and choosing which repositories need to be transformed.
I provide the required inputs, save the information and choose Send to Q.
Amazon Q Developer automatically ports .NET applications I selected to the target version and commits the transformed code to a new branch in my repository when the task is complete, preserving the original source code. I can monitor the transformation’s progress on the Dashboard.
Modernization of mainframe applications Now, let’s explore how Amazon Q Developer assists in the modernization of mainframe applications.
I ask Amazon Q Developer to create a new job for mainframe modernization. I see four phases in the Job Plan: Kick off modernization, Analyze code, Decompose code, and Plan migration wave.
Amazon Q Developer then analyzes the codebase, maps dependencies, and creates detailed documentation.
Next, Amazon Q Developer works with me to decompose my large monolith into simple and more loosely coupled business domains. I provide input on the files I need to group into different domains, and Amazon Q Developer decomposes them accordingly.
Then, using built-in mainframe and cloud domain expertise, Amazon Q Developer proposes a wave plan that I can review, update, and approve.
After approval, Amazon Q Developer implements automated refactoring of COBOL to Java, providing alerts when it needs input and status updates for tracking.
As you can see, Amazon Q Developer reduces timelines for large-scale assessment and modernization of mainframe applications through automated code analysis, documentation, decomposition, iterative planning, and refactoring.
Migration of VMware workloads Let’s now examine how Amazon Q Developer helps me in migrating VMware applications.
I ask Amazon Q Developer to create a new job, and it creates an initial job plan for me to migrate my VMware virtual machines to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
A typical VMware migration job consists of data discovery, application grouping, network migration and server migration steps. As the job progresses, Amazon Q Developer dynamically updates job plans and adds new steps, based on continual learning.
To discover on-premises data, I have an option to upload exports from tools such as RVtools, or I can use the AWS Application Discovery Service agentless or agent-based collectors to collect on-premises, server, and network traffic data.
Amazon Q Developer analyzes the discovered data, classifies it, and provides me a summary that includes data completeness indicators such as whether it has received enough network connection data to optimally group application servers and generate wave plans.
Amazon Q Developer then works collaboratively with me to build migration waves. It automatically suggests the waves and provides me with an option to edit by downloading the recommendations and uploading the new file.
Next, I select a target AWS account and ask Amazon Q Developer to use the uploaded network configuration to generate my AWS network. Amazon Q Developer translates the on-premises VMware network to generate the corresponding AWS network constructs.
Amazon Q Developer continues to work in collaboration with me to deploy the generated network and verifies its reach ability and performs reachability testing.
When the network migration is complete, Amazon Q Developer lets me select the waves I want to migrate. It prompts me to set Amazon EC2 instance preferences and generates a migration plan combining its previously generated artifacts. I can review and edit this plan according to my needs before uploading it to Amazon Q Developer to initiate migration with AWS Application Migration Service.
During the migration, I can track the overall transformation progress, including the state of network deployment and individual servers and waves, using the dashboard.
Join the preview The transformation capabilities of Amazon Q Developer are available today in preview with an Amazon Q Developer Pro Tier subscription. To get started, visit the Amazon Q Developer User Guide.
The growing complexity of modern software makes troubleshooting difficult, requiring deep knowledge and manual work across various systems. This results in slower problem-solving and less efficient operations. More and more customers need automated tools to handle routine tasks and simplify complex processes, so they can resolve issues faster and focus on delivering inovations for their customers.
Today, we’re announcing a new capability in Amazon Q Developer to investigate and remediation operational issues, which is now in preview. This generative AI-powered capability guides you through operational diagnostics and automates root cause analysis for problems in your workloads.
Here’s a quick look at how you can now use Amazon Q Developer for operational investigations.
AWS has more operational experience and scale than any other major cloud provider, delivering cloud services to customers around the world for over 17 years. AWS built this experience into Amazon Q Developer operational capabilities to create and present investigation hypotheses, and guide you through troubleshooting and remediation – capabilities that no other major cloud provider offers.
Get started with operational investigation using Amazon Q Developer This new capability from Amazon Q Developer seamlessly integrates with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager, providing a unified experience while troubleshooting issues. To get started with this capability, you need to complete some prerequisites. You can learn more on the Get Started with Amazon Q Developer Operational Investigations page.
I’ve completed the setup and configured a CloudWatch alarm to monitor the metrics for my application. After receiving a notification email, I navigate to that alarm in Amazon CloudWatch. I observe that the metric has exceeded its threshold over several time periods.
With this finding, I select Investigate. Then, I have two options: Start new investigation or Add to existing investigation. Because I’m just getting started, I select Start a new investigation and provide some details and notes if necessary.
After I’ve created the investigation, I can view the details by choosing View Details on the banner.
The investigation page is divided into two main sections: the left-hand Feed panel, which contains all findings added during the investigation, and the right-hand Suggestions panel, which displays a list of finding suggestions from Amazon Q Developer to assist in the investigation.
Amazon Q Developer uses its knowledge of my AWS resources to automatically discover the relationships between them and create a topology map of the application. This makes it possible for Amazon Q Developer to follow the architecture and quickly find the component that caused an alarm, helping me get back into production faster than ever before.
One of the hypotheses suggests that the slowness is caused by throttling on a DynamoDB table, with read and write capacity units frequently exceeding the provisioned limits. I find this hypothesis makes sense, and I can Accept it, which will bring it into my Feed.
With all these findings, I can collect all the supporting data to troubleshoot this issue. In one of the hypotheses from Amazon Q Developer, I can also view suggested actions. I select View actions to understand my options for remediation.
In the Suggested actions menu, Amazon Q Developer proposes AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks related to the hypothesis. Where applicable, it suggests automated runbooks from the AWS Systems Manager library, which includes over 400 AWS-authored and thousands of customer-authored runbooks to help remediate observed issues. Each runbook defines the actions that Systems Manager performs to help resolve the issue. Additionally, Amazon Q Developer provides relevant documentation links from AWS re:Post articles and AWS Documentation pages.
Here’s the list of suggested actions from Amazon Q Developer. I choose View runbook to understand more on how I can solve this issue by modifying DynamoDB provisioned capacity.
Here, I can read more information on this runbook. It will offer a description of the runbook, including execution history telling me if I ran this runbook successfully in this account in the past.
I can enter the required parameters as defined in the configuration. Under Execution preview segment, I can review a summary highlighting the impact on targeted resources. After confirming the details, I select Execute to implement the necessary changes for my workloads.
After running the runbook, I can see the results, which are then added to my feed.
Another feature I appreciate is the multiple ways to access this capability. For example, in my CloudWatch metrics for my AWS Lambda function, I can initiate an investigation and add findings directly. I can also select the Amazon Q Developer operational investigations icon to open the investigation panel.
This new capability from Amazon Q Developer feels like having an AWS expert available 24/7 to assist with operational troubleshooting. It lowers the barrier to operational experience and saves valuable time and effort.
Now in preview The new capability of Amazon Q Developer to help you investigate and remediate operational issues is now in preview in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. Transform your operational investigation today and accelerate remediation with Amazon Q Developer. Visit Amazon CloudWatch documentation page to get started.
Amazon Q Developer has transformed the traditional development workflow by integrating a wide range of generative AI capabilities within the environments where developers work from. This seamless integration helps to maintain focus while accelerating a wide range of development tasks beyond coding for enhanced productivity.
With its vast community of developers, GitLab is a popular DevSecOps platform where many development teams spend their time building and collaborating on projects. That’s why we are so excited to introduce GitLab Duo with Amazon Q. This is a new integration that brings the power of Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities to GitLab using GitLab Duo, transforming it into a unified development experience powering AI-driven DevSecOps. GitLab Duo with Amazon Q leverages AI agents to assist complex, multi-step tasks such as new feature development and codebase upgrades for Java 8 and 11. It also offers enhanced capabilities for code review and unit testing – all within the same familiar GitLab platform.
Interacting with Amazon Q Developer is straightforward through GitLab quick actions— type /q directly inside either the issue description, a general comment, or a merge request comment to start using it to help you accelerate your daily tasks or tackle more complex workflows.
Let’s have a quick tour.
Feature development Let me show you first how straightforward it is to start using Amazon Q Developer within your GitLab environment when developing new features or improving existing ones.
Imagine that you are working on a web application and you’ve been assigned the task to create a full signup flow. You can ask Amazon Q Developer to generate the whole code for you based on the contents of the issue by adding the /q dev command as a comment.
Amazon Q Developer analyzes your entire codebase and generates new code, whether in the form of updates to existing files or entirely new ones. After it’s done, it automatically creates a merge request and adds an entry to the Activity history with a link so it can be reviewed.
On the merge request review page, you’ll notice two interesting things. The first is that Amazon Q Developer has added a comment giving context about the request with instructions for how to request changes if you want to keep iterating. The second one is a follow-up comment where Amazon Q Developer warns that the generated code contains some third-party source material. It provides you with a file that you can download to look up the original code and decide for yourself whether this is something that you’re happy to include in your codebase or not. This makes it effortless to make use of open source responsibly while keeping records for traceability and audit.
Before proceeding, you can look through the code and make in-line comments, much like you would with any other merge request. You can then instruct Amazon Q Developer to make changes to the code based on the comments and continue to iterate like that until you’re fully happy with the results . Let’s imagine that your company’s coding standards include a requirement to implement logging for key operations in your code. Unfortunately, this was not included with the initial requirements in the issue’s description before running the /q dev command. However, you can still use Amazon Q Developer to seamlessly add that code during the review process.
To do this, navigate to the Changes tab, find the relevant code lines, and add in-line comments as you would when reviewing a developer’s merge request. For instance, below line 39, a comment is added stating “add logging” to highlight a part of the code that handles errors when calling the signup API. Below it, another comment is added with only /q dev as the text. This standalone comment triggers a quick action to invoke Amazon Q Developer, so it’s essential to keep it separate. Amazon Q Developer will then generate a new revision based on all the comments provided.
It’s worth noting that the /q dev command can be issued from anywhere in GitLab where comments are supported. Although it was convenient to add it here on line 39, the outcome would be the same if the command was issue as a comment on the Overview page, or against any other line of code in the Merge requests page.
After it’s done, Amazon Q Developer notifies you by adding another comment to the merge request history. Again, it also notifies that the generated content contains open source code providing more information about it so you can review it prior to accepting the merge. Upon closer inspection, it’s clear that it has used the logger library, which makes perfect sense considering the request.
Reviewing the code, it’s impressive to see that Amazon Q Developer didn’t only add the calls to log operations where they happen, but also used context to add the relevant log levels, such as info, and warning. Moreover, it also modified the code in other places to make sure the build doesn’t break. For example, it added the import statement at the top of the file and initiated the logger variable.
By using this new development flow, you can move much faster from requirements to code by relying on Amazon Q Developer to help get the tasks done from the convenience of your GitLab environment. After submitting a merge request though, it’s time to perform a code review. Again, you can also use GitLab Duo with Amazon Q Developer to help you accelerate and improve the quality of that process.
Performing code reviews Let’s work with a different code base, in this case, a Java application. To initiate the assisted code review process, in the merge request overview page, you can submit a comment with the text of /q review. Amazon Q Developer will add an automatic comment to the history informing that it has initiated a review of the merge. It scans all changes looking for security vulnerabilities, quality issues such as code that doesn’t follow best practices, and any other potential problems with the code.
After it’s finished, it will add each finding as a comment that includes a snippet of the problematic code found, a description of the issue, and a severity rating.
You can then take it one step further and ask Amazon Q Developer for a fix! Reply to the findings comment by entering the /q fix command and it will inform you that it is generating a fix for the issue before following it up on the same thread with a solution that you can review. It provides you with a diff view of the changes and an opportunity to accept and commit them.
Upgrading legacy code In addition to helping you with new code and features, GitLab Duo with Amazon Q Developer can also help automate and accelerate code base migration from Java 8 or 11 to Java 17. Start by creating a new issue and give it a descriptive title such as “Upgrade project to Java 17”. Then, in the Description field, add the command /q transform.
After you create the issue, Amazon Q Developer will follow the same pattern as before and add a comment to the issue’s history to inform you that it’s working on migrating the code base. This comment will be updated after Amazon Q Developer is finished and contain a link to the merge request much like we encountered earlier. It’ll also generate a migration plan that you can review while you wait. The plan contains a collapsible step-by-step list of actions to be taken with detailed information plus links that you can use for further reading.
The merge request produced is rich in details too. It contains general stats such as the number of lines of code that were migrated and the total time taken, among others. It also has a full report with links that you can you use to navigate to different sections so you can read the build log summary, review changes in dependencies, inspect all files changes, and more.
When yo’re ready to review the code, you can accept changes partially or fully, much like with any other merge request.
