From Amazon Q Business and AI Agents to new cloud storage and Amazon Bedrock tools, here are the 10 coolest new AWS products launched in 2024 so far.
From its new Amazon Q Developer and Business products to new cloud storage and Amazon Bedrock offerings, Amazon Web Services’ product innovation engine has been on fire in 2024, specifically around artificial intelligence.
The world leader in cloud computing is pouring billions into new products and AWS data centers that power the $100 billion company’s offerings and services.
AWS’ new generative AI products and AI-powered cybersecurity innovation are top of mind for the company’s new CEO, Matt Garman.
“With security as the absolute baseline, the next most critical thing for AWS today is innovating on behalf of our customers in the realm of generative AI,” Garman said in a recent blog post. “Generative AI is going to disrupt and change almost every industry and customer experience in the world. It’s an area where we have invested heavily and will continue to do so.”
[Related: AWS’ New CEO Garman Unveils Leadership Changes]
AWS $100 Billion Run Rate
AWS generated a record $25 billion in revenue during first-quarter 2024, an increase of 17 percent year over year.
The Seattle-based company is the worldwide market-share leader in cloud computing services, owning 31 percent share of the global market in first-quarter 2024, followed by Microsoft at 25 percent share and Google Cloud at 11 percent share.
With Garman now at the helm, he looks to take AWS’ GenAI product road map to the next level.
“It’s our job to help customers easily build any type of generative AI applications and make sure they perform well, do so securely, responsibly, and in the most sustainable way possible,” said Garman. “Whatever it takes, when it comes to generative AI, AWS is well positioned to build it.”
CRN breaks down the 10 biggest new AWS product launches of 2024 so far that every partner should know about.
Amazon Q Developer
Becoming generally available this year, Amazon Q is AWS’ new generative AI-powered assistant designed for work.
Customers can use Amazon Q to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insight and take action by connecting to their company’s information repositories, code, data and enterprise systems. The new GenAI collaborative assistant helps business users complete tasks using simple natural language prompts.
Launched in April, Amazon Q Developer aims to reimagine the developer experience across the entire software development life cycle.
Amazon Q Developer allows developers to offload time-consuming, manual tasks inside or outside AWS. Capabilities include Q&A and diagnosing common errors in the AWS Management Console; Amazon Q data integration to let users build data integration pipelines using natural language; conversational coding and inline code generation, and Amazon Q Developer Agent for software development.
Amazon Q Developer also includes Amazon Q Developer Agent for code transformation, a feature that can accelerate users’ application maintenance, upgrades and migration in minutes. In addition, the offering lists and describes resources in a user’s AWS account and can now help the user retrieve and analyze cost data from AWS Cost Explorer.
Guardrails For Amazon Bedrock
In one of the biggest security launches of the year, AWS unleashed Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock.
Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock implements safeguards customized to a business’ application requirements. AWS touts its Bedrock platform as the easiest way for businesses to build and scale generative AI-based applications.
The new Guardrails offering evaluates user input and foundation model responses based on use-case-specific policies and provides an additional layer of safeguards regardless of the underlying foundation model.
“It has capabilities to safeguard your generative AI applications with more responsible AI policies. So now you have a consistent level of protection across all of your GenAI development activities,” said AWS’ former CEO, Adam Selipsky, this year.
Guardrails can be applied across foundation models, including Anthropic Claude, Meta Llama 2, Cohere Command, AI21 Labs Jurassic and Amazon Titan Text, as well as fine-tuned models. Customers can create multiple guardrails, each configured with a different combination of controls, and use these guardrails across different applications and use cases.
Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client
AWS recently debuted its new Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client device for virtual desktop access for a price tag starting at $195 per device.
The hardware has purpose-built firmware and software, an operating system engineered for employees who need simple and secure access to applications in the cloud, and software that allows IT to remotely manage it.
Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client is optimized for the AWS Cloud. For the first time, AWS has adapted a consumer device—the Fire TV Cube—into an external hardware product for AWS customers.
“For a significant portion of the workforce, some form of remote and hybrid work is here to stay, particularly in industries such as customer service, technical support and health care,” said Amazon in a blog post this year. “Employees need quick, reliable access to a variety of business applications and data—regardless of where they are working. Enter the Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client.”
The devices are sold through Amazon Business, the company’s B2B marketplace, with customers being able to order preconfigured hardware.
Amazon Bedrock Studio
Amazon Bedrock Studio offers a web-based experience to accelerate the development of generative AI applications by providing a rapid prototyping environment with key Amazon Bedrock features, including Knowledge Bases, Agents and Guardrails.
Amazon Bedrock Studio provides an easy way for developers across an organization to experiment with large language models (LLMs) and other foundationamodels, collaborate on projects and iterate on generative AI applications.
To enable Bedrock Studio, AWS administrators can configure one or more workspaces for their organization in the AWS Management Console for Bedrock and grant permissions to individuals or groups to use the workspace.
Amazon Q Business
Amazon Q Business recently became generally available and is aimed at revolutionizing the way that employees interact with organizational knowledge and enterprise systems.
