Tag Archives: news

Amazon RDS now supports io2 Block Express volumes for mission-critical database workloads

Post Syndicated from Abhishek Gupta original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rds-now-supports-io2-block-express-volumes-for-mission-critical-database-workloads/

Today, I am pleased to announce the availability of Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) io2 Block Express storage volumes for all database engines in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS provides you the flexibility to choose between different storage types depending on the performance requirements of your database workload. io2 Block Express volumes are designed for critical database workloads that require high performance and high throughput at low latency.

Lower latency and higher availability for I/O intensive workloads
With io2 Block Express volumes, your database workloads will benefit from consistent sub-millisecond latency, enhanced durability to 99.999 percent over io1 volumes, and drive 20x more IOPS from provisioned storage (up to 1,000 IOPS per GB) at the same price as io1. You can upgrade from io1 volumes to io2 Block Express volumes without any downtime, significantly improving the performance and reliability of your applications without increasing storage cost.

“We migrated all of our primary Amazon RDS instances to io2 Block Express within 2 weeks,” said Samir Goel, Director of Engineering at Figma, a leading platform for teams that design and build digital products. “Io2 Block Express has had a profound impact on the availability of the database layer at Figma. We have deeply appreciated the consistency of performance with io2 Block Express — in our observations, the latency variability has been under 0.1ms.”

io2 Block Express volumes support up to 64 TiB of storage, up to 256,000 Provisioned IOPS, and a maximum throughput of 4,000 MiB/s. The throughput of io2 Block Express volumes varies based on the amount of provisioned IOPS and volume storage size. Here is the range for each database engine and storage size:

Database engine Storage size Provisioned IOPS Maximum throughput
Db2, MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL Between 100 and 65,536 GiB 1,000–256,000 IOPS 4,000 MiB/s
Oracle Between 100 and 199 GiB 1,000–199,000 IOPS 4,000 MiB/s
Oracle Between 200 and 65,536 GiB 1,000–256,000 IOPS 4,000 MiB/s
SQL Server Between 20 and 16,384 GiB 1,000–64,000 IOPS 4,000 MiB/s

Getting started with io2 Block Express in Amazon RDS
You can use the Amazon RDS console to create a new RDS instance configured with an io2 Block Express volume or modify an existing instance with io1, gp2, or gp3 volumes.

Here’s how you would create an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance with io2 Block Express volume.

Start with the basic information such as engine and version. Then, choose Provisioned IOPS SDD (io2) from the Storage type options:

Use the following AWS CLI command to create a new RDS instance with io2 Block Express volume:

aws rds create-db-instance --storage-type io2 --db-instance-identifier new-db-instance --db-instance-class db.t4g.large --engine mysql --master-username masteruser --master-user-password <enter password> --allocated-storage 400 --iops 3000

Similarly, to modify an existing RDS instance to use io2 Block Express volume:

aws rds modify-db-instance --db-instance-identifier existing-db-instance --storage-type io2 --allocated-storage 500 --iops 3000 --apply-immediately

Things to know

  • io2 Block Express volumes are available on all RDS databases using AWS Nitro System instances.
  • io2 Block Express volumes support an IOPS to allocated storage ratio of 1000:1. As an example, With an RDS for PostgreSQL instance, the maximum IOPS can be provisioned with volumes 256 GiB and larger (1,000 IOPS × 256 GiB = 256,000 IOPS).
  • For DB instances not based on the AWS Nitro System, the ratio of IOPS to allocated storage is 500:1. In this case, maximum IOPS can be achieved with 512 GiB volume (500 IOPS x 512 GiB = 256,000 IOPS).

Available now
Amazon RDS io2 Block Express storage volumes are supported for all RDS database engines and are available in US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Stockholm), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.

In terms of pricing and billing, io1 volumes and io2 Block Express storage volumes are billed at the same rate. For more information, see the Amazon RDS pricing page.

Learn more by reading about Provisioned IOPS SSD storage in the Amazon RDS User Guide.

— Abhishek

Introducing the newest Heroes of the year – March 2024

Post Syndicated from Taylor Jacobsen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-the-newest-heroes-of-the-year-march-2024/

AWS Heroes are inspirational thought leaders who go above and beyond to knowledge share in a variety of ways. You can find them speaking at local meetups, AWS Community Days, or even at re:Invent. And these technical experts are never done learning—they’re passionate about solving problems and creating content to enable the community to build faster on AWS. We’re excited to announce the first cohort of Heroes in 2024…

Let’s give a round of applause to our new Heroes!

Awedis Keofteian – Beirut, Lebanon

Community Hero Awedis Keofteian is a DevOps Engineer at Anghami. He has a strong background in DevOps practices, and he leverages modern technologies to enhance scalability, reliability, and efficiency in Anghami’s cloud-based architecture. His journey began as an AWS Community Builder, and over time, he took the helm as the leader of the AWS User Group in Beirut. Awedis is passionate about nurturing and supporting the growth of AWS communities, and shares his knowledge across DevOps, automation, serverless, and cloud technologies.

Daniel Aniszkiewicz – Wrocław, Poland

Security Hero Daniel Aniszkiewicz is a Senior Software Engineer at Algoteque International Hub. He co-organizes the Wrocław AWS User Group, and is passionate about contributing to the growth and engagement of the local AWS community. Daniel is also a seasoned speaker and loves to share his knowledge with others, such as presenting at re:Invent, AWS meetups, and AWS Community Days. He is particularly focused on promoting Amazon Verified Permissions and Cedar through workshops, blog posts, IaC templates, and open source projects.

Hazel Sáenz – Guatemala

Serverless Hero Hazel Sáenz is a Software Architect at Cognits. Her primary focus is modernizing on-premises applications to cloud environments using AWS, and predominantly designs high workload architectures in serverless frameworks. Hazel enjoys sharing her knowledge with the community through technical talks at local and international events, participating in AWS Summits, AWS Community Days, and meetups, as well as writing technical articles in both English and Spanish. Additionally, she is the leader of the AWS User Group Guatemala, where she excels at organizing inclusive events and sharing her knowledge with the community.

Kenta Goto – Tokyo, Japan

DevTools Hero Kenta Goto is a Backend Tech Lead and an enthusiastic contributor to AWS CDK. He has been selected as a top contributor and a trusted reviewer in AWS CDK, and serves as a maintainer for the community-driven CDK Construct Library. Kenta is also a conference speaker, having presented at the AWS Dev Day in Japan in 2022 and 2023. Furthermore, he actively contributes to the open source community by developing and publishing his self-made AWS tools and AWS CDK Construct libraries, which are used worldwide.

Martin Damovsky – Prague, Czech Republic

Community Hero Martin Damovsky is a Cloud Governance Lead at Ataccama.com, an AWS Partner providing Unified Data Management Solutions. He has been particularly interested in AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform, Cloud Intelligence Dashboard, and security and govern tools, such as AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Config. Martin is a leader for AWS User Group Prague, and he enjoys sharing his knowledge with the greater AWS community through his blog and speaking at meetups, podcasts, and conferences.