Conclusion GitLab Duo with Amazon Q bring together the most comprehensive DevSecOps platform with the most capable generative AI powered assistant for software development. Together, GitLab Duo and Amazon Q offer a seamless developer experience with new capabilities to accelerate feature development and transform workloads, all within the same familiar GitLab environment that developers are used to.
Things to know
Getting started – GitLab Duo with Amazon Q is available in preview for GitLab self-managed customers with an Ultimate subscription. Read more on how to get started to learn more about it.
Availability – GitLab Duo with Amazon Q is available now under preview for all GitLab self-managed customers with an ultimate tier subscription.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce Amazon Nova, a new generation of state-of-the-art foundation models (FMs) that deliver frontier intelligence and industry leading price performance, available exclusively in Amazon Bedrock.
You can use Amazon Nova to lower costs and latency for almost any generative AI task. You can build on Amazon Nova to analyze complex documents and videos, understand charts and diagrams, generate engaging video content, and build sophisticated AI agents, from across a range of intelligence classes optimized for enterprise workloads.
Whether you’re developing document processing applications that need to process images and text, creating marketing content at scale, or building AI assistants that can understand and act on visual information, Amazon Nova provides the intelligence and flexibility you need with two categories of models: understanding and creative content generation.
Amazon Nova understanding models accept text, image, or video inputs to generate text output. Amazon creative content generation models accept text and image inputs to generate image or video output.
Understanding models: Text and visual intelligence The Amazon Nova models include three understanding models (with a fourth one coming soon) designed to meet different needs:
Amazon Nova Micro – A text-only model that delivers the lowest latency responses in the Amazon Nova family of models at a very low cost. With a context length of 128K tokens and optimized for speed and cost, Amazon Nova Micro excels at tasks such as text summarization, translation, content classification, interactive chat and brainstorming, and simple mathematical reasoning and coding. Amazon Nova Micro also supports customization on proprietary data using fine-tuning and model distillation to boost accuracy.
Amazon Nova Lite – A very low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing image, video, and text inputs to generate text output. Amazon Nova Lite can handle real-time customer interactions, document analysis, and visual question-answering tasks with high accuracy. The model processes inputs up to 300K tokens in length and can analyze multiple images or up to 30 minutes of video in a single request. Amazon Nova Lite also supports text and multimodal fine-tuning and can be optimized to deliver the best quality and costs for your use case with techniques such as model distillation.
Amazon Nova Pro – A highly capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks. Amazon Nova Pro is capable of processing up to 300K input tokens and sets new standards in multimodal intelligence and agentic workflows that require calling APIs and tools to complete complex workflows. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on key benchmarks including visual question answering (TextVQA) and video understanding (VATEX). Amazon Nova Pro demonstrates strong capabilities in processing both visual and textual information and excels at analyzing financial documents. With an input context of 300K tokens, it can process code bases with over fifteen thousand lines of code. Amazon Nova Pro also serves as a teacher model to distill custom variants of Amazon Nova Micro and Lite.
Amazon Nova Premier – Our most capable multimodal model for complex reasoning tasks and for use as the best teacher for distilling custom models. Amazon Nova Premier is still in training. We’re targeting availability in early 2025.
What makes Amazon Nova particularly powerful for enterprises is its customization capabilities. Think of it as tailoring a suit: you start with a high-quality foundation and adjust it to fit your exact needs. You can fine-tune the models with text, image, and video to understand your industry’s terminology, align with your brand voice, and optimize for your specific use cases. For instance, a legal firm might customize Amazon Nova to better understand legal terminology and document structures.
Creative content generation: Bringing concepts to life The Amazon Nova models also include two creative content generation models:
Amazon Nova Canvas – A state-of-the-art image generation model producing studio-quality images with precise control over style and content, including rich editing features such as inpainting, outpainting, and background removal. Amazon Nova Canvas excels on human evaluations and key benchmarks such as text-to-image faithfulness evaluation with question answering (TIFA) and ImageReward.
Amazon Nova Reel – A state-of-the-art video generation model. Using Amazon Nova Reel, you can produce short videos through text prompts and images, control visual style and pacing, and generate professional-quality video content for marketing, advertising, and entertainment. Amazon Nova Reel outperforms existing models on human evaluations of video quality and video consistency.
All Amazon Nova models include built-in safety controls and creative content generation models include watermarking capabilities to promote responsible AI use.
Let’s see how these models work in practice for a few use cases.
Using Amazon Nova Pro for document analysis To demonstrate the capabilities of document analysis, I downloaded the Choosing a generative AI service decision guide in PDF format from the AWS documentation.
First, I choose Model access in the Amazon Bedrock console navigation pane and request access to the new Amazon Nova models. Then, I choose Chat/text in the Playground section of the navigation pane and select the Amazon Nova Pro model. In the chat, I upload the decision guide PDF and ask:
Write a summary of this doc in 100 words. Then, build a decision tree.
The output follows my instructions producing a structured decision tree that gives me a glimpse of the document before reading it.
Using Amazon Nova Pro for video analysis To demonstrate video analysis, I prepared a video by joining two short clips (more on this in the next section):
Amazon Nova Pro can analyze videos that are uploaded with the API (as in the previous code) or that are stored in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
In the script, I ask to describe the video. I run the script from the command line. Here’s the result:
The video begins with a view of a rocky shore on the ocean, and then transitions to a close-up of a large seashell resting on a sandy beach.
I can use a more detailed prompt to extract specific information from the video such as objects or text. Note that Amazon Nova currently does not process audio in a video.
Using Amazon Nova for video creation Now, let’s create a video using Amazon Nova Reel, starting from a text-only prompt and then providing a reference image.
Because generating a video takes a few minutes, the Amazon Bedrock API introduced three new operations:
StartAsyncInvoke – To start an asynchronous invocation
GetAsyncInvoke – To get the current status of a specific asynchronous invocation
ListAsyncInvokes – To list the status of all asynchronous invocations with optional filters such as status or date
Amazon Nova Reel supports camera control actions such as zooming or moving the camera. This Python script creates a video from this text prompt:
Closeup of a large seashell in the sand. Gentle waves flow all around the shell. Sunset light. Camera zoom in very close.
After the first invocation, the script periodically checks the status until the creation of the video has been completed. I pass a random seed to get a different result each time the code runs.
import random
import time
import boto3
AWS_REGION = "us-east-1"
MODEL_ID = "amazon.nova-reel-v1:0"
SLEEP_TIME = 30
S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET = "<BUCKET>"
video_prompt = "Closeup of a large seashell in the sand. Gentle waves flow all around the shell. Sunset light. Camera zoom in very close."
bedrock_runtime = boto3.client("bedrock-runtime", region_name=AWS_REGION)
model_input = {
"taskType": "TEXT_VIDEO",
"textToVideoParams": {"text": video_prompt},
"videoGenerationConfig": {
"durationSeconds": 6,
"fps": 24,
"dimension": "1280x720",
"seed": random.randint(0, 2147483648)
}
}
invocation = bedrock_runtime.start_async_invoke(
modelId=MODEL_ID,
modelInput=model_input,
outputDataConfig={"s3OutputDataConfig": {"s3Uri": f"s3://{S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}"}}
)
invocation_arn = invocation["invocationArn"]
s3_prefix = invocation_arn.split('/')[-1]
s3_location = f"s3://{S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}/{s3_prefix}"
print(f"\nS3 URI: {s3_location}")
while True:
response = bedrock_runtime.get_async_invoke(
invocationArn=invocation_arn
)
status = response["status"]
print(f"Status: {status}")
if status != "InProgress":
break
time.sleep(SLEEP_TIME)
if status == "Completed":
print(f"\nVideo is ready at {s3_location}/output.mp4")
else:
print(f"\nVideo generation status: {status}")
I run the script:
Status: InProgress
. . .
Status: Completed
Video is ready at s3://BUCKET/PREFIX/output.mp4
This is the resulting video. As requested, the camera zooms in on the subject.
Using Amazon Nova Reel with a reference image To have better control over the creation of the video, I can provide Amazon Nova Reel a reference image such as the following:
This script uses the reference image and a text prompt with a camera action (drone view flying over a coastal landscape) to create a video:
import base64
import random
import time
import boto3
S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET = "<BUCKET>"
AWS_REGION = "us-east-1"
MODEL_ID = "amazon.nova-reel-v1:0"
SLEEP_TIME = 30
input_image_path = "seascape.png"
video_prompt = "drone view flying over a coastal landscape"
bedrock_runtime = boto3.client("bedrock-runtime", region_name=AWS_REGION)
# Load the input image as a Base64 string.
with open(input_image_path, "rb") as f:
input_image_bytes = f.read()
input_image_base64 = base64.b64encode(input_image_bytes).decode("utf-8")
model_input = {
"taskType": "TEXT_VIDEO",
"textToVideoParams": {
"text": video_prompt,
"images": [{ "format": "png", "source": { "bytes": input_image_base64 } }]
},
"videoGenerationConfig": {
"durationSeconds": 6,
"fps": 24,
"dimension": "1280x720",
"seed": random.randint(0, 2147483648)
}
}
invocation = bedrock_runtime.start_async_invoke(
modelId=MODEL_ID,
modelInput=model_input,
outputDataConfig={"s3OutputDataConfig": {"s3Uri": f"s3://{S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}"}}
)
invocation_arn = invocation["invocationArn"]
s3_prefix = invocation_arn.split('/')[-1]
s3_location = f"s3://{S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}/{s3_prefix}"
print(f"\nS3 URI: {s3_location}")
while True:
response = bedrock_runtime.get_async_invoke(
invocationArn=invocation_arn
)
status = response["status"]
print(f"Status: {status}")
if status != "InProgress":
break
time.sleep(SLEEP_TIME)
if status == "Completed":
print(f"\nVideo is ready at {s3_location}/output.mp4")
else:
print(f"\nVideo generation status: {status}")
This is the resulting video. The camera starts from the reference image and moves forward.
Building AI responsibly Amazon Nova models are built with a focus on customer safety, security, and trust throughout the model development stages, offering you peace of mind as well as an adequate level of control to enable your unique use cases.
We’ve built in comprehensive safety features and content moderation capabilities, giving you the controls you need to use AI responsibly. Every generated image and video include digital watermarking.
The Amazon Nova foundation models are built with protections that match its increased capabilities. Amazon Nova extends our safety measures to combat the spread of misinformation, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) risks.
The new generation of Amazon Nova understanding models speaks your language. These models understand and generate content in over 200 languages, with particularly strong capabilities in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, and Hebrew. This means you can build truly global applications without worrying about language barriers or maintaining separate models for different regions. Amazon Nova models for creative content generation support English prompts.
As you explore Amazon Nova, you’ll discover its ability to handle increasingly complex tasks. You can use these models to process lengthy documents up to 300K tokens, analyze multiple images in a single request, understand up to 30 minutes of video content, and generate images and videos at scale from natural language. This makes these models suitable for a variety of business use cases, from quick customer service interactions to deep analysis of corporate documentation and asset creation for advertising, ecommerce, and social media applications.
Integration with Amazon Bedrock makes deployment and scaling straightforward. You can leverage features like Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases to enhance your model with proprietary information, use Amazon Bedrock Agents to automate complex workflows, and implement Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to promote responsible AI use. The platform supports real-time streaming for interactive applications, batch processing for high-volume workloads, and detailed monitoring to help you optimize performance.
Ready to start building with Amazon Nova? Give the new models a try in the Amazon Bedrock console today, visit the Amazon Nova models section of the Amazon Bedrock documentation, and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Bedrock. You can find deep-dive technical content and discover how our Builder communities are using Amazon Bedrock at community.aws. Let us know what you build with these new models!
When it comes to disaster recovery (DR), hope isn’t a plan. Yet I’ve seen the same story play out too many times: Companies find themselves scrambling when the unthinkable happens, discovering that their disaster recovery strategy is, well, full of holes. It’s like packing a parachute: You don’t want to find out what you missed when you’re already falling through the air. From my experience, there are some common mistakes businesses make that can turn a manageable problem into a fire drill.
In this post, I’m sharing the top 10 disaster recovery mistakes I’ve come across when helping businesses think through their disaster recovery posture so that you can strengthen your own safety net. By avoiding these mistakes and implementing a comprehensive DR plan, you can ensure a rapid and efficient recovery from unforeseen disruptions.
1. Proximity paradox
A geographically close disaster recovery site offers limited protection. A natural disaster impacting your primary location could easily disable the nearby DR facility as well. And, if you don’t have a DR site, this could still apply to your business if you keep your backups nearby, such as in a tape storage facility down the road.
How Pittsburg State solved the proximity paradox
Pittsburg State University is located in Kansas in the heart of tornado alley. Disaster planning is nonnegotiable, and the university didn’t want to take chances with their data. See how they set up a robust private cloud with nodes across the state and backed all of their data up to immutable cloud storage with Backblaze B2.
