With AWS re:Invent underway, the company has already unveiled a whole host of news, updates, upgrades and other announcements.
Given everyone’s busy schedules, you may have missed some of the more niche or interesting announcements – but don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
If you want to track all the news and updates as they happen – follow our AWS re:Invent 2024 live blog for the breaking news – and don’t worry, we’ll keep this piece updated with anything else we spot that we don’t have time for a full article on!
Amazon Nova is here
Our special guest in the day one keynote was a familiar face for AWS fans – former CEO, and now Amazon boss Andy Jassy.
He revealed Nova, a new family of foundation models, which is hoped will push Amazon to the forefront of the AI arms race.
We’ve covered the image and video generation models Canvas and Reel in our news story – but Nova is actually four tiers of model, available on Amazon Bedrock now.
The full line-up is Amazon Nova Micro (a very fast, text-to-text model); and Amazon Nova Lite , Amazon Nova Pro , and Amazon Nova Premier (multi-modal models that can process text, images, and videos to generate text).
A new generation of SageMaker
Amazon’s analytics platform SageMaker has long been one of the company’s biggest success stories, and it got a host of upgrades at re:Invent 2024.
AWS CEO unveiled “a new generation of SageMaker”, which the company says will bring together the capabilities customers need for fast SQL analytics, petabyte-scale big data processing, data exploration and integration, model development and training, and generative artificial intelligence into one integrated platform.
And a place to experiment in SageMaker too
Another part of this new generation was SageMaker Unified Studio – a new, single environment to access all of your organization’s data, and act on it in new ways.
SageMaker Lakehouse
The last bit of the SageMaker triple-header was SageMaker Lakehouse – a new way to simplify analytics and AI with an open, unified and secure data lake house – providing easy access right across all of your data.
Amazon Q for Developers
AI is becoming an indispensible tool for developers everywhere, and Amazon Q for Developers is getting a host of new tools.
This includes generating end-to-end user tests, accurate documentation, and code reviews – all of which should cut down on developer workloads immensely.
Q Developer is also getting transformation support for transforming .NET apps, a great help for modernizing legacy Windows applications, allowing a quick way to transform apps from Windows to Linux.
There’s also a new elastic service, moving VMware subscriptions to AWS, but also a new tool allowing transforming VMware workloads to cloud native architectures.
Amazon Q for Business
Trying to get all the information you need from your company’s can be tricky to track down, especially if you’re a big organization with multiple data siloes.
To make this less painful, AWS revealed Amazon Q Business integration with Amazon QuickSight, bringing together structured and unstructured data out of their siloes.
Amazon Q Business is also now offering more than 50 new actions for some of the most popualr third-party apps it uses, like creating a task in Asana or sending a private message in Teams. There’s also even a new capability that uses agents to execute complex workflows, helping employees automate both simple and complex tasks.
GitLab partnership
Another launch aimed at helping developers – a new integrated offering bringing together GitLab Duo with Amazon Q.
The two firms say the launch will combine DevSecOps workflows with Amazon Q autonomous agents to help organizations deliver secure software faster, all providing a seamless AI-powered developer experience.