Rafał Mituła – Warsaw, Poland

Community Hero Rafał Mituła is a Cloud Data Engineer and Architect within the Data & AI division at Chaos Gears. He is actively involved in the AWS community, co-organizing the AWS User Group Warsaw meetups and the AWS Community Day Poland conference. In addition to his technical and organizational roles, Rafał shares his expertise by speaking at conferences and leading workshops aimed at introducing new builders to AWS and data analytics, such as the AWS Data Engineering Immersion Days.

Sena Yakut – Izmir, Turkey

Security Hero Sena Yakut is a Senior Cloud Security Engineer at Lyrebird Studio. She has a master’s degree in cloud security, and builds security requirements for architectural designs, providing threat management and security concepts and services using AWS. Sena shares her knowledge through blog posts across various platforms, and engaging in discussions about cloud security at events, such as AWS Community Day Türkiye, and DevOpsDays Istanbul. As an active blogger and speaker, she enjoys learning new security features on AWS and informing others about them.

Tiago Rodrigues – Lisbon, Portugal

Community Hero Tiago Rodrigues is a Senior Cloud Consultant at tecRacer.com, an AWS Premier Partner and AWS Advanced Training Partner. He specializes in migrations from on-premises environments to the cloud, as well as modernizing architectures and implementing serverless solutions. Beyond his role, Tiago is deeply committed to knowledge sharing and actively contributes to the AWS community through engagements, such as the AWS User Group Lisbon, educational workshops, and guest lectures at universities. He is passionate about education and innovation, and developed an open source mobile app, AWSary, which is an AWS dictionary designed to provide solution architect diagram drawings and quick insights into AWS services.

Learn More

Please visit the AWS Heroes website if you’d like to learn more about the AWS Heroes program or to connect with a Hero near you.

— Taylor

Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-internet-when-moving-out-of-aws/

You told us one of the primary reasons to adopt Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the broad choice of services we offer, enabling you to innovate, build, deploy, and monitor your workloads. AWS has continuously expanded its services to support virtually any cloud workload. It now offers over 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), and many more. For example, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers over 750 generally available instances—more than any other major cloud provider—and you can choose from numerous relational, analytics, key-value, document, or graph databases.

We believe this choice must include the one to migrate your data to another cloud provider or on-premises. That’s why, starting today, we’re waiving data transfer out to the internet (DTO) charges when you want to move outside of AWS.

Over 90 percent of our customers already incur no data transfer expenses out of AWS because we provide 100 gigabytes per month free from AWS Regions to the internet. This includes traffic from Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Application Load Balancer, among others. In addition, we offer one terabyte of free data transfer out of Amazon CloudFront every month.

If you need more than 100 gigabytes of data transfer out per month while transitioning, you can contact AWS Support to ask for free DTO rates for the additional data. It’s necessary to go through support because you make hundreds of millions of data transfers each day, and we generally do not know if the data transferred out to the internet is a normal part of your business or a one-time transfer as part of a switch to another cloud provider or on premises.

We will review requests at the AWS account level. Once approved, we will provide credits for the data being migrated. We don’t require you to close your account or change your relationship with AWS in any way. You’re welcome to come back at any time. We will, of course, apply additional scrutiny if the same AWS account applies multiple times for free DTO.

We believe in customer choice, including the choice to move your data out of AWS. The waiver on data transfer out to the internet charges also follows the direction set by the European Data Act and is available to all AWS customers around the world and from any AWS Region.

Freedom of choice is not limited to data transfer rates. AWS also supports Fair Software Licensing Principles, which make it easy to use software with other IT providers of your choice. You can read this blog post for more details.

You can check the FAQ for more information, or you can contact AWS Customer Support to request credits for DTO while switching.

But I sincerely hope you will not.

— seb

Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet foundation model is now available in Amazon Bedrock

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/anthropics-claude-3-sonnet-foundation-model-is-now-available-in-amazon-bedrock/

In September 2023, we announced a strategic collaboration with Anthropic that brought together their respective technology and expertise in safer generative artificial intelligence (AI), to accelerate the development of Anthropic’s Claude foundation models (FMs) and make them widely accessible to AWS customers. You can get early access to unique features of Anthropic’s Claude model in Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent your businesses, and accelerate your generative AI journeys.

In November 2023, Amazon Bedrock provided access to Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, which delivers key capabilities to build generative AI for enterprises. Claude 2.1 includes a 200,000 token context window, reduced rates of hallucination, improved accuracy over long documents, system prompts, and a beta tool use feature for function calling and workflow orchestration.

Today, Anthropic announced Claude 3, a new family of state-of-the-art AI models that allows customers to choose the exact combination of intelligence, speed, and cost that suits their business needs. The three models in the family are Claude 3 Haiku, the fastest and most compact model for near-instant responsiveness, Claude 3 Sonnet, the ideal balanced model between skills and speed, and Claude 3 Opus, a most intelligent offering for the top-level performance on highly complex tasks.

We’re also announcing the availability of Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet today in Amazon Bedrock, with Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3 Haiku coming soon. For the vast majority of workloads, Claude 3 Sonnet model is two times faster than Claude 2 and Claude 2.1, with increased steerability, and new image-to-text vision capabilities.

With Claude 3 Sonnet’s availability in Amazon Bedrock, you can build cost-effective generative AI applications for enterprises that need intelligence, reliability, and speed. You can now use Anthropic’s latest model, Claude 3 Sonnet, in the Amazon Bedrock console.

Introduction of Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet
Here are some key highlights about the new Claude 3 Sonnet model in Amazon Bedrock:

2x faster speed – Claude 3 has made significant gains in speed. For the vast majority of workloads, it is two times faster with the same level of intelligence as Anthropic’s most performant models, Claude 2 and Claude 2.1. This combination of speed and skill makes Claude 3 Sonnet the clear choice for tasks that require intelligent tasks demanding rapid responses, like knowledge retrieval or sales automation. This includes use cases like content generation, classification, data extraction, and research and retrieval or accurate searching over knowledge bases.

Increased steerability – Increased steerability of AI systems gives users more control over outputs and delivers predictable, higher-quality outcomes. It is significantly less likely to refuse to answer questions that border on the system’s guardrails to prevent harmful outputs. Claude 3 Sonnet is easier to steer and better at following directions in popular structured output formats like JSON—making it simpler for developers to build enterprise and frontier applications. This is particularly important in enterprise use cases such as autonomous vehicles, health and medical diagnoses, and algorithmic decision-making in sensitive domains such as financial services.

Image-to-text vision capabilities – Claude 3 offers vision capabilities that can process images and return text outputs. It is extremely capable at analyzing and understanding charts, graphs, technical diagrams, reports, and other visual assets. Claude 3 Sonnet achieves comparable performance to other best-in-class models with image processing capabilities, while maintaining a significant speed advantage.

Expanded language support – Claude 3 has improved understanding and responding in languages other than English, such as French, Japanese, and Spanish. This expanded language coverage allows Claude 3 Sonnet to better serve multinational corporations requiring AI services across different geographies and languages, as well as businesses requiring nuanced translation services. Claude 3 Sonnet is also stronger at coding and mathematics, as evidenced by Anthropic’s scores in evaluations such as grade-school math problems (GSM8K and Hendrycks) and Codex (HumanEval).

To learn more about Claude 3 Sonnet’s features and capabilities, visit Anthropic’s Claude on Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic Claude model in the AWS documentation.