2. Untested backups
Backups that haven’t been restored and verified are unreliable. Regularly test your backups to ensure a smooth recovery process during a disaster.
3. Replication trap
Relying solely on replication for DR creates a single point of failure. If your primary site is compromised, the replicated data at the DR site might be compromised as well. Off-site full and incremental backups are essential.
4. Paper plan peril
A DR plan gathering dust on a shelf is useless. Conduct regular drills to simulate disaster scenarios and expose weaknesses in your plan.
5. Snapshot snafu
Snapshots are not comprehensive backups. Using snapshots for long term storage and retention introduces both technical and compliance risks in relation to how snapshots are managed. This affects both cloud and on-premises platforms.
6. SaaS surprises
Software as a service (SaaS) providers like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace focus on high availability, but they operate on a shared responsibility model, meaning they may have limited built-in protection and recovery options. You may not be managing servers, but you do need a comprehensive data protection plan including regular, incremental backups outside of the SaaS platform.
7. Unforeseen force majeure
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. Don’t limit your DR plan to common IT disruptions. Consider scenarios like widespread power outages or communication breakdowns, and plan accordingly. The goal is holistic cyber resilience—not only identifying threats and protecting against them, but also withstanding attacks as they’re happening and responding effectively.
8. Backup infiltration
Bad actors are increasingly targeting backups to increase the chances of a payout. Utilize immutable backups, unchangeable after creation, for an extra layer of protection against ransomware attacks.
9. Cloud drive disasters
Storing data on Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. is incredibly common. But these platforms do not protect against ransomware and provide limited point-in-time recovery options. Cloud drives are not a sufficient backup of your data.
10. Overlooking compliance
Factor in compliance needs when building your data protection and DR strategy. Regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, and others may have security or archival requirements that should be considered in your plan.
Invest in cyber resilience
After working in the disaster recovery space, I can tell you this: It’s not just about having a plan; it’s about having one that works when it counts. The mistakes I’ve covered here are common, but they’re also avoidable. Take the time to address these now, and you’re not only protecting your systems and data, but your company’s future. For me, a strong DR plan is an investment in resilience, and it’s there to catch you when you need it most.
Today, we’re announcing the multi-agent collaboration capability for Amazon Bedrock (preview). With multi-agent collaboration, you can build, deploy, and manage multiple AI agents working together on complex multi-step tasks that require specialized skills.
When you need more than a single agent to handle a complex task, you can create additional specialized agents to address different aspects of the process. However, managing these agents becomes technically challenging as tasks grow in complexity. As a developer using open source solutions, you may find yourself navigating the complexities of agent orchestration, session handling, memory management, and other technical aspects that require manual implementation.
With the fully managed multi-agent collaboration capability on Amazon Bedrock, specialized agents work within their domains of expertise, coordinated by a supervisor agent. The supervisor breaks down requests, delegates tasks, and consolidates outputs into a final response. For example, an investment advisory multi-agent system might include agents specialized in financial data analysis, research, forecasting, and investment recommendations. Similarly, a retail operations multi-agent system could handle demand forecasting, inventory allocation, supply chain coordination, and pricing optimization.
Amazon Bedrock Agents manages the collaboration, communication, and task delegation behind the scenes. By enabling agents to work together, you can achieve higher task success rates, accuracy, and enhanced productivity. In internal benchmark testing, multi-agent collaboration has shown marked improvements compared to single-agent systems for handling complex, multi-step tasks.
Highlights of multi-agent collaboration in Amazon Bedrock A key challenge in building effective multi-agent collaboration systems is managing the complexity and overhead of coordinating multiple specialized agents at scale. Amazon Bedrock simplifies the process of building, deploying, and orchestrating effective multi-agent collaboration systems while addressing efficiency challenges through several key features and optimizations:
Quick setup – Create, deploy, and manage AI agents working together in minutes without the need for complex coding.
Composability – Integrate your existing agents as subagents within a larger agent system, allowing them to seamlessly work together to tackle complex workflows.
Efficient inter-agent communication – The supervisor agent can interact with subagents using a consistent interface, supporting parallel communication for more efficient task completion.
Optimized collaboration modes – Choose between supervisor mode and supervisor with routing mode. With routing mode, the supervisor agent will route simple requests directly to specialized subagents, bypassing full orchestration. For complex queries or when no clear intention is detected, it automatically falls back to the full supervisor mode, where the supervisor agent analyzes, breaks down problems, and coordinates multiple subagents as needed.
Integrated trace and debug console – Visualize and analyze multi-agent interactions behind the scenes using the integrated trace and debug console.
These features collectively improve coordination capabilities, communication speed, and overall effectiveness of the multi-agent collaboration framework in tackling complex, real-world problems.
Here’s how to get started.
Using multi-agent collaboration in Amazon Bedrock For this demo, I create a social media campaign manager agent that’s composed of a content strategist agent creating posts and an engagement predictor agent optimizing their timing and reach. The following figure shows the team of agents that I’m creating and how multi-agent collaboration works in this scenario.
To get started, you can use the Amazon Bedrock console or APIs to create a supervisor agent and associate specialist subagents in just a few steps.
Create subagents First, I create the two subagents using the existing agent builder workflow. I open the Amazon Bedrock console, select Agents in the left navigation panel, then choose Create Agent. I create one agent that I name content-strategist, an agent that generates creative social media content ideas. Note the new option to enable the agent for multi-agent collaboration. I leave this option unchecked for now; we need to enable this option later for the supervisor agent. Next, I choose Create.
In the Agent builder dialog box, I choose to create and use a new service role, select Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 as the model, and provide the following instructions for the agent:
You are a social media content strategist with expertise in converting business goals into engaging social posts. Your task is to generate creative, on-brand content ideas that align with specified campaign goals and target audience. Each suggestion should include a topic, content type (image/video/text/poll), specific copy, and relevant hashtags. Focus on variety, authenticity, and ensuring each post serves a strategic purpose.
I also create and attach a knowledge base that contains high-performing post templates. As with any other agent, you could also configure additional settings, such as action groups to perform tasks, enable code interpretation, or add guardrails. I leave all other settings to their defaults.
Then, I choose Save and exit.
I repeat the steps to create a second agent that I name engagement-predictor, an agent that predicts social media post performance and optimal posting times. For this agent, I provide the following instructions:
You are a social media analytics expert who predicts post performance and optimal timing. For each content idea, analyze potential reach and engagement based on content type, industry benchmarks, and audience behavior patterns. Your task is to estimate reach, engagement rate, and determine the best posting time (day/hour). Support each prediction with data-driven reasoning and industry-specific insights. Focus on actionable metrics that will maximize campaign impact.
I create and attach a knowledge base that contains platform-specific peak engagement times, industry benchmark metrics, and content performance multipliers for predicting and optimizing social media post performance. Again, I choose Save and exit.
I now have my two specialist subagents.
Before moving on, test each agent individually, and once you’ve confirmed their functionality, create an alias for each one. This approach will streamline the process of creating supervisor agents in the future.
Create supervisor agent and associate subagents Next, I create the supervisor agent. I name this agent social-media-campaign-manager, an agent that combines the outputs from the content strategy agent and the engagement predictor agent into a comprehensive campaign plan.
This time, I turn on Enable Multi-agent collaboration before I choose Create.
In the Agent builder dialog box, I again choose to create and use a new service role, select Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 as the model, and provide the following instructions for the agent:
You are a strategic campaign manager who orchestrates social media campaigns from concept to execution.
I create and attach a knowledge base that contains a collection of proven campaign templates, content mix ratios, and cross-platform posting requirements.
Next, I scroll down to Multi-agent collaboration and choose Edit.
The option to turn on multi-agent collaboration should already be checked because I enabled this option when I started creating the agent.
Then, you can choose between two collaboration configurations that determine how information is handled across the agent’s team to coordinate a final response.
In Supervisor mode, the supervisor agent analyzes the input, breaking down complex problems or paraphrasing the request. It then invokes subagents either serially or in parallel, and it might consult knowledge bases or invoke action groups. After receiving responses from subagents, the supervisor agent processes them to determine if the problem is solved or if further action is needed.
Alternatively, in Supervisor with routing mode, the supervisor agent first attempts to route simple requests directly to a relevant subagent, whose response is then forwarded to the user. For complex or ambiguous inputs, the system switches to supervisor mode, where the supervisor agent breaks down the problem or asks follow-up questions before proceeding similarly to standard supervisor mode. This approach allows for efficient handling of both straightforward and complex queries within a single framework.
For my demo, I choose Supervisor mode.
As a last step, I associate the two subagents by adding each subagent in Agent collaborator. I provide a collaborator name for each agent and a collaborator instruction.
I select the content-strategist agent and provide the collaborator name content-strategist along with the following instruction:
You can invoke this agent for social media content strategy tasks such as converting business goals into engaging social posts. The agent generates creative, on-brand content ideas that align with specified campaign goals and target audience.
Then, I choose Add collaborator, select the engagement-predictor agent, and provide the collaborator name engagement-predictor along with the following instructions:
You can invoke this agent for social media analytics to predict post performance and optimal timing.
Note: Enable conversation history sharing allows the supervisor agent to pass the full context of a user interaction to subagents. This helps maintain coherence and avoid repeating questions, especially when routing or switching between agents. Keep in mind, it might confuse simpler subagents with complex task histories. We recommend enabling this feature when you need continuity and disabling it when you’re focusing on task simplification or using specialized agents. I keep it disabled for my demo.
Choose Save and complete the Agent builder workflow.
Let’s test it!
Test multi-agent collaboration Prepare the social media campaign manageragent and choose Test.
I use the following input prompt:
Create a 2-week social campaign for EcoTech's new solar panel launch. Target: B2B (facility managers, sustainability directors) Key points: 30% more efficient, AI-optimized, 2-year ROI Need: 4 posts/week on LinkedIn/Twitter (40% educational, 30% product, 30% thought leadership).
After the response comes back, I choose Show trace to inspect the workflow. In the Multi-agent collaboration trace timeline, you can observe that each subagent got invoked. You can also inspect the trace steps to check the orchestration details.
You can find more examples of how to work with Amazon Bedrock Agents and the new multi-agent collaboration capability in the Amazon Bedrock Agent Samples GitHub repo.
Things to know
During preview, multi-agent collaboration supports real-time chat assistant (synchronous) use cases.
Subagents can have collaboration enabled themselves with an overall soft limit of three hierarchical agent team layers.
Join the preview Multi-agent collaboration in Amazon Bedrock is available today in preview in all AWS Regions that support Amazon Bedrock Agents, except AWS GovCloud (US-West). Check the full Region list for future updates. To learn more, visit Amazon Bedrock Agents.
Today, we’re adding Automated Reasoning checks (preview) as a new safeguard in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to help you mathematically validate the accuracy of responses generated by large language models (LLMs) and prevent factual errors from hallucinations.
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails lets you implement safeguards for generative AI applications by filtering undesirable content, redacting personal identifiable information (PII), and enhancing content safety and privacy. You can configure policies for denied topics, content filters, word filters, PII redaction, contextual grounding checks, and now Automated Reasoning checks.
Automated Reasoning checks help prevent factual errors from hallucinations using sound mathematical, logic-based algorithmic verification and reasoning processes to verify the information generated by a model, so outputs align with known facts and aren’t based on fabricated or inconsistent data.
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails is the only responsible AI capability offered by a major cloud provider that helps customers to build and customize safety, privacy, and truthfulness for their generative AI applications within a single solution.
Primer on automated reasoning Automated reasoning is a field of computer science that uses mathematical proofs and logical deduction to verify the behavior of systems and programs. Automated reasoning differs from machine learning (ML), which makes predictions, in that it provides mathematical guarantees about a system’s behavior. Amazon Web Services (AWS) already uses automated reasoning in key service areas such as storage, networking, virtualization, identity, and cryptography. For example, automated reasoning is used to formally verify the correctness of cryptographic implementations, improving both performance and development speed. To learn more, check out Provable Security and the Automated reasoning research area in the Amazon Science Blog.
Now AWS is applying a similar approach to generative AI. The new Automated Reasoning checks (preview) in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails is the first and only generative AI safeguard that helps prevent factual errors due to hallucinations using logically accurate and verifiable reasoning that explains why generative AI responses are correct. Automated Reasoning checks are particularly useful for use cases where factual accuracy and explainability are important. For example, you could use Automated Reasoning checks to validate LLM-generated responses about human resources (HR) policies, company product information, or operational workflows.
Used alongside other techniques such as prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and contextual grounding checks, Automated Reasoning checks add a more rigorous and verifiable approach to making sure that LLM-generated output is factually accurate. By encoding your domain knowledge into structured policies, you can have confidence that your conversational AI applications are providing reliable and trustworthy information to your users.