Amazon Q Business helps users get comprehensive answers to complex questions and take actions in a unified web-based chat experience—all using an enterprise’s existing content, data and systems.
The offering connects seamlessly to over 40 popular enterprise systems, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Microsoft 365 and Salesforce. It ensures that users access content securely with their existing credentials using single sign-on, according to their permissions, and enterprise-level access controls.
Amazon Q Business also recently introduced custom plugins. Admins can connect any third-party application with custom plugins so that employees can use natural language prompts to perform actions like submitting time-off requests and sending meeting invites directly through Amazon Q Business.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone
On the cloud storage front, AWS unleashed Amazon S3 Express One Zone this year.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone is a high-performance, single-Availability Zone storage class purpose-built to deliver consistent single-digit millisecond data access for customers’ most frequently accessed data and latency-sensitive applications.
With S3 Express One Zone, storage automatically scales up or down based on a customer’s consumption and need, while users no longer need to manage multiple storage systems for low-latency workloads.
“Amazon S3 Express One supports millions of requests per minute, with consistent single-digit millisecond latency—the fastest object storage in the cloud,” said AWS’ Selipsky earlier this year. “And up to 10 times faster than S3 standard storage.”
While AWS customers have always been able to choose a specific AWS Region to store their S3 data, S3 Express One Zone enables them to select a specific AWS Availability Zone within an AWS Region to store their data. Customers can choose to co-locate their storage with their compute resources in the same Availability Zone to further optimize performance. Data is stored in a different bucket type—an S3 directory bucket—which supports hundreds of thousands of requests per second.
AI Agents for Amazon Bedrock
AI Agents for Amazon Bedrock enable generative AI applications to execute multistep tasks across company systems and data sources.
Agents for Amazon Bedrock securely connects to a company’s data sources, automatically converts data into numerical representations, and augments the user request with the right information to generate an accurate and relevant response.
AWS’ new simplified agent creation lets users define an action schema and get the control back to perform those actions without needing to create a specific AWS Lambda function. Agents also added support for Anthropic Claude 3 Haiku and Sonnet to help build faster and more intelligent agents.
Agents for Amazon Bedrock create a prompt from the developer-provided instructions, API details needed to complete the tasks, and company data source details from knowledge bases. The automatic prompt creation saves weeks of experimenting with prompts for different foundation models.
Overall, AWS said Agents for Amazon Bedrock enhance operational efficiency, customer service and decision-making while reducing costs and facilitating innovation.
New AWS Generative AI Partner Competency
On of the most important new AWS tools on the partner front was this year’s launch of the new AWS Generative AI Competency.
The new competency is designed to feature partners who have technical proficiency and a track record of customer success when implementing GenAI, with the goal of winning more AI customer deals.
“Leveraging technologies such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, these partners have deep expertise building and deploying groundbreaking applications across industries,” said Selipsky earlier this year. “Our AWS Generative AI Competency Partners will make it easier than ever for customers to innovate with enterprise-grade security and privacy, choice of foundation models, generative AI applications, and a high-performance, low-cost infrastructure.”
The AWS Generative AI Competency will include AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partners and APN Services Partners.
Software path partners will have to show their proficiency in either generative AI applications, foundation models and application development, or in infrastructure and data.
Services path partners will need to show proficiency in end-to-end generative AI consulting.
Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Platform Comes To AWS
Nvidia says its new Blackwell GPU platform will enable up to 30 times greater inference performance and consume 25 times less energy for large AI models.
Nvidia’s Blackwell platform is coming to the AWS cloud with the goal of speeding up inference workloads for resource-intensive, multitrillion-parameter language models.
AWS will provide the Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip and B100 Tensor Core GPUs on its cloud platform.
“Not only will we offer Nvidia’s new Grace Blackwell GPU platform running seamlessly on AWS, we’re integrating it with our industry-leading networking, virtualization and security capabilities—making it possible for customers to build and run multitrillion-parameter large language models faster, at massive scale, and more securely than anywhere else,” said Selipsky.
In addition, AWS offers new Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPU-based Amazon EC2 instances and Nvidia DGX Cloud to accelerate performance of building and running inference on multitrillion-parameter LLMs.
Amazon Bedrock Revamped
The Amazon Bedrock of 2024 looks very different from the Bedrock of 2023.
Although not entirely a new product, AWS’ flagship AI offering, Amazon Bedrock, has been significantly revamped in 2024.
This includes a new Custom Model Import where users can import customized models into Amazon Bedrock to accelerate generative AI application development. The feature allows customers to leverage their prior model customization investments within Amazon Bedrock and consume them in the same manner as Bedrock’s existing models.
Amazon’s Titan Image Generator model also is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock, helping users easily build and scale generative AI applications with new image generation and image editing capabilities.
A slew of the newest foundation models launched by third parties in 2024 have also become available on Bedrock, including Mistral Small FM as well as Anthropic’s new Claude 3 models such as Opus and Sonnet.