Get started with Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet in Amazon Bedrock
If you are new to using Anthropic models, go to the Amazon Bedrock console and choose Model access on the bottom left pane. Request access separately for Claude 3 Sonnet.

To test Claude 3 Sonnet in the console, choose Text or Chat under Playgrounds in the left menu pane. Then choose Select model and select Anthropic as the category and Claude 3 Sonnet as the model.

To test more Claude prompt examples, choose Load examples. You can view and run Claude 3 specific examples, such as advanced Q&A with citations, crafting a design brief, and non-English content generation.

By choosing View API request, you can also access the model via code examples in the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and AWS SDKs. Here is a sample of the AWS CLI command:

aws bedrock-runtime invoke-model \
--model-id anthropic.claude-3-sonnet-v1:0 \
--body "{\"prompt\":\"Write the test case for uploading the image to Amazon S3 bucket\\nHere are some test cases for uploading an image to an Amazon S3 bucket:\\n\\n1. **Successful Upload Test Case**:\\n   - Test Data:\\n     - Valid image file (e.g., .jpg, .png, .gif)\\n     - Correct S3 bucket name\\n     - Correct AWS credentials (access key and secret access key)\\n   - Steps:\\n     1. Initialize the AWS S3 client with the correct credentials.\\n     2. Open the image file.\\n     3. Upload the image file to the specified S3 bucket.\\n     4. Verify that the upload was successful.\\n   - Expected Result: The image should be successfully uploaded to the S3 bucket.\\n\\n2. **Invalid File Type Test Case**:\\n   - Test Data:\\n     - Invalid file type (e.g., .txt, .pdf, .docx)\\n     - Correct S3 bucket name\\n     - Correct AWS credentials\\n   - Steps:\\n     1. Initialize the AWS S3 client with the correct credentials.\\n     2. Open the invalid file type.\\n     3. Attempt to upload the file to the specified S3 bucket.\\n     4. Verify that an appropriate error or exception is raised.\\n   - Expected Result: The upload should fail with an error or exception indicating an invalid file type.\\n\\nThese test cases cover various scenarios, including successful uploads, invalid file types, invalid bucket names, invalid AWS credentials, large file uploads, and concurrent uploads. By executing these test cases, you can ensure the reliability and robustness of your image upload functionality to Amazon S3.\",\"max_tokens_to_sample\":2000,\"temperature\":1,\"top_k\":250,\"top_p\":0.999,\"stop_sequences\":[\"\\n\\nHuman:\"],\"anthropic_version\":\"bedrock-2023-05-31\"}" \
--cli-binary-format raw-in-base64-out \
--region us-east-1 \
invoke-model-output.txt

Upload your image if you want to test image-to-text vision capabilities. I uploaded the featured image of this blog post and received a detailed description of this image.

You can process images via API and return text outputs in English and multiple other languages.

{
  "modelId": "anthropic.claude-3-sonnet-v1:0",
  "contentType": "application/json",
  "accept": "application/json",
  "body": {
    "anthropic_version": "bedrock-2023-05-31",
    "max_tokens": 1000,
    "system": "Please respond only in Spanish.",
    "messages": {
      "role": "user",
      "content": [
        {
          "type": "image",
          "source": {
            "type": "base64",
            "media_type": "image/jpeg",
            "data": "iVBORw..."
          }
        },
        {
          "type": "text",
          "text": "What's in this image?"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

To celebrate this launch, Neerav Kingsland, Head of Global Accounts at Anthropic, talks about the power of the Anthropic and AWS partnership.

“Anthropic at its core is a research company that is trying to create the safest large language models in the world, and through Amazon Bedrock we have a change to take that technology, distribute it to users globally, and do this in an extremely safe and data-secure manner.”

Now available
Claude 3 Sonnet is available today in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions; check the full Region list for future updates. The availability of Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus and Haiku in Amazon Bedrock also will be coming soon.

You will be charged for model inference and customization with the On-Demand and Batch mode, which allows you to use FMs on a pay-as-you-go basis without having to make any time-based term commitments. With the Provisioned Throughput mode, you can purchase model units for a specific base or custom model. To learn more, see Amazon Bedrock Pricing.

Give Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet a try in the Amazon Bedrock console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Bedrock or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

Mistral AI models now available on Amazon Bedrock

Post Syndicated from Donnie Prakoso original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/mistral-ai-models-now-available-on-amazon-bedrock/

Last week, we announced that Mistral AI models are coming to Amazon Bedrock. In that post, we elaborated on a few reasons why Mistral AI models may be a good fit for you. Mistral AI offers a balance of cost and performance, fast inference speed, transparency and trust, and is accessible to a wide range of users.

Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of two high-performing Mistral AI models, Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B, on Amazon Bedrock. Mistral AI is the 7th foundation model provider offering cutting-edge models in Amazon Bedrock, joining other leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon. This integration provides you the flexibility to choose optimal high-performing foundation models in Amazon Bedrock.

Mistral 7B is the first foundation model from Mistral AI, supporting English text generation tasks with natural coding capabilities. It is optimized for low latency with a low memory requirement and high throughput for its size. Mixtral 8x7B is a popular, high-quality, sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, that is ideal for text summarization, question and answering, text classification, text completion, and code generation.

Here’s a quick look at Mistral AI models on Amazon Bedrock:

Getting Started with Mistral AI Models
To get started with Mistral AI models in Amazon Bedrock, first you need to get access to the models. On the Amazon Bedrock console, select Model access, and then select Manage model access. Next, select Mistral AI models, and then select Request model access.

Once you have the access to selected Mistral AI models, you can test the models with your prompts using Chat or Text in the Playgrounds section.

Programmatically Interact with Mistral AI Models
You can also use AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS Software Development Kit (SDK) to make various calls using Amazon Bedrock APIs. Following, is a sample code in Python that interacts with Amazon Bedrock Runtime APIs with AWS SDK:

import boto3
import json

bedrock = boto3.client(service_name="bedrock-runtime")

prompt = "<s>[INST] INSERT YOUR PROMPT HERE [/INST]"

body = json.dumps({
    "prompt": prompt,
    "max_tokens": 512,
    "top_p": 0.8,
    "temperature": 0.5,
})

modelId = "mistral.mistral-7b-instruct-v0:2"

accept = "application/json"
contentType = "application/json"

response = bedrock.invoke_model(
    body=body,
    modelId=modelId,
    accept=accept,
    contentType=contentType
)

print(json.loads(response.get('body').read()))

Mistral AI models in action
By integrating your application with AWS SDK to invoke Mistral AI models using Amazon Bedrock, you can unlock possibilities to implement various use cases. Here are a few of my personal favorite use cases using Mistral AI models with sample prompts. You can see more examples on Prompting Capabilities from the Mistral AI documentation page.

Text summarization — Mistral AI models extract the essence from lengthy articles so you quickly grasp key ideas and core messaging.

You are a summarization system. In clear and concise language, provide three short summaries in bullet points of the following essay.

# Essay:
{insert essay text here}

Personalization — The core AI capabilities of understanding language, reasoning, and learning, allow Mistral AI models to personalize answers with more human-quality text. The accuracy, explanation capabilities, and versatility of Mistral AI models make them useful at personalization tasks, because they can deliver content that aligns closely with individual users.