Using Automated Reasoning checks (preview) in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails With Automated Reasoning checks in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, you can create Automated Reasoning policies that encode your organization’s rules, procedures, and guidelines into a structured, mathematical format. These policies can then be used to verify that the content generated by your LLM-powered applications is consistent with your guidelines.
Automated Reasoning policies are composed of a set of variables, defined with a name, type, and description, and the logical rules that operate on the variables. Behind the scenes, rules are expressed in formal logic, but they’re translated to natural language to make it easier for a user without formal logic expertise to refine a model. Automated Reasoning checks uses the variable descriptions to extract their values when validating a Q&A.
Here’s how it works.
Create Automated Reasoning policies Using the Amazon Bedrock console, you can upload documents that describe your organization’s rules and procedures. Amazon Bedrock will analyze these documents and automatically create an initial Automated Reasoning policy, which represents the key concepts and their relationships in a mathematical format.
Navigate to the new Automated Reasoning menu item in Safeguards. Create a new policy and give it a name. Upload an existing document that defines the right solution space, such as an HR guideline or an operational manual. For this demo, I’m using an example airline ticket policy document that includes the airline’s policies for ticket changes.
Then, define the policy’s intent and any processing parameters. For example, specify if it will validate airport staff inquiries and identify any elements to exclude from processing, such as internal reference numbers. Include one or more sample Q&As to help the system understand typical interactions.
Here’s my intent description:
Ignore the policy ID number, it's irrelevant. Airline employees will ask questions about whether customers are allowed to modify their tickets providing the customer details. Below is an example question:
QUESTION: I’m flying to Wonder City with Unicorn Airlines and noticed my last name is misspelled on the ticket, can modify it at the airport? ANSWER: No. Changes to the spelling of the names on the ticket must be submitted via email within 24 hours of ticket purchase.
Then, choose Create.
The system now initiates an automated process to create your Automated Reasoning policy. This process involves analyzing your document, identifying key concepts, breaking down the document into individual units, translating these natural language units into formal logic, validating the translations, and finally combining them into a comprehensive logical model. Once complete, review the generated structure, including the rules and variables. You can edit these for accuracy through the user interface.
To test the Automated Reasoning policy, you first have to create a guardrail.
Create a guardrail and configure Automated Reasoning checks When building your conversational AI application with Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, you can enable Automated Reasoning checks and specify which Automated Reasoning policies to use for validation.
Navigate to the Guardrails menu item in Safeguards. Create a new guardrail and give it a name. Choose Enable Automated Reasoning policy and select the policy and policy version you want to use. Then, complete your guardrail configuration.
Test Automated Reasoning checks You can use the Test playground in the Automated Reasoning console to verify the effectiveness of your Automated Reasoning policy. Enter a test question just like a user of your application would, together with an example answer to validate.
For this demo, I enter an incorrect answer to see what will happen.
Question: I'm flying to Wonder City with Unicorn Airlines and noticed my last name is misspelled on the ticket, I'm currently in person at the airport, can I submit the change in person?
Answer: Yes. You are allowed to change names on tickets at any time, even in person at the airport.
Then, select the guardrail you’ve just created and choose Submit.
Automated Reasoning checks will analyze the content and validate it against the Automated Reasoning policies you’ve configured. The checks will identify any factual inaccuracies or inconsistencies and provide an explanation for the validation results.
In my demo, the Automated Reasoning checks correctly identified the response as Invalid. It shows which rule led to the finding, along with the extracted variables and suggestions.
When the validation result is invalid, the suggestions show a set of variable assignments that would make the conclusion valid. In my scenario, the suggestions show that the change submission method needs to be email for the validation result to be valid.
If no factual inaccuracies are detected and the validation result is Valid, suggestions show a list of assignments that are necessary for the result to hold; these are unstated assumptions in the answer. In my scenario, this might be assumptions such as that it’s the original ticket on which name corrections must be made or that the type of ticket stock is eligible for changes.
If factual inconsistencies are detected, the console will display Mixed results as the validation result. In the API response, you will see a list of findings, with some marked as valid and others as invalid. If this happens, review the system’s findings and suggestions and edit any unclear policy rules.
You can also use the validation results to enhance LLM-generated responses based on the feedback. For example, the following code snippet demonstrates how you can ask the model to regenerate its answer based on the received feedback:
for f in findings:
if f.result == "INVALID":
if f.rules is not None:
for r in f.rules:
feedback += f"<feedback>{r.description}</feedback>\n"
new_prompt = (
"The answer you generated is inaccurate. Consider the feedback below within "
f"<feedback> tags and rewrite your answer.\n\n{feedback}"
)
Achieving high validation accuracy is an iterative process. As a best practice, regularly review policy performance and adjust it as needed. You can edit rules in natural language and the system will automatically update the logical model.
For example, updating variable descriptions can significantly improve validation accuracy. Consider a scenario where a question states, “I’m a full-time employee…,” and the description of the is_full_time variable only states, “works more than 20 hours per week.” In this case, Automated Reasoning checks might not recognize the phrase “full-time.” To enhance accuracy, you should update the variable description to be more comprehensive, such as: “Works more than 20 hours per week. Users may refer to this as full-time or part-time. The value should be true for full-time and false for part-time.” This detailed description helps the system pick up all relevant factual claims for validation in natural language questions and answers, providing more accurate results.
Available in preview The new Automated Reasoning checks safeguard is available today in preview in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails in the US West (Oregon) AWS Region. To request to be considered for access to the preview today, contact your AWS account team. In the next few weeks, look for a sign-up form in the Amazon Bedrock console. To learn more, visit Amazon Bedrock Guardrails.
Today, we’re announcing the availability of Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation in preview that automates the process of creating a distilled model for your specific use case by generating responses from a large foundation model (FM) called a teacher model and fine-tunes a smaller FM called a student model with the generated responses. It uses data synthesis techniques to improve response from a teacher model. Amazon Bedrock then hosts the final distilled model for inference giving you a faster and more cost-efficient model with accuracy close to the teacher model, for your use case.
Customers are excited to use the most powerful and accurate FMs on Amazon Bedrock for their generative AI applications. But for some use cases, the latency associated with these models isn’t ideal. In addition, customers are looking for better price performance as they scale their generative AI applications to many billions of user interactions. To reduce latency and be more cost-efficient for their use case, customers are turning to smaller models. However, for some use cases, smaller models can’t provide optimal accuracy. Fine-tuning models requires an additional skillset to create the high-quality labeled datasets to increase model accuracy for customer’s use cases.
With Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation, you can increase the accuracy of a smaller-sized student model to mimic a higher-performance teacher model with the process of knowledge transfer. You can create distilled models that for a certain use case, are up to five times faster and up to 75 percent less expensive than original large models, with less than two percent accuracy loss for use cases such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), by transferring knowledge from a teacher model of your choice to a student model in the same family.
How does it work? Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation generates responses from teacher models, improves response generation from a teacher model by adding proprietary data synthesis, and fine-tunes a student model.
Amazon Bedrock employs various data synthesis techniques to enhance response generation from the teacher model and create high-quality fine-tuning datasets. These techniques are tailored to specific use cases. For instance, Amazon Bedrock may augment the training dataset by generating similar prompts, effectively increasing the volume of the fine-tuning dataset.
Alternatively, it can produce high-quality teacher responses by using provided prompt-response pairs as golden examples. At preview, Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation supports Anthropic, Meta, and Amazon models.
Get started with Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation To get started, go to the Amazon Bedrock console and choose Custom models in the left navigation pane. Now you have three customization methods: Fine-tuning, Distillation, and Continued pre-training.
Choose Create Distillation job to start fine-tuning your model using model distillation.
Enter your distilled model name and job name.
Then, choose the teacher model and, based on your choice of the teacher model, select a student model from the list of available student models. The teacher and the student model must be from the same family. For example, if you choose Meta Llama 3.1 405B Instruct model as a teacher model, you can only choose either Llama 3.1 70B or 8B Instruct model as a student model.
To generate synthetic data, set the value of Max response length, an inference parameter to determine the response generated by the teacher model. Choose the distillation input dataset located in your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. This input dataset presents the prompts or golden prompt-response pairs for your use case. The input files must be in the dataset format according to your model. To learn more, visit Prepare the datasets in the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.
Then, choose Create Distillation job after setting up the Amazon S3 location to store the distillation output metrics data and permissions to write to Amazon S3 on your behalf.
After the distillation job is created successfully, you can track the training progress on the Jobs tab, and the model will be available on the Models tab.
Using production data with Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation If you want to reuse your production data for distillation and skip generating teacher responses again, you do so by turning on model invocation logging to collect invocation logs, model input data, and model output data for all invocations in your AWS account used in Amazon Bedrock. Adding request metadata helps you to easily filter invocation logs at a later point.
request_params = {
'modelId': 'meta.llama3-1-405b-instruct-v1:0',
'messages': [
{
'role': 'user',
'content': [
{
"text": "What is model distillation in generative AI?"
}
]
}
},
'requestMetadata': {
"ProjectName": "myLlamaDistilledModel",
"CodeName": "myDistilledCode"
}
}
response = bedrock_runtime_client.converse(**request_params)
pprint(response)
---
'output': {'message': {'content': [{'text': '\n''\n'
'Model distillation is a technique in generative AI that involves training a smaller,'
'more efficient model (the '"student") to mimic the behavior of a larger, '
'more complex model '(the "teacher"). The goal of model distillation is to'
'transfer the knowledge and capabilities of the teacher model to the student model,'
'allowing the student to perform similarly well on a given task, but with much less computational'
'resources and memory.\n'
'\n'}]
}
}
Next, when using Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation, select a teacher model whose accuracy you want to aim for your use case and a student model that you want to fine-tune. Then give access to Amazon Bedrock to read your invocation logs. Here, you can specify the request metadata filters so that only specific logs, which are valid for your use case, are read to fine-tune the student model. The teacher model selected for distillation and the model used in the invocation logs must be the same if you want Amazon Bedrock to reuse the responses from invocation logs.
Inference from your distilled model Before using the distilled model, you need to purchase Provisioned Throughput for Amazon Bedrock and then use the resulting distilled model for inference. When you purchase Provisioned Throughput, you can select a commitment term, choose the number of model units, and check estimated hourly, daily, and monthly costs.
Things to know Here are a few important things to know.
Model distillation aims to increase the accuracy of the student model to match the performance of the teacher model for your specific use case. Before you begin model distillation, we recommend that you evaluate different teacher models for your use case and select the teacher model that works well for your use case.
We recommend optimizing your prompts for your use case against which you find the teacher model accuracy to be acceptable. Submit these prompts as the distillation input data.
To choose a corresponding student model to fine-tune, evaluate the latency profiles of different student model options for your use case. The final distilled model will have the same latency profile as the student model that you select.
If a specific student model already performs well for your use case, then we recommend using the student model as is instead of creating a distilled model.
You pay the cost to generate synthetic data by the teacher model and the cost to fine-tune the student model during model distillation. After the distilled model is created, you pay the cost to store the distilled model monthly. Inference from the distilled model is charged under Provisioned Throughput per hour per model unit. To learn more, visit the Amazon Bedrock Pricing page.
AWS customers make use of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) at an incredible scale, regularly creating individual buckets that contain billions or trillions of objects! At that scale, finding the objects which meet particular criteria — objects with keys that match a pattern, objects of a particular size, or objects with a specific tag — becomes challenging. Our customers have had to build systems that capture, store, and query for this information. These systems can become complex and hard to scale, and can fall out of sync with the actual state of the bucket and the objects within.
Rich Metadata Today we are enabling in preview automatic generation of metadata that is captured when S3 objects are added or modified, and stored in fully managed Apache Iceberg tables. This allows you to use Iceberg-compatible tools such as Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, Amazon QuickSight, and Apache Spark to easily and efficiently query the metadata (and find the objects of interest) at any scale. As a result, you can quickly find the data that you need for your analytics, data processing, and AI training workloads.
For video inference responses stored in S3, Amazon Bedrock will annotate the content it generates with metadata that will allow you to identify the content as AI-generated, and to know which model was used to generate it.
The metadata schema contains over 20 elements including the bucket name, object key, creation/modification time, storage class, encryption status, tags, and user metadata. You can also store additional, application-specific descriptive information in a separate table and then join it with the metadata table as part of your query.
How it Works You can enable capture of rich metadata for any of your S3 buckets by specifying the location (an S3 table bucket and a table name) where you want the metadata to be stored. Capture of updates (object creations, object deletions, and changes to object metadata) begins right away and will be stored in the table within minutes. Each update generates a new row in the table, with a record type (CREATE, UPDATE_METADATA, or DELETE) and a sequence number. You can retrieve the historical record for a given object by running a query that orders the results by sequence number.