You are a mortgage lender customer service bot, and your task is to create personalized email responses to address customer questions. Answer the customer's inquiry using the provided facts below. Ensure that your response is clear, concise, and directly addresses the customer's question. Address the customer in a friendly and professional manner. Sign the email with "Lender Customer Support."

# Facts
<INSERT FACTS AND INFORMATION HERE>

# Email
{insert customer email here}

Code completion — Mistral AI models have an exceptional understanding of natural language and code-related tasks, which is essential for projects that need to juggle computer code and regular language. Mistral AI models can help generate code snippets, suggest bug fixes, and optimize existing code, accelerating your development process.

[INST] You are a code assistant. Your task is to generate a 5 valid JSON object based on the following properties:
name: 
lastname: 
address: 
Just generate the JSON object without explanations:
[/INST]

Things You Have to Know
Here are few additional information for you:

  • Availability — Mistral AI’s Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral 7B models in Amazon Bedrock are available in the US West (Oregon) Region.
  • Deep dive into Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B — If you want to learn more about Mistral AI models on Amazon Bedrock, you might also enjoy this article titled “Mistral AI – Winds of Change” prepared by my colleague, Mike.

Now Available
Mistral AI models are available today in Amazon Bedrock, and we can’t wait to see what you’re going to build. Get yourself started by visiting Mistral AI on Amazon Bedrock.

Happy building,
— Donnie

AWS Weekly Roundup — .Net Runtime for AWS Lambda, PartyRock Hackathon, and more — February 26, 2024

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-net-runtime-for-aws-lambda-partyrock-hackathon-and-more-february-26-2024/

The Community AWS re:invent 2023 re:caps continue! Recently, I was invited to participate in one of these events hosted by the AWS User Group Kenya, and was able to learn and spend time with this amazing community.

AWS User Group Kenya

AWS User Group Kenya

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

.NET 8 runtime for AWS Lambda – AWS Lambda now supports .NET 8 as both a managed runtime and container base image. This support provides you with .NET 8 features that include API enhancements, improved Native Ahead of Time (Native AOT) support, and improved performance. .NET 8 supports C# 12, F# 8, and PowerShell 7.4. You can develop Lambda functions in .NET 8 using the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, the AWS Extensions for .NET CLI, AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM), AWS CDK, and other infrastructure as code tools.

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

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects, programs, and news items that you might find interesting:

Earlier this month, I used this image to call attention to the PartyRock Hackathon that’s currently in progress. The deadline to join the hackathon is fast approaching so be sure to signup before time runs out.

Amazon API Gateway – Amazon API Gateway processed over 100 trillion API requests in 2023, and we continue to see growing demand for API-driven applications. API Gateway is a fully-managed service that enables you to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. Customers that onboarded large workloads on API Gateway in 2023 told us they chose the service for its availability, security, and serverless architecture. Those in regulated industries value API Gateway’s private endpoints, which are isolated from the public internet and only accessible from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community.

Upcoming AWS events
Season 3 of the Build on Generative AI Twitch show has kicked off. Join every Monday on Twitch at 9AM PST/Noon EST/18h CET to learn among others, how you can build generative AI-enabled applications.

If you’re in the EMEA timezone, there is still time to register and watch the AWS Innovate Online Generative AI & Data Edition taking place on February 29. Innovate Online events are free, online, and designed to inspire and educate you about building on AWS. Whether you’re in the Americas, Asia Pacific & Japan, or EMEA region, learn here about future AWS Innovate Online events happening in your timezone.

AWS Community re:Invent re:Caps – Join a Community re:Cap event organized by volunteers from AWS User Groups and AWS Cloud Clubs around the world to learn about the latest announcements from AWS re:Invent.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events here.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

– Veliswa

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

New AWS Region in Mexico is in the works

Post Syndicated from Irshad Buchh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-region-in-mexico-is-in-the-works/

Today, I am happy to announce that we are working on an AWS Region in Mexico. This AWS Mexico (Central) Region will be the second Region in Latin America joining the AWS South America (São Paulo) Region and will give AWS customers the ability to run workloads and store data that must remain in-country.

Mexico in the works

The Region will include three Availability Zones, each one physically independent of the others in the Region yet far enough apart to minimize the risk that an event in one Availability Zone will have impact on business continuity. The Availability Zones will be connected to each other by high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections over dedicated, fully redundant fiber.

With this announcement, AWS now has five new Regions in the works (Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, and Thailand) and 15 upcoming new Availability Zones.

AWS investment in Mexico

The upcoming AWS Mexico Region is the latest in ongoing investments by AWS in Mexico to provide customers with advanced and secure cloud technologies. Since 2020, AWS has launched seven Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Mexico. Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure and programmable content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds.

In 2020, AWS launched AWS Outposts in Mexico. AWS Outposts is a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience. AWS expanded its infrastructure footprint in Mexico again in 2023 with the launch of AWS Local Zones in Queretaro. AWS Local Zones are a type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers, enabling customers to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users. In 2023, AWS established an AWS Direct Connect location in Queretaro, allowing customers to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data center, office, or colocation environment.

Here is a glimpse into our customers in Mexico and the exciting, innovative work they’re undertaking:

Banco Santander Mexico is one of the leading financial groups in the country, focused on commercial banking and securities financing, serving more than 20.5 million customers. “AWS has been a strategic partner for our digital transformation,” said Juan Pablo Chiappari, head of IT Infrastructure for North America. “Thanks to their wide range of services, we have been able to innovate faster, improve our customer experience and reduce our operating costs.”

SkyAlert is an innovative technology company that quickly alerts millions of people living in earthquake-prone areas, promoting a culture of prevention against natural disasters. In order to provide customers—both businesses and individuals—with the right tools to protect themselves during earthquakes, SkyAlert migrated its infrastructure to AWS. After implementing its Internet of Things (IoT) solution to run on AWS and its efficient alert service, SkyAlert scales quickly and can send millions of messages in a few seconds, helping to save lives in the event of earthquakes.

Kueski is an online lender for the middle class of Mexico and Latin America. The company uses big data and advanced analytics to approve and deliver loans in a matter of minutes. The company has become the fastest-growing platform of its kind in the region and has already granted thousands of loans. They were born with AWS.

Bolsa Institucional de Valores (BIVA) is a stock exchange based in Mexico, backed by Nasdaq. BIVA provides local and global investors with cutting-edge technology for trading and market solutions and companies with listing and maintenance services. As part of its vision of innovation, BIVA started its journey to the cloud in 2023 by migrating its disaster recovery site, including its trading and market surveillance systems, to AWS, using edge compute capabilities available in both the AWS Local Zones in Queretaro, Mexico, to achieve their low latency needs.

Stay Tuned
The AWS Region in Mexico will open in early 2025. As usual, subscribe to this blog so that you will be among the first to know when the new Region is open!

To learn more about AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure, see the Global Infrastructure page.

— Irshad

Mistral AI models coming soon to Amazon Bedrock

Post Syndicated from Donnie Prakoso original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/mistral-ai-models-coming-soon-to-amazon-bedrock/

Mistral AI, an AI company based in France, is on a mission to elevate publicly available models to state-of-the-art performance. They specialize in creating fast and secure large language models (LLMs) that can be used for various tasks, from chatbots to code generation.

We’re pleased to announce that two high-performing Mistral AI models, Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B, will be available soon on Amazon Bedrock. AWS is bringing Mistral AI to Amazon Bedrock as our 7th foundation model provider, joining other leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon. With these two Mistral AI models, you will have the flexibility to choose the optimal, high-performing LLM for your use case to build and scale generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock.

Overview of Mistral AI Models
Here’s a quick overview of these two highly anticipated Mistral AI models:

  • Mistral 7B is the first foundation model from Mistral AI, supporting English text generation tasks with natural coding capabilities. It is optimized for low latency with a low memory requirement and high throughput for its size. This model is powerful and supports various use cases from text summarization and classification, to text completion and code completion.
  • Mixtral 8x7B is a popular, high-quality sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that is ideal for text summarization, question and answering, text classification, text completion, and code generation.

Choosing the right foundation model is key to building successful applications. Let’s have a look at a few highlights that demonstrate why Mistral AI models could be a good fit for your use case:

  • Balance of cost and performance — One prominent highlight of Mistral AI’s models strikes a remarkable balance between cost and performance. The use of sparse MoE makes these models efficient, affordable, and scalable, while controlling costs.
  • Fast inference speed — Mistral AI models have an impressive inference speed and are optimized for low latency. The models also have a low memory requirement and high throughput for their size. This feature matters most when you want to scale your production use cases.
  • Transparency and trust — Mistral AI models are transparent and customizable. This enables organizations to meet stringent regulatory requirements.
  • Accessible to a wide range of users — Mistral AI models are accessible to everyone. This helps organizations of any size integrate generative AI features into their applications.

Available Soon
Mistral AI publicly available models are coming soon to Amazon Bedrock. As usual, subscribe to this blog so that you will be among the first to know when these models will be available on Amazon Bedrock.

Learn more

Stay tuned,
— Donnie

The Zabbix/HackerOne Bug Bounty Program: A Year of Results

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/the-zabbix-hackerone-bug-bounty-program-a-year-of-results/27490/

As cyberattacks increase exponentially and the cost of maintaining dedicated internal security teams skyrockets, the popularity of the “bug bounty” program (which sees outside hackers paid by organizations to legally expose cybersecurity vulnerabilities) is exploding.

Organizations large and small are running programs to root out the security vulnerabilities in their products. Governments and policymakers are changing laws to make the approach easier to adopt, while private sector tech giants are also offering generous rewards – Apple alone has reportedly paid out more than $20 million via its bounty program, and the vendor offers up to $2 million to any hacker who reports a vulnerability that bypasses the protections of Lockdown Mode on its devices.

It’s an approach that dovetails perfectly with the Zabbix philosophy of “security first,” and it’s why as 2023 dawned we began working with HackerOne, the world leader in attack resistance management (ARM). ARM blends the security expertise of ethical hackers with asset discovery, continuous assessment, and process enhancement to find and close gaps in the digital attack surface.

Why HackerOne?

We knew from the start that we wanted to create a Zabbix-specific bug bounty program that would challenge the world’s best ethical hackers to find the weak spots in our cybersecurity armor – and let us know about them in time to fix them.

One of the biggest advantages of the HackerOne platform is the broad and diverse community of experts that they can call on. Adding Zabbix to HackerOne’s platform was a golden opportunity to test our security and vulnerabilities on a scale that we’d previously been unable to even imagine.

In contrast to an individual penetration test, which is the “old-school” industry standard security measure and is performed based on a pre-prepared scenario, we knew that HackerOne’s experts could discover vulnerabilities that a run-of-the-mill penetration test would never find.

At the same time, we knew that adding Zabbix to HackerOne was a bold decision that would test our faith in the security of our product. Put simply, teaming up with HackerOne was our way of confirming the quality of Zabbix and our desire to constantly improve it.

Getting started

We’ve known for a long time that HackerOne was the ideal partner for a bug bounty program, given their reputation for innovation and effectiveness. After an initial approach and agreement between HackerOne and Zabbix, it was time to consider what exactly a Zabbix bug bounty program would look like.

It was clear to everyone involved that if the reporting of vulnerabilities was to be meaningful and structured, we needed to develop new workflows that would provide a procedure for processing the received applications and handing them over for development. Another critical step was to register for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, where all vulnerabilities discovered in Zabbix are currently registered.

The results

We’re pleased to report that as with any successful implementation, the numbers speak for themselves:

Data for the period 01.01.2023 – 25.01.2024

Submissions

• Reports submitted: 250
• Reports triaged: 3
• Reports closed as resolved: 16
• Reports rewarded: 19

Rewards

• Total rewards: $17,300.00
• Average reward: $865.00
• Median reward: $500.00

Submissions by severity

• Critical: 29
• High: 65
• Medium, low, none: 108
• Not severe: 48

We were pleasantly surprised at the sheer number of submissions alone – not all 250 submissions were severe or even actionable, but the number shows that our community is taking to the program, spreading the word, and doing their part to help us make sure that Zabbix is as secure as we can possibly make it. The fact that we were able to “squash” several bugs that will now never get a chance to bedevil our users is just the icing on the cake.

The results are impressive, but in keeping with the Zabbix ethos of continuous improvement, we’re confident that with a few refinements we can pay out even more in 2024. After all, any money that goes toward building a better, more secure product is money well spent! We’d like to close by extending a special and heartfelt thank you to everyone who has contributed to our bug bounty program and discovered vulnerabilities – keep up the great work!

 

The post The Zabbix/HackerOne Bug Bounty Program: A Year of Results appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

AWS Weekly Roundup — AWS Control Tower new API, TLS 1.3 with API Gateway, Private Marketplace Catalogs, and more — February 19, 2024

Post Syndicated from Irshad Buchh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-aws-control-tower-new-api-tls-1-3-with-api-gateway-private-marketplace-catalogs-and-more-february-19-2024/

Over the past week, our service teams have continued to innovate on your behalf, and a lot has happened in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) universe that I want to tell you about. I’ll also share about all the AWS Community events and initiatives that are happening around the world.

Let’s dive in!

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

AWS Control Tower introduces APIs to register organizational units – With these new APIs, you can extend governance to organizational units (OUs) using APIs and automate your OU provisioning workflow. The APIs can also be used for OUs that are already under AWS Control Tower governance to re-register OUs after landing zone updates. These APIs include AWS CloudFormation support, allowing customers to manage their OUs with infrastructure as code (IaC).

API Gateway now supports TLS 1.3 – By using TLS 1.3 with API Gateway as the centralized point of control, developers can secure communication between the client and the gateway; uphold the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of their API traffic; and benefit from API Gateway’s integration with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for centralized deployment of SSL certificates using TLS.

Amazon OpenSearch Service now lets you update cluster volume without blue/green – While blue/green deployments are meant to avoid any disruption to your clusters because the deployment uses additional resources on the domain, it is recommended that you perform them during low traffic periods. Now, you can update volume-related cluster configuration without requiring a blue/green deployment, ensuring minimal performance impact on your online traffic and avoiding any potential disruption to your cluster operations.

Amazon GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring protects clusters running in shared VPC – With this launch, customers who are already opted into automated agent management in GuardDuty will benefit from a renewed 30-day trial of GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring, where we will automatically start monitoring the resources (clusters) deployed in a shared VPC setup. Customers also have the option to manually manage the agent and provision the virtual private cloud (VPC) endpoint in their shared VPC environment.