Enabling and Querying Metadata I start by creating a table bucket for my metadata using the create-table-bucket command (this can also be done from the AWS Management Console or with an API call):
For testing purposes I installed Apache Spark on an EC2 instance and after a little bit of setup I was able to run queries by referencing the Amazon S3 Tables Catalog for Apache Iceberg package and adding the metadata table (as mytablebucket) to the command line:
scala> spark.sql("describe table mytablebucket.aws_s3_metadata.jbarr_data_bucket_1_table").show(100,35)
+---------------------+------------------+-----------------------------------+
| col_name| data_type| comment|
+---------------------+------------------+-----------------------------------+
| bucket| string| The general purpose bucket name.|
| key| string|The object key name (or key) tha...|
| sequence_number| string|The sequence number, which is an...|
| record_type| string|The type of this record, one of ...|
| record_timestamp| timestamp_ntz|The timestamp that's associated ...|
| version_id| string|The object's version ID. When yo...|
| is_delete_marker| boolean|The object's delete marker statu...|
| size| bigint|The object size in bytes, not in...|
| last_modified_date| timestamp_ntz|The object creation date or the ...|
| e_tag| string|The entity tag (ETag), which is ...|
| storage_class| string|The storage class that's used fo...|
| is_multipart| boolean|The object's upload type. If the...|
| encryption_status| string|The object's server-side encrypt...|
|is_bucket_key_enabled| boolean|The object's S3 Bucket Key enabl...|
| kms_key_arn| string|The Amazon Resource Name (ARN) f...|
| checksum_algorithm| string|The algorithm that's used to cre...|
| object_tags|map<string,string>|The object tags that are associa...|
| user_metadata|map<string,string>|The user metadata that's associa...|
| requester| string|The AWS account ID of the reques...|
| source_ip_address| string|The source IP address of the req...|
| request_id| string|The request ID. For records that...|
+---------------------+------------------+-----------------------------------+
Here’s a simple query that shows some of the metadata for the ten most recent updates:
In a real-world situation I would query the table using one of the AWS or open source analytics tools that I mentioned earlier.
Console Access I can also set up and manage the metadata configuration for my buckets using the Amazon S3 Console by clicking the Metadata tab:
Available Now Amazon S3 Metadata is available in preview now and you can start using it today in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions.
Pricing is based on the number updates (object creations, object deletions, and changes to object metadata) with an additional charge for storage of the metadata table. For more pricing information, visit the S3 Pricing page.
I’m confident that you will be able to make use of this metadata in many powerful ways, and am looking forward to hearing about your use cases. Let me know what you think!
Amazon S3 Tables give you storage that is optimized for tabular data such as daily purchase transactions, streaming sensor data, and ad impressions in Apache Iceberg format, for easy queries using popular query engines like Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Apache Spark. When compared to self-managed table storage, you can expect up to 3x faster query performance and up to 10x more transactions per second, along with the operational efficiency that is part-and-parcel when you use a fully managed service.
Iceberg has become the most popular way to manage Parquet files, with thousands of AWS customers using Iceberg to query across often billions of files containing petabytes or even exabytes of data.
Table Buckets, Tables, and Namespaces Table buckets are the third type of S3 bucket, taking their place alongside the existing general purpose and directory buckets. You can think of a table bucket as an analytics warehouse that can store Iceberg tables with various schemas. Additionally, S3 Tables deliver the same durability, availability, scalability, and performance characteristics as S3 itself, and automatically optimize your storage to maximize query performance and to minimize cost.
Each table bucket resides in a specific AWS Region and has a name that must be unique within the AWS account with respect to the region. Buckets are referenced by ARN and also have a resource policy. Finally, each bucket uses namespaces to logically group the tables in the bucket.
Tables are structured datasets stored in a table bucket. Like table buckets, they have ARNs and resource policies, and exist within one of the bucket’s namespaces. Tables are fully managed, with automatic, configurable continuous maintenance including compaction, management of aged snapshots, and removal of unreferenced files. Each table has an S3 API endpoint for storage operations.
Namespaces can be referenced from access policies in order to simplify access management.
Buckets and Tables from the Command Line Ok, let’s dive right in, create a bucket, and put a table or two inside. I’ll use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), but AWS Management Console and API support is also available. For conciseness, I will pipe the output of the more verbose commands through jq and show you only the most relevant values.
I can access and populate the table in many different ways. For testing purposes I installed Apache Spark, then invoked the Spark shell with command-line arguments to use the Amazon S3 Tables Catalog for Apache Iceberg package and to set mytablebucket to the ARN of my table.
I create a namespace (mydata) that I will use to group my tables:
scala> spark.sql("""CREATE NAMESPACE IF NOT EXISTS mytablebucket.mydata""")
Then I create a simple Iceberg table in the namespace:
spark.sql("""CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS mytablebucket.mydata.table1
(id INT,
name STRING,
value INT)
USING iceberg
""")
Buckets and Tables from the Console I can also create and work on table buckets using the S3 Console. I click Table buckets to get started:
Before creating my first bucket I click Enable integration so that I can access my table buckets from Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, and other AWS query engines (I can do this later if I don’t do it now):
I read the fine print and click Enable integration to create the specified IAM role and an entry in the AWS Glue Data Catalog:
After a few seconds the integration is enabled and I click Create table bucket to move ahead:
I enter a name (jbarr-table-bucket-3) and click Create table bucket:
From here I can create and use tables as I showed you earlier in the CLI section.
Table Maintenance Table buckets take care of some important maintenance duties that would be your responsibility if you were creating and managing your own Iceberg tables. To relieve you of these duties so that you can spend more time on your table, the following maintenance operations are performed automatically:
Compaction – This process combines multiple small table objects into a larger object to improve query performance, in pursuit of a target file size that can be configured to be between 64 MiB and 512 MiB. The new object is rewritten as a new snapshot.
Snapshot Management – This process expires and ultimately removes table snapshots, with configuration options for the minimum number of snapshots to retain and the maximum age of a snapshot to retain. Expired snapshots are marked as non-current, then later deleted after a specified number of days.
Unreferenced File Removal – This process removes and deletes objects that are not referenced by any table snapshots.
Things to Know Here are a couple of important things that you should know about table buckets and tables:
The new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)Trn2 instances and Trn2 UltraServers are the most powerful EC2 compute options for ML training and inference. Powered by the second generation of AWS Trainium chips (AWS Trainium2), the Trn2 instances are 4x faster, offer 4x more memory bandwidth, and 3x more memory capacity than the first-generation Trn1 instances. Trn2 instances offer 30-40% better price performance than the current generation of GPU-based EC2 P5e and P5en instances.
In addition to the 16 Trainium2 chips, each Trn2 instance features 192 vCPUs, 2 TiB of memory, and 3.2 Tbps of Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) v3 network bandwidth, which offers up to 50% lower latency than the previous generation.
The Trn2 UltraServers, which are a completely new compute offering, feature 64x Trainium2 chips connected with a high-bandwidth, low-latency NeuronLink interconnect, for peak inference and training performance on frontier foundation models.
Up and Out and Up Sustained growth in the size and complexity of the frontier models is enabled by innovative forms of compute power, assembled into equally innovative architectural forms. In simpler times we could talk about architecting for scalability in two ways: scaling up (using a bigger computer) and scaling out (using more computers). Today, when I look at the Trainium2 chip, the Trn2 instance, and the even larger compute offerings that I will talk about in a minute, it seems like both models apply, but at different levels of the overall hierarchy. Let’s review the Trn2 building blocks, starting at the NeuronCore and scaling to an UltraCluster:
NeuronCores are at the heart of the Trainium2 chip. Each third-generation NeuronCore includes a scalar engine (1 input to 1 output), a vector engine (multiple inputs to multiple outputs), a tensor engine (systolic array multiplication, convolution, and transposition), and a GPSIMD (general purpose single instruction multiple data) core.
Each Trainium2 chip is home to eight NeuronCores and 96 GiB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), and supports 2.9 TB/second of HBM bandwidth. The cores can be addressed and used individually, or pairs of physical cores can be grouped into a single logical core. A single Trainium2 chip delivers up to 1.3 petaflops of dense FP8 compute and up to 5.2 petaflops of sparse FP8 compute, and can drive 95% utilization of memory bandwidth thanks to automated reordering of the HBM queue.
Each Trn2 instance is, in turn, home to 16 Trainum2 chips. That’s a total of 128 NeuronCores, 1.5 TiB of HBM, and 46 TB/second of HBM bandwidth. Altogether this multiplies out to up to 20.8 petaflops of dense FP8 compute and up to 83.2 petaflops of sparse FP8 compute. The Trainium2 chips are connected across NeuronLink in a 2D torus for high bandwidth, low latency chip-to-chip communication at 1 GB/second.
An UltraServer is home to four Trn2 instances connected with low-latency, high-bandwidth NeuronLink. That’s 512 NeuronCores, 64 Trainium2 chips, 6 TiB of HBM, and 185 TB/second of HBM bandwidth. Doing the math, this results in up to 83 petaflops of dense FP compute and up to 332 petaflops of sparse FP8 compute. In addition to the 2D torus that connects NeuronCores within an instance, Cores at corresponding XY positions in each of the four instances are connected in a ring. For inference, UltraServers help deliver industry-leading response time to create the best real-time experiences. For training, UltraServers boost model training speed and efficiency with faster collective communication for model parallelism when compared to standalone instances. UltraServers are designed to support training and inference at the trillion parameter level and beyond; they are available in preview form and you can contact us to join the preview.
Trn2 instances and UltraServers are being deployed in EC2 UltraClusters to enable scale-out distributed training across tens of thousands of Trainium chips on a single petabit scale, non-blocking network, with access to Amazon FSx for Lustre high performance storage.
On the software side, you can start with the AWS Deep Learning AMIs. These images are preconfigured with the frameworks and tools that you probably already know and use: PyTorch, JAX, and a lot more.
If you used the AWS Neuron SDK to build your apps, you can bring them over and recompile them for use on Trn2 instances. This SDK integrates natively with JAX, PyTorch, and essential libraries like Hugging Face, PyTorch Lightning, and NeMo. Neuron includes out-of-the-box optimizations for distributed training and inference with the open source PyTorch libraries NxD Training and NxD Inference, while providing deep insights for profiling and debugging. Neuron also supports OpenXLA, including stable HLO and GSPMD, enabling PyTorch/XLA and JAX developers to utilize Neuron’s compiler optimizations for Trainium2.
AWS re:Invent 2024, our flagship annual conference, is taking place Dec. 2-6, 2024, in Las Vegas. This premier cloud computing event brings together the global cloud computing community for a week of keynotes, technical sessions, product launches, and networking opportunities. As AWS continues to unveil its latest innovations and services throughout the conference, we’ll keep you updated here with all the major product announcements.
Additional re:Invent resources:
AWS News Blog: Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr and colleagues keep you posted on the biggest and best new AWS offerings.
AWS Clean Rooms now supports multiple clouds and data sources With expanded data sources, AWS Clean Rooms helps customers securely collaborate with their partners’ data across clouds, eliminating data movement, safeguarding sensitive information, promoting data freshness, and streamlining cross-company insights.
New RAG evaluation and LLM-as-a-judge capabilities in Amazon Bedrock Evaluate AI models and applications efficiently with Amazon Bedrock’s new LLM-as-a-judge capability for model evaluation and RAG evaluation for Knowledge Bases, offering a variety of quality and responsible AI metrics at scale.
New APIs in Amazon Bedrock to enhance RAG applications, now available With custom connectors and reranking models, you can enhance RAG applications by enabling direct ingestion to knowledge bases without requiring a full sync, and improving response relevance through advanced reranking models.
Introducing new PartyRock capabilities and free daily usage Unleash your creativity with PartyRock’s new AI capabilities: generate images, analyze visuals, search hundreds of thousands of apps, and process multiple docs simultaneously – no coding required.
Users can now query information embedded in various types of visuals, including diagrams, infographics, charts, and other image-based content.
Management & Governance
Container Insights with enhanced observability now available in Amazon ECS With granular visibility into container workloads, CloudWatch Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon ECS enables proactive monitoring and faster troubleshooting, enhancing observability and improving application performance.
Simplify governance with declarative policies With only a few steps, create declarative policies and enforce desired configuration for AWS services across your organization, reducing ongoing governance overhead and providing transparency for administrators and end users.
Announcing Amazon FSx Intelligent-Tiering, a new storage class for FSx for OpenZFS Delivering NAS capabilities with automatic data tiering among frequently accessed, infrequent, and archival storage tiers, Amazon FSx Intelligent-Tiering offers high performance up to 400K IOPS, 20 GB/s throughput, seamless integration with AWS services.