AWS Marketplace now supports managing Private Marketplace catalogs for OUs – This capability supports distinct product catalogs per business unit or development environment, empowering organizations to align software procurement with specific needs. Additionally, customers can designate a trusted member account as a delegated administrator for Private Marketplace administration, reducing the operational burden on management account administrators. With this launch, organizations can procure more quickly by providing administrators with the agile controls they need to scale their procurement governance across distinct business and user needs.

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

Other AWS news

Join AWS Cloud Clubs Captains – The C3 cohort of AWS Cloud Club Captains is open for applications from February 5–23, 2024, at 5:00 PM EST.

AWS open source news and updates – Our colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter highlighting new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

Building with Generative AI on AWS using PartyRock, Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q – You will gain skills in prompt engineering and using the Amazon Bedrock API. We will also explore how to “chat with your documents” through knowledge bases, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), embeddings, and agents. We will also use next-generation developer tools Amazon Q and Amazon CodeWhisperer to assist in coding and debugging.

Location: AWS Skills Center, 1550-G Crystal Drive, Arlington, VA

AI/ML security – Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) and especially generative AI  have become top of mind for many organizations, but even the companies who want to move forward with this new and transformative technology are hesitating. They don’t necessarily understand how they can ensure that what they build will be secure. This webinar explains how they can do that.

AWS Jam Session – Canada Edition – AWS JAM is a gamified learning platform where you come to play, learn, and validate your AWS skills. The morning will include a mix of challenges across various technical domains – security, serverless, AI/ML, analytics, and more. The afternoon will be focused on a different specialty domain each month. You can form teams of up to four people to solve the challenges. There will be prizes for the top three winning teams.

Whether you’re in the Americas, Asia Pacific and Japan, or the EMEA region, there’s an upcoming AWS Innovate Online event that fits your time zone. Innovate Online events are free, online, and designed to inspire and educate you about AWS.

AWS Summits are a series of free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. These events are designed to educate you about AWS products and services and help you develop the skills needed to build, deploy, and operate your infrastructure and applications. Find an AWS Summit near you and register or set a notification to know when registration opens for a Summit that interests you.

AWS Community re:Invent re:Caps – Join a Community re:Cap event organized by volunteers from AWS User Groups and AWS Cloud Clubs around the world to learn about the latest announcements from AWS re:Invent.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

– Irshad

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

Super Bowl Sunday Check Out the 49ers Stadium Data Center Press Box and Stats Room

Post Syndicated from Patrick Kennedy original https://www.servethehome.com/super-bowl-sunday-check-out-the-49ers-stadium-data-center-press-box-and-stats-room-intel/

Looking for something to do pre-game? Check out our 49ers Levi’s Stadium tour with the on-site data center, press box, and more

The post Super Bowl Sunday Check Out the 49ers Stadium Data Center Press Box and Stats Room appeared first on ServeTheHome.

AWS Weekly Roundup — Amazon Q in AWS Glue, Amazon PartyRock Hackathon, CDK Migrate, and more — February 5, 2024

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-amazon-q-in-aws-glue-amazon-partyrock-hackathon-cdk-migrate-and-more-february-5-2024/

With all the generative AI announcements at AWS re:invent 2023, I’ve committed to dive deep into this technology and learn as much as I can. If you are too, I’m happy that among other resources available, the AWS community also has a space that I can access for generative AI tools and guides.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

Amazon Q data integration in AWS Glue (Preview) – Now you can use natural language to ask Amazon Q to author jobs, troubleshoot issues, and answer questions about AWS Glue and data integration. Amazon Q was launched in preview at AWS re:invent 2023, and is a generative AI–powered assistant to help you solve problems, generate content, and take action.

General availability of CDK Migrate – CDK Migrate is a component of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) that enables you to migrate AWS CloudFormation templates, previously deployed CloudFormation stacks, or resources created outside of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) into a CDK application. This feature was launched alongside the CloudFormation IaC Generator to give you an end-to-end experience that enables you to create an IaC configuration based off a resource, as well as its relationships. You can expect the IaC generator to have a huge impact for a common use case we’ve seen.

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

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects, programs, and news items that you might find interesting:

Amazon API Gateway processed over 100 trillion API requests in 2023, demonstrating the growing demand for API-driven applications. API Gateway is a fully-managed API management service. Customers from all industry verticals told us they’re adopting API Gateway for multiple reasons. First, its ability to scale to meet the demands of even the most high-traffic applications. Second, its fully-managed, serverless architecture, which eliminates the need to manage any infrastructure, and frees customers to focus on their core business needs.

Join the PartyRock Generative AI Hackathon by AWS. This is a challenge for you to get hands-on building generative AI-powered apps. You’ll use Amazon PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground, as a fast and fun way to learn about Prompt Engineering and Foundational Models (FMs) to build a functional app with generative AI.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community.

Upcoming AWS events
Whether you’re in the Americas, Asia Pacific & Japan, or EMEA region, there’s an upcoming AWS Innovate Online event that fits your timezone. Innovate Online events are free, online, and designed to inspire and educate you about AWS.

AWS Summits are a series of free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. These events are designed to educate you about AWS products and services and help you develop the skills needed to build, deploy, and operate your infrastructure and applications. Find an AWS Summit near you and register or set a notification to know when registration opens for a Summit that interests you.

AWS Community re:Invent re:Caps – Join a Community re:Cap event organized by volunteers from AWS User Groups and AWS Cloud Clubs around the world to learn about the latest announcements from AWS re:Invent.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

– Veliswa

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

AWS named as a Leader in 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services for thirteenth year in a row

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/read-the-2023-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-strategic-cloud-platform-services/

On December 4, 2023, AWS was named as a Leader in the 2023 Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services (SCPS). AWS is the longest-running Magic Quadrant Leader, with Gartner naming AWS a Leader for the thirteenth consecutive year. AWS is placed highest on the Ability to Execute axis.

SCPS, previously known as Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (CIPS), is defined as “standardized, automated, public cloud offerings integrating infrastructure services (for example, computing, network, and storage), platform services (for example, managed application and data services) and transformation services (programs/resources that help customers adopt cloud-oriented IT delivery models).”

I have the chance to talk with our customers every single week. When I ask the main reasons why they choose AWS, I consistently hear the following responses:

Breadth and depth. AWS offers more cloud services and features than other providers, including compute, storage, databases, machine learning (ML), data analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT). This allows faster, easier, and cheaper cloud migration of existing apps and building new apps. AWS has the deepest functionality within services, such as a wide variety of purpose-built databases optimized for cost and performance.

A rapid pace of innovation. AWS enables faster experimentation and innovation through the latest technologies. We continually accelerate innovation pace to invent new technologies for business transformation. For example, in 2014, we launched the serverless computing service AWS Lambda, eliminating server provisioning and management for developers. In 2017, we launched the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and a lightweight hypervisor that enables better performance, increased security, and cost savings for Amazon EC2 instances. At re:Invent 2018, we announced AWS Graviton, a family of processors designed to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). And today, we continue to innovate with generative artificial intelligence (AI) services such as Amazon Q or Amazon CodeWhisperer, your coding productivity tool available in developer’s integrated development environment (IDE) and on the command line (CLI).

A large community of customers and partners. AWS has a large, active community with millions of customers and tens of thousands of partners globally. Customers in most industries and of varied sizes use AWS for diverse applications. The AWS Partner Network includes thousands of systems integrators specializing in AWS and tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISV) adapting their technologies for AWS.

You also benefit from the global AWS infrastructure, including the 33 Regions where you can deploy your workload and store your data. We pre-announced four future Regions in Malaysia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

An AWS Region is a physical location in the world where we have multiple Availability Zones. Availability Zones consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. Unlike with other cloud providers, who often define a region as a single data center, having multiple Availability Zones allows you to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center.

AWS has more than 17 years of experience building its global infrastructure. And, as Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, keeps repeating, “There’s no compression algorithm for experience,” especially when it comes to scale, security, and performance.

Here is the graphical representation of the 2023 Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services.

Gartner | 2023 Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform ServicesThe full Gartner report has details about the features and factors they reviewed. It explains the methodology used and the recognitions. This report can serve as a guide when choosing a cloud provider that helps you innovate on behalf of your customers.

— seb

Gartner, 2023 Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services, 4 December 2023, David Wright, Dennis Smith, et. al.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from AWS.

New chat experience for AWS Glue using natural language – Amazon Q data integration in AWS Glue (Preview)

Post Syndicated from Irshad Buchh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-chat-experience-for-aws-glue-using-natural-language-amazon-q-data-integration-in-aws-glue-preview/

Today we’re previewing a new chat experience for AWS Glue that will let you use natural language to author and troubleshoot data integration jobs.

Amazon Q data integration in AWS Glue will reduce the time and effort you need to learn, build, and run data integration jobs using AWS Glue data integration engines. You can author jobs, troubleshoot issues, and get instant answers to questions about AWS Glue and anything related to data integration. The chat experience is powered by Amazon Bedrock.

You can describe your data integration workload and Amazon Q will generate a complete ETL script. You can troubleshoot your jobs by asking Amazon Q to explain errors and propose solutions. Amazon Q provides detailed guidance throughout the entire data integration workflow. Amazon Q helps you learn and build data integration jobs using AWS Glue. Amazon Q can help you connect to common AWS sources such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Let me show you some capabilities of Amazon Q data integration in AWS Glue.

1. Conversational Q&A capability

To start using this feature, I can select the Amazon Q icon on the right-hand side of the AWS Management Console.

AmazonQ-1

For example, I can ask, “What is AWS Glue,” and Amazon Q provides concise explanations along with references I can use to follow up on my questions and validate the guidance.

AmazonQ-2

With Amazon Q, I can elaborate on my use cases in more detail to provide context. For example, I can ask Amazon Q, “How do I create an AWS Glue job?”

AmazonQ-2

Next let me ask Amazon Q, “How do I optimize memory management in my AWS Glue job?”

AmazonQ-41

2. AWS Glue job creation

To use this feature, I can tell Amazon Q, “Write a Glue ETL job that reads from Redshift, drops null fields, and writes to S3 as parquet files.”

AmazonQ-Parq

I can copy code into the script editor or notebook with a simple click on the Copy button. I can also tell Amazon Q, “Help me with a Glue job that reads my DynamoDB table, maps the fields, and writes the results to Amazon S3 in Parquet format”.

AmazonQ-DynamoDB

Get started with Amazon Q today
With Amazon Q, you have an artificial intelligence (AI) expert by your side to answer questions, write code faster, troubleshoot issues, optimize workloads, and even help you code new features. These capabilities simplify every phase of building applications on AWS. Amazon Q data integration in AWS Glue is available in every region where Amazon Q is supported. To learn more, see the Amazon Q pricing page.

Learn more

— Irshad

AWS Weekly Roundup — Amazon API Gateway, AWS Step Functions, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon LightSail, Amazon VPC, and more — January 29, 2024

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-amazon-api-gateway-aws-step-functions-amazon-ecs-amazon-eks-amazon-lightsail-amazon-vpc-and-more-january-29-2024/

This past week our service teams continue to innovate on your behalf, and a lot has happened in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) universe. I’ll also share about all the AWS Community events and initiatives that are happening around the world.

Let’s dive in!

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

AWS Step Functions adds integration for 33 services including Amazon Q – AWS Step Functions is a visual workflow service capable of orchestrating over 11,000+ API actions from over 220 AWS services to help customers build distributed applications at scale. This week, AWS Step Functions expands its AWS SDK integrations with support for 33 additional AWS services, including Amazon Q, AWS B2B Data Interchange, and Amazon CloudFront KeyValueStore.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Service Connect introduces support for automatic traffic encryption with TLS Certificates – Amazon ECS launches support for automatic traffic encryption with Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates for its networking capability called ECS Service Connect. With this support, ECS Service Connect allows your applications to establish a secure connection by encrypting your network traffic.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon EKS Distro support Kubernetes version 1.29 – Kubernetes version 1.29 introduced several new features and bug fixes. You can create new EKS clusters using v1.29 and upgrade your existing clusters to v1.29 using the Amazon EKS console, the eksctl command line interface, or through an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool.

IPv6 instance bundles on Amazon Lightsail – With these new instance bundles, you can get up and running quickly on IPv6-only without the need for a public IPv4 address with the ease of use and simplicity of Amazon Lightsail. If you have existing Lightsail instances with a public IPv4 address, you can migrate your instances to IPv6-only in a few simple steps.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) supports idempotency for route table and network ACL creation – Idempotent creation of route tables and network ACLs is intended for customers that use network orchestration systems or automation scripts that create route tables and network ACLs as part of a workflow. It allows you to safely retry creation without additional side effects.

Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) announces audio-only pricing for Low-Latency Streaming – Amazon IVS is a managed live streaming solution that is designed to make low-latency or real-time video available to viewers around the world. It now offers audio-only pricing for its Low-Latency Streaming capability at 1/10th of the existing HD video rate.

Sellers can resell third-party professional services in AWS Marketplace – AWS Marketplace sellers, including independent software vendors (ISVs), consulting partners, and channel partners, can now resell third-party professional services in AWS Marketplace. Services can include implementation, assessments, managed services, training, or premium support.

Introducing the AWS Small and Medium Business (SMB) Competency – This is the first go-to-market AWS Specialization designed for partners who deliver to small and medium-sized customers. The SMB Competency provides enhanced benefits for AWS Partners to invest and focus on SMB customer business, such as becoming the go-to standard for participation in new pilots and sales initiatives and receiving unique access to scale demand generation engines.

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

X in Y – We launched existing services and instance types in additional Regions:

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects, programs, and news items that you might find interesting:

Get The NewsExport a Software Bill of Materials using Amazon Inspector – Generating an SBOM gives you critical security information that offers you visibility into specifics about your software supply chain, including the packages you use the most frequently and the related vulnerabilities that might affect your whole company. My colleague Varun Sharma in South Africa shows how to export a consolidated SBOM for the resources monitored by Amazon Inspector across your organization in industry standard formats, including CycloneDx and SPDX. It also shares insights and approaches for analyzing SBOM artifacts using Amazon Athena.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS InnovateAWS Innovate: AI/ML and Data Edition – Register now for the Asia Pacific & Japan AWS Innovate online conference on February 22, 2024, to explore, discover, and learn how to innovate with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Choose from over 50 sessions in three languages and get hands-on with technical demos aimed at generative AI builders.