Connect users to data through your apps with Storage Browser for Amazon S3 Storage Browser for Amazon S3 is an open source interface component that you can add to your web applications to provide your authorized end users, such as customers, partners, and employees, with access to easily browse, upload, download, copy, and delete data in S3.
In the hurry-up-and-wait world of media production, anything you can do to speed through the hurry-ups and avoid or shorten the waits is not just a gift—it’s an advantage that can mean happier team members, delighted clients and fans, and more revenue.
Backblaze Event Notifications can help.This new B2 Cloud Storage feature can help you streamline a range of your production tasks—like automatically starting transcoding of video and distributing new images—across your preferred workflow tools.
Today, I’m sharing five ways you can use Backblaze Event Notifications to operationalize media production efficiencies. If you’re interested in Event Notifications for applications, check out this post; and stay tuned for a future post on how to use Event Notifications for IT backup.
Event Notifications for media production: Simplified automation
Event Notifications monitors your B2 Cloud Storage for data changes that you designate—think raw video uploads, content version updates, deletions, etc.—and delivers near real-time alerts where you want them about these changes. These alerts can be used to create awareness faster, and even more powerfully, to initiate streamlined end-to-end processes that can save you time and hassle, and avoid unnecessary manual tasks and/or the cost of complex intermediaries.
What are webhooks?
Webhooks, if you’re not familiar with the term, are HTTP-based callback functions that enable event-based communications between software applications. Backblaze Event Notifications can uniquely work with any external service that accepts webhooks. This means you can use it to your advantage across your media production workflow—and this is novel when most vendors’ alerts features are limited to closed ecosystems or require significant and sometimes costly workarounds to communicate beyond a limited set of production tools.
Top 5 use cases for media production
Here are specific, practical ways people producing and managing media can take advantage of Event Notifications for immediate benefits.
1. New content processing
Event Notifications can be used to trigger tasks immediately after new content is uploaded. Imagine one of your team members uploads a video or image: Event Notifications can be sent to a transcoding service to format it and a tagging service to categorize it for better content organization. Set up to furthermore extract valuable metadata too—all in near real time, without manual intervention.
General workflow (abbreviated)
By automating these processes, companies can ensure that user-generated content is formatted correctly, appropriately tagged, and moderated without delay. This not only saves time but guarantees a consistent user experience.
What’s more, you can even go full Jedi Knight and handle errors programmatically with Event Notifications logic that triggers reprocessing tasks whenever issues arise.
2. Integrated alerts in go-to tools
Event Notifications can easily integrate with your communication tools like Slack and productivity tools like Zapier, to inform internal and external stakeholders of updates without them needing to check for them manually. Users have told us this is a great way to keep people updated when assets are added, updated, or advanced to key stages in production and post cycles—setting them up to consider taking downstream actions that don’t lend themselves to further process automation.
Asset change announcement workflow
Additionally, for teams using workflow tools such as Zapier to connect various services, Event Notifications makes it simple to trigger actions across multiple platforms, enabling powerful, automated workflows with your data in B2 Cloud Storage.
3. Over-the-top (OTT) streaming automation
Regardless of whether your streaming model is AVOD, TVOD, or SVOD, Event Notifications can help automate processing and distribution workflows. Users can enable them so that every time a new title is added to B2 Cloud Storage, it then triggers alerts that initiate transcoding, compression, and prep for delivery or playback via content delivery network (CDN).
OTT streaming platform workflow
4. Backup completion monitoring
An important (if unglamorous) aspect of managing media is backing it up for extra safekeeping. After all, it’s a precious asset worth a lot of money now and later. So whether you back up nightly, monthly, at project’s end, or on some other cadence, with Event Notifications, customers can set up to receive updates when their media backups are successfully uploaded to a Backblaze B2 Bucket—providing peace of mind when data is protected.
We’ve also had a few users already tell us that not seeing backup completion alerts when expected helped them realize that they had other, previously unknown workflow hiccups to address.
Backup complete workflow
Tangentially related, media organizations are also using Backblaze Cloud Replication to programmatically store their content to two or more geographically distributed locations for added protection—this isn’t the same as Event Notifications, but is another automation tool for enhancing your protection posture.
5. Monitor data usage
Since Event Notifications messages are sent within seconds of files being uploaded and deleted, and they contain the size of the file in question, you can easily and reliably track your data usage in near real time, helping you identify trends and potential issues. For example, if you know large raw files are coming in and then messages indicating much smaller than expected file sizes were uploaded, it can alert you to begin to QC it.
We’ve also seen such data monitoring prove highly beneficial to IT personnel who support them because the near real-time monitoring allows faster responses to situations as they are happening, thereby mitigating risks, reducing costs, and/or nipping issues in the bud so the production teams remain disruption and distraction free.
Monitoring workflow
Beyond these example use cases, Event Notifications opens up a wide range of possibilities for automating and optimizing workflows. This flexibility makes it easy to automate how your infrastructure interacts with and reacts to file changes in B2 Cloud Storage, simplifying workflows across your distributed services. So go ahead and get creative—and please do share with us the cool things you’re doing with Event Notifications.
Why Event Notifications matter for production workflows
The benefits of real-time notifications extend beyond simply saving time—they transform the way teams work, automate processes, and reduce the margin for error.
Awareness: Instant notifications for uploads, updates, or deletions keep everyone on the same page.
Actionable insights: Real-time alerts provide critical information that helps make informed decisions quickly.
Flexibility: Direct connections to services like media asset managers (MAMs), transcoding applications, and CDNs mean more choice to stick with your preferred stack and less lock-in to specific vendors or tools.
Cost efficiency: Automating tasks like media transcoding, data processing, or content delivery reduces the need for manual labor, saving on operational costs and freeing up resources for other strategic initiatives.
Improved security: By instantly alerting teams to changes or unusual activity, Event Notifications help maintain data integrity and support proactive security measures.
How Event Notifications compares
Unlike other offerings like Amazon’s messaging services, which are limited to specific ecosystems, Backblaze Event Notifications integrates directly with any service that accepts webhooks, offering true flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Event Notifications is also designed for at-least-once delivery, ensuring critical notifications are not missed. This reliability is important for teams building workflows that require precision and a level of consistency their end users expect.
The pricing for Event Notifications is simple and transparent. Backblaze B2 Reserve customers enjoy unlimited free Event Notifications, while pay-as-you-go Backblaze B2 customers enjoy 2,500 calls per day free and then $0.004 per 10,000 transactions. This straightforward pricing applies no matter the service receiving the notification. This enables businesses to confidently scale their event-driven workflows, knowing exactly what to expect in terms of costs, regardless of the services they choose to integrate with.
Ready to add automation to your media tasks?
For existing customers working with a Backblaze account manager, Event Notifications is already enabled for you, and your account manager can assist with any questions. If you’re an existing customer not currently working with an account manager, please contact our Support team to request access to Event Notifications.
New customers can contact our Sales team to learn more about how Event Notifications can streamline workflows and how to get started.
Once Event Notifications are enabled, log in to your Backblaze B2 account, navigate to the Buckets page, and click on the Event Notifications section. From there, you can set up notification rules for the events you want to track or configure notifications using our API.
Ah, the holidays. They can be both fun and stressful for many of us—not least because we have to make so many decisions around gift giving. The plethora of cyber sales and new products on the market make this a great time to try out new products yourself or buy some for the loved people in your lives. To that end, I’ve followed tradition and asked some of my fellow Backblazers to submit their gift ideas for this year and we’ve compiled them into this 2024 gift giving list!
For the reader in your life, the Kindle Paperwhite is a great way to keep reading regardless of the conditions. It uses e-ink technology to avoid glare and allows for reading in both high and low light conditions!
This is one of the coolest devices out there, and I can personally say that I desperately want someone to gift me one (although it’s a bit on the pricey side, so I get it). This uses similar e-ink technology as the Paperwhite and allows you to take notes using your own handwriting—which (at least in my case when I write in cursive) helps me remember things!
Mixing writing and artistry, this doodle tablet is great for kiddos that are with you in a restaurant or long-haul flight. In fact, I just bought one of these for my nephew!
Some people are math people. I don’t get it, but this Klein Bottle is basically an inside joke to math nerds (something about Möbius loops) and can serve as a lovely table prop for the math lover in your life.
For the gamer in your life, these are some of the best headphones on the market. They’re wireless, they sound great, and the microphone picks up all of the positive (I’m sure) feedback for teammates.
If you’re an Android user (raises hand) you may want something built for your phone and the latest Pro version of the Pixel Buds are here for you. These come with little nubs for snug fit, meaning you can run or lift or meander without worrying that your tiny buds will fall out.
If you’re a fan of traveling you’ve likely stayed at an AirBnB. But even if you’re more of a homebase person, their Experiences tab is worth checking out. From cooking to glass blowing to cow cuddle therapy (yes, that’s a thing).
I have one of these in my car and, let me tell you, as a person who used to bite their nails out of boredom (gross, I know), it helps keep my mind and compulsions at bay! Highly recommend.
Many of us spend our day sitting, sometimes standing at a desk. Even when you’re sitting, though, ergonomics are a big deal and having an adjustable foot rest can help you get into a position that feels solid and sustainable for long stretches of time. I recommend getting up and stretching every now and again, but if you’re like me and have a bad back, these are great.
Whether you’re outdoors or indoors, sometimes you need to cut or saw or screw or open or pry or file something, and for that, these Leatherman tools cannot be beaten.
Give the gift of Backblaze
And, of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t remind you that Backblaze Computer Backup makes a great gift. Help your family and friends experience the sweet, sweet peace of mind that comes from a good backup strategy and make sure they never lose a file again. Bonus: you don’t even have to go to the store to get it.
Go forth and gift!
We hope this guide sparked some ideas and simplified some choices. We love hearing about what folks are excited about, so feel free to give us some more good options in the comments below.
Event-driven infrastructure is at the core of modern application development. It helps businesses streamline processes like transcoding user-uploaded video or processing images for tagging, kicks off downstream workflows immediately, and reduces complexity by automating multi-step processes across distributed services.
Today, I’m sharing seven ways you can use Backblaze Event Notifications to accelerate application workflows, automate processes, streamline operations, and scale revenue. If you’re interested in Event Notifications, but you’re not using it to run applications, stay tuned for future posts sharing use cases for media management and backup and archive.
Event Notifications for applications: Simplified automation
Event Notifications delivers near real-time alerts for changes in B2 Cloud Storage, simplifying workflows across the services that interact with your stored data. Teams can use Event Notifications to create end-to-end processes that scale efficiently and integrate directly with any external service that accepts webhooks. This means no more manual monitoring of storage or relying on complex intermediaries.
What are webhooks?
Webhooks, if you’re not familiar, are a way for applications to communicate with each other by sending data automatically based on specific events, e.g., HTTP POST requests with a JSON payload. Notably, our Event Notifications feature isn’t limited to a closed ecosystem or subset of business tools.
Automating common application tasks with Event Notifications allows you to reduce operational overhead by minimizing manual monitoring, accelerate processes across integrations with your preferred services, and reduce manual entry errors that can cost enterprises time and money.
Top 7 use cases for applications
Let’s explore some practical ways Event Notifications can be leveraged within your tech stack:
1. User-generated content processing
For applications dealing with user-uploaded content, Event Notifications can be used to trigger tasks immediately upon data upload. Imagine a user uploading a video or image: An Event Notification could be sent to a transcoding service to format it, a tagging service to categorize it, or even a moderation tool to ensure it complies with your community standards—all in near real time, without manual intervention.
Social platform workflow
By automating these processes, companies can ensure that user-generated content is formatted correctly, appropriately tagged, and moderated without delay. This not only saves time but guarantees a consistent user experience.
2. Integrated alerts with automation tools
Event Notifications can easily integrate with productivity tools like Slack and Zapier, or any service that accepts a webhook, making it easy to provide team-wide awareness into changes in your storage environment without manual checks. This keeps teams informed and at the ready to be able to respond immediately to critical events.
Asset tracking and monitoring workflow
Additionally, for teams using workflow platforms such as Zapier to connect various services, Event Notifications makes it simple to trigger actions across multiple platforms, enabling powerful, automated workflows with your data in B2 Cloud Storage.
3. Surveillance and streaming automation
For applications managing large video files, such as surveillance or streaming platforms, Event Notifications can help automate the processing and distribution workflows. Videos can be transcoded, compressed, and prepared for delivery or playback promptly.
Streaming platform workflow
This automation is also useful for time-sensitive content, where quick turnaround is essential. Automating video processing reduces the manual effort involved and ensures content is always ready for viewing in the preferred format as soon as it’s available.
4. AI workload automation
For businesses building AI applications, Event Notifications can be used to trigger AI workloads in real time, enabling faster processing and response. For instance, when new data is uploaded, alerts can trigger downstream services to process that data, such as converting images to text or analyzing content for insights.