AWS Summit Paris 2024AWS Summit Paris  – The AWS Summit Paris is an annual event that is held in Paris, France. It is a great opportunity for cloud computing professionals from all over the world to learn about the latest AWS technologies, network with other professionals, and collaborate on projects. The Summit is free to attend and features keynote presentations, breakout sessions, and hands-on labs. Registrations are open!

AWS Community re:Invent re:CapsAWS Community re:Invent re:Caps – Join a Community re:Cap event organized by volunteers from AWS User Groups and AWS Cloud Clubs around the world to learn about the latest announcements from AWS re:Invent.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— seb

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

2023 in Review: A Bigger, Bolder, and Better Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/2023-in-review-a-bigger-bolder-and-better-zabbix/27272/

It hardly seems possible, but somehow 2023 is already in the rearview mirror. It’s been quite a ride, full of dynamic growth, popular events, new releases, and exciting additions to our global community. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the highlights!

Spreading the word

We radically expanded our slate of events this year in an attempt to spread the good word about the world’s finest open-source monitoring solution and meet our vibrant community. Our efforts took the form of:

• 31 meetings (in locations ranging from Kuala Lumpur to Seoul to Paris)
• 3 forums (in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Mexico City)
• 16 meetups (online and in multiple locations around the globe)
• 5 conferences (in Germany, Benelux, China, Japan, and Latin America)
• Countless exhibitions, trade fairs, and expos from Las Vegas to Tokyo and all points in between

Oh, and one blowout Zabbix Summit in Riga in October!

Building a better product

This year we released Zabbix 6.4, which included many important new features:

• Just-in-time (JIT) user provisioning
• Cause and symptom events
• Instant propagation of configuration changes
• Zero-downtime upgrades
• SNMP discovery/bulk data collection speed and performance improvements
• A new menu layout
• The ability to stream metrics and events from Zabbix to external systems over HTTP
• Template versioning
• A development framework for widget creation
• Optional interfaces for server-originated checks
• Streamlined media type configuration for multiple email service providers

Zabbix 6.4 also comes with many new templates for the most popular vendors and cloud providers, including:

• Microsoft Azure MySQL servers
• Microsoft Azure PostgreSQL servers
• Microsoft Azure virtual machines
• Low-level discovery improvements in AWS by HTTP template
• Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager
• Veeam Backup and Replication
• Cisco Nexus 9000 Series
• BMC Control-M
• Cisco Meraki dashboard
• OS processes by Zabbix agent
• Improvements to filesystem discovery in official Zabbix OS templates

Speaking of templates, since the release of Zabbix 6.0, we have developed 38 new integrations, including:

• 16 application templates
• 4 cloud templates
• 2 database templates
• 6 webhooks
• 2 net templates
• 3 SAN templates
• 5 server templates

Maintaining security

In January, we received an ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certificate for information security. The certification stands as proof positive that Zabbix protects all our information within the highest internationally acknowledged security standards and reaffirms our commitment to prioritize information security best practices everywhere within our organization.

February saw us launch a public bug bounty program in partnership with HackerOne, the world’s number one ethical hacker-powered platform. The program’s purpose is to discover potential security vulnerabilities by letting hackers proactively search for and report Zabbix security vulnerabilities and get rewarded for found and validated issues. The program has been a massive success, with 15 reports resolved and $17,800 in bounties being paid out so far.

The power of growth

In 2023 we managed to grow our headcount across every location we operate in, while adding to a growing roster of remote workers from around the world. On March 29, we officially opened a new office in Mexico, joining our offices in Brazil (opened in 2020), the United States (2016), Japan (2012), and Latvia (2005).

To celebrate this momentous occasion, we invited our community of users, partners, and customers to participate in a free and exclusive event dedicated entirely to Zabbix. They were able to learn a little more about the company, ask questions about the plans for the new office, and share knowledge with our team of experts.

Our Integration team also saw significant growth in 2023, which has resulted in a faster rollout of popular templates and integrations as well as higher levels of quality than ever before. The Partners team had a busy year as well, adding 19 new certified partners around the globe and upgrading several others to Premium and Certified Reseller status.

Lending a helping hand

As an open-source company, we champion knowledge sharing and a more open world. It’s why we took part in the career day at the Transport and Telecommunication Institute in Riga, supported the “Youth Has Talent” contest in Latvia organized by the Laiks Jauniešiem association, and sent our Head of Training Kristine Lamberte as a guest speaker to Rezekne Technical School.

Our team in Latin America got in on the action by working with the DEDICATE Foundation to develop the Zabbix Innova Challenge. It’s a free activity that’s designed to promote the development of technological projects that involve young people in Mexico, while boosting the technology community and stimulating the development of creative solutions.

Our goal in showing up at all these events is to encourage young talent, support and invest in local social projects that empower and inspire future generations, share our skills and experience, and showcase some of the amazing career opportunities that Zabbix can offer.

We aim to create a world without interruption, and just as we strive to make the world a better place by building the best monitoring tool possible, we also do what we can to help those around us whose lives have been interrupted by circumstances beyond their control.

In 2023, that involved donating a total of €378,000 to organizations like the Children’s Hospital Foundation, Samaritan International Latvia, The Oncological Patient Support Association “Tree of Life”, the Children’s Foundation of Latvia, the Autism Support Point in Rēzekne, and ziedot.lv.

Getting noticed

The world continued to sit up and take notice of what we’ve been doing in 2023. Brazilian tech journal iMasters started off the year by noting Zabbix LATAM’s incredible 300% growth rate, while another Brazilian journal, Baguete, published an outstanding piece on the opening of the Zabbix office in Mexico.

In May, we were recognized as the top monitoring solution on Peerspot, and July saw us spotlighted in Labs of Latvia, a media platform for tech and innovation, which reported on our global expansion.

October brought with it a wave of favorable press coverage – Zabbix Summit 2023 speaker Dr. Hiroshi Abe had great things to say about us when profiled in El Español, and the same publication also published a well-researched company profile after the Summit.

In addition, Guaratã Almeida, a Zabbix partner and the technology director of the Brazilian city of Maceió, was an enthusiastic4 participant in the Summit, as noted by the city’s website.

Meanwhile, ThinkIT in Japan published an insightful interview with Zabbix Engineers Elina Pulke and Eliza Sekace, plus an inside look at the Summit proceedings.

Belgian website ITdaily followed that up with a post-Summit look at our business model and future plans, while Techzine published a glowing profile of their own as November drew to a close.

The icing on the cake of 2023 was Zabbix being named to the list of the “Top 101 Latvia’s Most Valuable Enterprises in 2023.” It’s a good measure of our significant contribution to Latvia’s economy and a reminder of our increasingly global impact.

Carrying our momentum into 2024

It was a year full of growth and accomplishments, and it was all possible because of our incredible community of customers and contributors! As 2024 approaches, you can look forward to a long list of new upgrades, events, and inspiration. Keep following us on social media, reading our blog, and checking our forum to stay on top of all the latest Zabbix news and events!

The post 2023 in Review: A Bigger, Bolder, and Better Zabbix appeared first on Zabbix Blog.