AI image to text workflow
In this case, this AI workflow ensures tasks start the moment data becomes available. Whether you’re running an image recognition service, analyzing datasets, or building AI models, Event Notifications eliminates the delays that come with manual processing. No matter what your downstream service is, Event Notifications provides the flexibility to integrate seamlessly with your AI workflows, improving real-time processing capabilities and enabling teams to focus on delivering better solutions rather than managing manual data flow.
5. Monitor data usage
Since Event Notifications messages are sent within seconds of files being uploaded and deleted, and contain the size of the file in question, you can easily and reliably track your data usage in near real time, helping you identify trends and potential issues.
Monitoring workflow
In contrast with periodic usage reports, near real-time monitoring allows you to respond to situations as they are happening, mitigating risks and potentially reducing costs.
6. Respond to security events
Event Notifications can feed near real-time data to security information and event management (SIEM) systems, allowing you to detect and respond to anomalous access patterns as they are happening.
Security alert workflow
Event Notifications allows you to take a proactive, rather than reactive, security posture, again mitigating risks and reducing costs.
7. Automatically trigger data integration
Event Notifications enable your data integration workloads to run within seconds of new data being uploaded to Backblaze B2, continuously delivering data to analytical systems and dashboards, giving you a live view of the state of your business.
Data integration workflow
Delivering data to dashboards within seconds or minutes of its availability enables near real-time insights, faster decision-making, and the ability to react to events as they occur.
Beyond these example use cases, Event Notifications opens up a wide range of possibilities for automating and optimizing workflows. You can use Event Notifications to automate metadata extraction and tagging for better content organization, and handle errors programmatically by triggering reprocessing tasks whenever issues arise. This flexibility makes it easy to automate how your infrastructure interacts with and reacts to data changes in B2 Cloud Storage, simplifying workflows across your distributed services.
Why Event Notifications matter for application workflows
The benefits of real-time notifications extend beyond simply saving time—they transform the way teams work, automate processes, and reduce the margin for error.
Awareness: Instant notifications for data changes, uploads, or deletions keep everyone on the same page.
Actionable insights: Whether it’s confirming a successful upload or catching an unexpected change, real-time alerts provide critical information that helps make informed decisions quickly.
Flexibility: Direct connections to services like transcoding, compute, or serverless applications mean more choice and less lock-in to specific vendors or tools.
Improved security: By instantly alerting teams to unauthorized changes or unusual activity, Event Notifications help maintain data integrity and support proactive security measures.
Cost efficiency: Automating tasks like media transcoding, data processing, or content delivery reduces the need for manual labor, saving on operational costs and freeing up resources for other strategic initiatives.
How Event Notifications compares
Unlike other offerings like Amazon’s messaging services, which are limited to specific ecosystems, Event Notifications integrates directly with any service that accepts webhooks, offering true flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Event Notifications is also designed for at-least-once delivery, ensuring critical notifications are not missed. This reliability is important for teams building workflows that require precision and a level of consistency their end users expect.
The pricing for Event Notifications is simple and transparent, with 2,500 calls per day free, and just $0.004 per 10,000 transactions. This straightforward pricing applies no matter the service receiving the notification. This enables businesses to confidently scale their event-driven workflows, knowing exactly what to expect in terms of costs, regardless of the services they choose to integrate with.
Ready to add automation to your application?
For existing customers working with a Backblaze account manager, Event Notifications is already enabled for you, and your account manager can assist with any questions. If you’re an existing customer not currently working with an account manager, please contact our Support team to request access to Event Notifications.
New customers can contact our Sales team to learn more about how Event Notifications can streamline workflows and how to get started.
Once Event Notifications are enabled, log in to your Backblaze B2 account, navigate to the Buckets page, and click on the Event Notifications section. From there, you can set up notification rules for the events you want to track or configure notifications using our API.
Today, I am happy to introduce resource control policies (RCPs) – a new authorization policy managed in AWS Organizations that can be used to set the maximum available permissions on resources within your entire organization. They are a type of preventative control that help you establish a data perimeter in your AWS environment and restrict external access to resources at scale. Enforced centrally within Organizations, RCPs provide confidence to the central governance and security teams that access to resources within their AWS accounts conforms to their organization’s access control guidelines.
There are no additional charges for enabling and using RCPs.
How are they different from service control policies (SCPs)? While similar in nature, RCPs complement service control policies (SCPs), but they work independently.
Service control policies (SCPs) allow you to limit the permissions granted to principals within your organization such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. By constraining these permissions centrally within Organizations you can restrict access to AWS services, specific resources and even under what conditions principals can make requests across multiple AWS accounts.
RCPs, on the other hand, allow you to limit the permissions granted to resources in your organization. Because you implement RCPs centrally within Organizations, you can enforce consistent access controls on resources across multiple AWS accounts. For instance, you can restrict access to S3 buckets in your accounts so that they can only be accessed by principals that belong to your organization. RCPs are evaluated when your resources are being accessed irrespective of who is making the API request.
Keep in mind that neither SCPs nor RCPs grant any permissions. They only set the maximum permissions available to principals and resources in your organization. You still need to grant permissions with appropriate IAM policies, such as identity-based or resource-based policies.
Quotas for SCPs and RCPs are completely independent from each other. Each RCP can contain up to 5,120 characters. You can have up to five RCPs attached to the organization root, each OU, and account, and you can create and store up to 1000 RCPs in an organization.
How to get started To start using RCPs you must first enable them. You can do this using the Organizations console, an AWS SDK, or by using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). Make sure you are using the Organizations management account or a delegated administrator because those are the only accounts that can enable or disable policy types.
Make sure that you are using Organizations with the “all features” option. If you are using the “Consolidated billing features” mode, then you need to migrate to using all features before you can enable RCPs.
For console users, first head to the Organizations console. Choose Policies and you should see the option to enable Resource control policies.
After RCPs are enabled, you will notice in the Resource control policies page that a new policy called RCPFullAWSAccess is now available. This is an AWS managed policy that is automatically created and attached to every entity in your organization including the root, each OU, and AWS account.
This policy allows all principals to perform any action against the organization’s resources, which means that until you start creating and attaching your own RCPs, all of your existing IAM permissions continue to operate as they did.
Now, we are ready to create our first RCP! Let’s look at an example.
By default, AWS resources do not permit access to external principals; resource owners must explicitly grant such access by configuring their policies. While developers have the flexibility to set resource-based policies according to their application needs, RCPs enable central IT teams to maintain control over the effective permissions across resources in their organization. This ensures that even if developers grant broad access, external identities are still restricted access in accordance with the organization’s security requirements.
Let’s create an RCP to restrict access to our S3 buckets so that only principals within our organization can access them.
On the Resources control policies page, choose Create policy which will take you to the page where you can author a new policy.
I am going to call this policy EnforceOrgIdentities. I recommend you enter a clear description so it is easy to understand at first glance what this policy does and to tag it appropriately.
The next section is where you can edit your policy statement. I replace the pre-populated policy template with my own:
Version – This is a standard and required element of IAM policies. AWS maintains backwards compatibility, so using the latest version, currently 2012-10-17, doesn’t break existing policies but allows you to use newer features.
Statement – An array that can contain one or more statement objects. Each of these statement objects defines a single permission or set of permissions.
Sid – This is an optional field that can be helpful for policy management and troubleshooting. It needs to be unique within the scope of this JSON policy document.
Effect – As you might remember from earlier, by default we have an RCP that allows access to every AWS principal, action, and resource attached to every entity in our organization. Therefore, you should use Deny to apply restrictions.
Principal – For an RCP, this field must always be set to "*". Use the Condition field if you want this policy to apply only to specific principals.
Action – Specifies the AWS service and the actions that this policy applies to. In this case, we want to deny all interactions with Amazon S3 if they don’t meet our access control guidelines.
Resource – Specifies the resources that the RCP applies to.
Condition – A collection of conditions that will be evaluated to determine whether the policy should be applied or not for each request.
It’s important to remember that all conditions must evaluate to true for the RCP to be applied. In this case, we are applying two conditions:
This condition first checks if the key aws:PrincipalOrgID is present in the request. If it’s not, then this condition evaluates to true without further evaluation.
If it does exist, then it compares the value to our organization ID. If the value is the same then it evaluates to false which means that the RCP will not be applied because all conditions must evaluate to true. This is the intended behaviour because we don’t want to deny access to principals within our organization.
However, if the value doesn’t match our organization ID, that means the request was made by a principal who is external to our organization. The condition evaluates to true which means that the RCP can still potentially be applied as long as the second condition also evaluates to true.
This condition tests if the request contains a special key called aws:PrincipalIsAWSService which is automatically injected into the request context for all signed API requests and is set to true when it originates from an AWS service such as AWS CloudTrail writing events to your S3 bucket. If the key is not present, then this condition evaluates to true.
If it does exist, then it will compare the value to what we declare in our statement. In this case, we are testing if the value is equal to false. If it is, then we return true since that would mean that the request was not made by an AWS service and could potentially still have been made by someone outside of our organization. Otherwise, we return false.
In other words, if the request did not originate from a principal within our organization and it did not originate from an AWS service, then access to the S3 bucket is denied.
This policy is just a sample and you should tailor it to meet your unique business and security objectives. For instance, you might want to customize this policy to allow access by your business partners or to restrict access to AWS services so that they can access your resources only on your behalf. See Establishing a data perimeter on AWS: Allow only trusted identities to access company data for more details.
Attaching an RCP The process of attaching an RCP is similar to an SCP. As previously mentioned, you can attach it to the root of your organization, to an OU, or to specific AWS accounts within your organization.
After the RCP is attached, access requests to affected AWS resources must comply with the RCP restrictions. We recommend that you thoroughly test the impact that the RCP has on resources in your accounts before enforcing it at scale. You can begin by attaching RCPs to individual test accounts or test OUs.
Seeing it in action I have now created and attached my RCP, so I’m ready to see it in practice! Let’s assume that a developer attached a resource-based policy to an S3 bucket in our organization and they explicitly gave access to identities in an external account:
RCPs do not prevent users from saving resource-based policies that are more permissive than the RCP allows. However, the RCP will be evaluated as part of the authorization process, as we’ve seen previously, so the request by external identities will be denied regardless.
We can prove this by trying to access the bucket with this external account, this time from the AWS CLI:
$ aws s3api get-object —bucket 123124ffeiufskdjfgbwer \
--key sensitivefile.txt \
--region us-east-1 local_file
An error occurred (AccessDenied) when calling the GetObject operation: Access Denied
Scaling the deployment of RCPs in your environment So far, we have seen how we can manage RCPs using the console. However, for large-scale control management you should look into configuring them as infrastructure as code and make sure they are integrated into your existing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and processes.
If you use AWS Control Tower, you can deploy RCP-based controls in addition to SCP-based controls. For instance, you can use AWS Control Tower to deploy an RCP similar to that we created in the preceding example which prevents external principals from accessing S3 buckets in our organization. This ensures that RCPs are consistently applied to resources in managed accounts, streamlining and centralizing access control governance at scale.
Additionally, similar to SCPs, AWS Control Tower also supports drift detection for RCPs. If an RCP is modified or removed outside of AWS Control Tower, you will be notified of the drift and provided with steps for remediation.
Conclusion Resource control policies (RCPs) offer centralized management over the maximum permissions available to AWS resources in your organization. Along with SCPs, RCPs help you to centrally establish a data perimeter across your AWS environment and prevent unintended access at scale. SCPs and RCPs are independent controls that allow you to achieve a distinct set of security objectives. You can choose to enable only SCPs or RCPs, or use both policy types together to establish a comprehensive security baseline as part of the defense-in-depth security model.
As of the end of Q3 2024, Backblaze was monitoring 292,647 hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs) in our cloud storage servers located in our data centers around the world. We removed from this analysis 4,100 boot drives, consisting of 3,344 SSDs and 756 HDDs. This leaves us with 288,547 hard drives under management to review for this report. We’ll review the annualized failure rates (AFRs) for Q3 2024 and the lifetime AFRs of the qualifying drive models. Along the way, we’ll share our observations and insights on the data presented and, as always, we look forward to you doing the same in the comments section at the end of the post.
Hard drive failure rates for Q3 2024
For our Q3 2024 quarterly analysis, we remove the following from consideration: drive models which did not have at least 100 drives in service at the end of the quarter, drive models which did not accumulate 10,000 or more drive days during the quarter, and individual drives which exceeded their manufacturer’s temperature specification during their lifetime. The removed pool totalled 471 drives, leaving us with 288,076 drives grouped into 29 drive models for our Q3 2024 analysis.
The table below lists the AFRs and related data for these drive models. The table is sorted ascending by drive size then ascending by AFR within drive size.
Notes and observations on the Q3 2024 Drive Stats
Upward AFR. The quarter-to-quarter AFR continues to creep up rising from 1.71% in Q2 2024 to 1.89% in Q3 2024. The rise can’t be attributed to the aging 4TB drives, as our CVT drive migration system continues to replace these drives. As a consequence, the AFR for the remaining 4TB drives was 0.26% in Q3. The primary culprit is the collection of 8TB drives, which are now on average over seven years old. As a group, the AFR for the 8TB drives rose to 3.04% in Q3 2024, up from 2.31% in Q2. The CVT team is gearing up to begin the migration of 8TB drives over the next few months.
Yet another golden oldie is gone. You may have noticed that the 4TB Seagate drives (model: ST4000DM000) are missing from the table. All of the Backblaze Vaults containing these drives have been migrated, and as a consequence there are only two of these drives remaining, not enough to make the quarterly chart. You can read more about their demise in our recent Halloween post.
A new drive in town. In Q3, the 20TB Toshiba drives (model: MG10ACA20TE) arrived in force, populating three complete Backblaze Vaults of 1,200 drives each. Over the last few months our drive qualification team put the 20TB drive model through its paces and, having passed the test, they are now on the list of drive models we can deploy.
One zero. For the second quarter in a row, the 14TB Seagate (model: ST16000NM00J) drive model had zero failures. With only 185 drives in service, there is a lot of potential variability in the future, but for the moment, they are settling in quite well.
The nine year club. There are no data drives with 10 or more years of service, but there are 39 drives that are nine years or older. They are all 4TB HGST drives (model: HMS5C4040ALE640) spread across 31 different Storage Pods, in five different Backblaze Vaults and two different data centers. Will any of those drives make it to 10 years? Probably not, given that four of the five vaults have started their CVT migrations and will be gone by the end of the year. And, while the fifth vault is not scheduled for migration yet, it is just a matter of time before all of the 4TB drives we are using will be gone.
Reactive and proactive drive failures
In the Drive Stats dataset schema, there is a field named failure, which displays either a 1 for failure or a 0 for not failed. Over the years in various posts, we have stated that for our purposes drive failure is either reactive or proactive. Furthermore, we have suggested that failed drives fall basically evenly into these two categories. We’d like to put some data behind that 50/50 number, but first let’s start by defining our two categories of drive failure, reactive and proactive.
Reactive: A reactive failure is when any of the following conditions occur: the drive crashes and refuses to boot or spin up, the drive won’t respond to system commands, or the drive won’t stay operational.
Proactive: A proactive failure is generally anything not a reactive failure, and typically is when one or more indicators such as SMART stats, FSCK (file system) checks, etc., signal that the drive is having difficulty and drive failure is highly probable. Typically a multitude of indicators are present in drives declared as proactive failures.
A drive that is removed and replaced as either a proactive or reactive failure is considered a drive failure in Drive Stats unless we learn otherwise. For example, a drive is experiencing communications errors and command timeouts and is scheduled for a proactive drive replacement. During the replacement process, the data center tech realizes the drive does not appear to be fully seated. After gently securing the drive, further testing reveals no issues and the drive is no longer considered failed. At that point, the Drive Stats dataset is updated accordingly.
As noted above, the Drive Stats dataset includes the failure status (0 or 1) but not the type of failure (proactive or reactive). That’s a project for the future. To get a breakdown of different types of drives failure we have to interrogate the data center maintenance ticketing system used by each data center to record any maintenance activities on Storage Pods and related equipment. Historically, the drive failure data was not readily accessible, but a recent software upgrade now allows us access to this data for the first time. So in the spirit of Drive Stats, we’d like to share our drive failure types with you.
Drive failure type stats
Q3 2024 will be our starting point for any drive failure type stats we publish going forward. For consistency, we will use the same drive models listed in the Drive Stats quarterly report, in this case Q3 2024. For this period, there were 1,361 drive failures across 29 drive models.
We actually have been using the data center maintenance data for several years as each quarter we validate the failed drives reported by the Drive Stats system with the maintenance records. Only validated failed drives are used for the Drive Stats reports we publish quarterly and in the data we publish on our Drive Stats webpage.
The recent upgrades to the data center maintenance ticketing system have not only made the drive failure validation process easier, we can now easily join together the two sources. This gives us the ability to look at the drive failure data across several different attributes as shown in the tables below. We’ll start with the number of failed drives in each category and go from there. This will form our baseline data.
Reactive vs. proactive drive failures for Q3 2024
Observation period
Reactive failures
Proactive failures
Total failures
Reactive %
Proactive%
Q3 2024 failed drives
640
721
1,361
47.0%
53.0%
Reactive vs. proactive drive failures for Q3 2024
Manufacturer
Reactive failures
Proactive failures
Total failures
Reactive %
Proactive %
HGST
194
177
371
52.3%
47.7%
Seagate
258
272
530
48.7%
51.3%
Toshiba
124
221
345
35.9%
64.1%
WDC
64
51
115
55.7%
44.3%
Reactive vs. proactive drive failures by Backblaze data center
Backblaze data center
Reactive failures
Proactive failures
Total failures
Reactive %
Proactive %
AMS
36
77
113
31.9%
68.1%
IAD
50
92
142
35.2%
64.8%
PHX
179
201
380
47.1%
52.9%
SAC 0
151
148
299
50.5%
49.5%
SAC 2
224
203
427
52.5%
47.5%
Reactive vs. proactive drive failures by server type
Server type
Reactive failures
Proactive failures
Total failures
Reactive %
Proactive %
5.0 red Storage Pod (45 drives)
4
2
6
66.7%
33.3%
6.0 red Storage Pod (60 drives)
433
349
782
55.4%
44.6%
6.1 red Storage Pod (60 drives)
70
107
177
39.5%
60.5%
Dell Server (26 drives)
22
61
83
26.5%
73.5%
Supermicro Server (60 drives)
111
202
313
35.5%
64.5%
Obviously, there are many things we could analyze here, but for the moment we just want to establish a baseline. Next, we’ll collect additional data to see how consistent and reliable our data is over time. We’ll let you know what we find.
Learning more about proactive failures
One item of interest to us is the different reasons that cause a drive to be designated as a proactive failure. Today we record the reasons for the proactive designation at the time the drive is flagged for replacement, but currently multiple reasons are allowed for a given drive. This makes determining the primary reason difficult to determine. Of course, there may be no such thing as a primary reason, as it is often a combination of factors causing the problem. That analysis could be interesting as well. Regardless of the exact reason, such drives are in bad shape and replacing degraded drives to protect the data they store is our first priority.
Lifetime hard drive failure rates
As of the end of Q3 2024, we were tracking 288,547 operational hard drives. To be considered for the lifetime review, a drive model was required to have 500 or more drives as of the end of Q3 2024 and have over 100,000 accumulated drive days during their lifetime. When we removed those drive models which did not meet the lifetime criteria, we had 286,892 drives grouped into 25 models remaining for analysis as shown in the table below.
Downward lifetime AFR
In Q2 2024, the lifetime AFR for the drives listed was 1.47%. In Q3, the lifetime AFR went down to 1.31%, a significant decrease from one quarter to the next for the lifetime AFR. This decrease is also contrary to the increasing quarterly AFR increase over the same period. At first blush, that doesn’t make much sense as an increasing quarter-to-quarter AFR should increase the lifetime AFR. There are two related factors which explain this seemingly contradictory data. Let’s take a look.
We’ll start with the table below which summarizes the differences between the Q2 and Q3 lifetime stats.
Period
Drive count
Drive days
Drive failures
Lifetime AFR
Q2 2024
283,065
469,219,469
18,949
1.47%
Q3 2024
286,892
398,476,931
14,308
1.31%
To create the dataset for the lifetime AFR tables two criteria are applied: first, at the end of a given quarter, the number of drives of a drive model must be greater than 500, and, second, the number of drive days must be greater than 100,000. The first criterion ensures that the drive models are relevant to the data presented; that is, we have a significant number of each of the included drive models. The second standard ensures that the drive models listed in the lifetime AFR table have a sufficient number of data points; that is, they have enough drive days to be significant.
As we can see in the table above, while the number of drives went up from Q2 to Q3, the number of drive days and the number of drive failures went down significantly. This is explained by comparing the drive models listed in the Q2 lifetime table versus the Q3 lifetime table. Let’s summarize.
Added: In Q3, we added the 20TB Toshiba drive model (MG10ACA20TE). In Q2, there were only two of these drives in service.
Removed: In Q3, we removed the 4TB Seagate drive model (ST4000DM000) as there were only two drives remaining as of the end of Q3, well below the criteria of 500 drives.
When we removed the 4TB Seagate drives we also removed 80,400,065 lifetime drive days and 5,789 lifetime drive failures from the Q3 lifetime AFR computations. If the 4TB Seagate drive model data (drive days and drive failures) was included in the Q3 Lifetime stats, the AFR would have been 1.50%.
Why not include the 4TB Seagate data? In other words, why have a drive count criteria at all? Shouldn’t we compute lifetime AFR using all of the drive models we have ever used which accumulated over 100,000 drive days in a lifetime? If we did things that way, the list of drive models used to compute the lifetime AFR would now include drive models we stopped using years ago and would include nearly 100 different drive models. As a result, a majority of the drive models used to compute the lifetime AFR would be outdated and the lifetime AFR table would contain rows of basically useless data that has no current or future value. In short, having drive count as one of the criteria in computing lifetime AFR keeps the table relevant and approachable.
The Hard Drive Stats data
It has now been over 11 years since we began recording, storing, and reporting the operational statistics of the HDDs and SSDs we use to store data at Backblaze. We look at the telemetry data of the drives, including their SMART stats and other health related attributes. We do not read or otherwise examine the actual customer data stored.
Over the years, we have analyzed the data we have gathered and published our findings and insights from our analyses. For transparency, we also publish the data itself, known as the Drive Stats dataset. This dataset is open source and can be downloaded from our Drive Stats webpage.
You can download and use the Drive Stats dataset for free for your own purpose. All we ask are three things: 1) you cite Backblaze as the source if you use the data, 2) you accept that you are solely responsible for how you use the data, 3) you may sell derivative works based on the data, but 4) you can not sell this data to anyone; it is free.
Good luck, and let us know if you find anything interesting.
I have been following the progress of AWS BuilderCards for several years. Players of all skill levels use the cards to learn about AWS in a fun and engaging way, competing (in a friendly fashion) to combine their cards to form architectures, gaining knowledge and scoring points as they play:
To date, more than 15,000 sets of BuilderCards have been printed and put to use over the course of three re:Invents, fifteen AWS Summits, and multiple community events. For example, here is a group of AWS enthusiasts having a good time in Tokyo during JAWS Days 2024:
Feedback from players has been incredibly positive, with a 4.8 star customer satisfaction score (CSAT) across more than 1500 replies.
Second Edition Now Available I am happy to announce that the second edition of AWS BuilderCards will be distributed at re:Invent 2024 and will soon be available for purchase online. In response to feedback on the first edition, we have made many changes to the second edition. Here’s a summary:
Design — The revised design focuses on the contents of the card, with additional gradients and patterns to make the cards more attractive and playful. The font size was increased, game effects are now represented as icons, and the QR codes now point to the BuilderCards site:
Game Mechanics — The mechanics have been revised to improve balance, simplify play, and remove some bias. There are also some starter cards that represent a common on-premises data center environment.
Generative AI Add-On Pack — This new deck includes 50 additional BuilderCards designed to show how Generative AI and AWS architecture align. This add-on pack also includes a set of Mission cards. These cards add context, with QR codes that link to published best practices or solutions. The cards are larger, with additional text and an architecture diagram. Use is optional, with players earning extra points for completing a mission. Each deck also includes five blank BuilderCards and two blank Mission cards to support customization:
Get Your BuilderCards If you will be at re:Invent 2024, make plans to visit the BuilderCards play area on Level 1 of Caesar’s Forum next to the PeerTalk area:
Sunday – 10 AM to 6 PM Monday – 9 AM to 5 PM Tuesday – 9 AM to 5 PM Wednesday – 9 AM to 5 PM Thursday – 9 AM to 4 PM
You can play against other re:Invent attendees and also get your own game and add-on packs to take home (we’ll give away 1,000 per day). Thanks to hard work by Masanori Yamaguchi (AWS Hero) and Kosuke Enomoto (AWS Community Builder) we will also have BuilderCards in Japanese for on-site play. You can read Kosuke’s blog post (AWS BuilderCards Japanese Edition for JAWS DAYS) to learn more about the translation process.
If you won’t be able to attend re:Invent, you will soon be able to purchase a deck of your own. Check back here for more info!
Stay Tuned The BuilderCards team is working on additional goodies including expansion packs and additional language packs.
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