Summer is at its peak for some of us around the world and many are heading to their favorite holiday destinations to enjoy some time off. Having just returned from holiday myself, I couldn’t help but think about the key role artificial intelligence (AI) plays in our modern world to help us expand the operation of simple things like travel. Passport and identity verification was quick, and thanks to the new airport security system that has rolled out around the world, so were my baggage checks. I smiled and looked at my backpack as it rolled along the security screening belt with my computer, tablet and portable game consoles neatly tucked inside without any fuss.
Without AI, we wouldn’t be able to scale operations to keep up with population growth or the enormous amount of data we generate daily. The advent of generative artificial intelligence has taken this even further by unlocking the ability to use all this data in all sorts of creative ways, leading to a new wave of exciting innovations that continue to elevate modern products and services.
This new environment can be challenging for companies learning how generative AI can help them grow or succeed, such as startups. That’s why I’m so excited to have AWS GenAI Lofts happening around the world in the coming months.
AWS GenAI Lofts are co-working spaces that are available in different cities around the world for several weeks. Here, startups, developers, investors, and industry experts can meet with access to AWS AI experts and participate in interviews, workshops, fireside chats, and Q&As with industry leaders. All lofts are free and carefully curated to offer something for everyone to help speed up your AI journey. Lofts are scheduled in Bengaluru (July 29-August 9), San Francisco (August 14-September 27), Sao Paulo (September 2-November 20), London (September 30-October 25), Paris (October 8 – November 25) and Seoul (November, exact dates awaited). I highly encourage you to check out loft agendas near you and stop by to learn more about GenAI and connect with others.
Last week’s launch
Here’s some news that caught my eye last week.
Amazon Q Business cross-region IdC — Amazon Q Business is a generative AI-powered assistant that deeply understands your business by providing connectors you can easily set up to unify data from multiple sources like Amazon S3, Microsoft 365, and more. You can then generate content, answer questions, and even automate tasks that are relevant and specific to your business. Q Business integrates with AWS IAM Identity Center to ensure that only those who are authorized to access data. Previously, the IAM Identity Center instance had to be located in the same region as the Q Business application. You can now join one in another region.
Git sync state changes are published to Amazon EventBridge — AWS CloudFormation Git Sync is a very useful feature that can help streamline your DevOps operations by allowing you to automatically update your AWS CloudFormation stacks whenever you make changes to a template or deployment file in source control. As of last week, any change in sync state is published in near real-time as an event on EventBridge. This allows you to take your GitOps workflow further and stay on top of Git repositories or resource sync state changes.
Some AWS Pinpoint options are now under AWS End User Messaging — AWS Pinpoint’s SMS, MMS, push, and text-to-voice capabilities have been shuffled and are now offered through a proprietary service called AWS End User Messaging. There is no impact on existing applications and no changes to the API, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or IAM policies, however the new name is now reflected in the AWS Management Console, AWS Billing Console dashboard, documentation, and other places.
Amazon WorkSpaces Update — Microsoft Visual Studio Professional and Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise 2022 are now added to the list of available applications licensed for Workspaces Personal. In addition, the Amazon WorkSpaces thin client has received Carbon Trust verification. As verified by the Carbon Trust, the total life cycle carbon emissions are 77 kg CO2e and 50% of the product is made from recycled materials.
GenAI for the public sector — There have been two notable launches that may be of interest to those in the public sector looking to get started with generative AI. Amazon Bedrock is now an authorized FedRAMP High service in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region. Additionally, both Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B are now available in this region, so this is a great opportunity to start experimenting with Bedrock and Llama 3 if you have workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region.
Customers in Germany can now sign in to AWS using their bank account — This means that no debit or credit card is required to create AWS accounts if you have a billing address in Germany. This can help simplify paying AWS invoices for some businesses, as well as make it easier for others to get started with AWS.
Learning materials
These are my recommended teaching materials for this week.
AWS Skill Builder — This is a rather broad recommendation, but I’m still surprised that so many people have never heard of AWS Skill Builder or haven’t tried it yet. There is so much learning you can do for free, including many hands-on courses. In July alone, AWS Skill Builder launched 25 new digital training products, including AWS SimulLearn and AWS Cloud Quest: Generative AI, which are game-based learning experiences. Speaking of which, did you know that if you need to recertify your Cloud Practitioner certification, you can do so simply by playing the AWS Cloud Quest: Recertify Cloud Practitioner game?
Get started with the Agent Code Interpreter — Earlier last month, we released a new feature for Agents for Amazon Bedrock that allows agents to dynamically generate and run code in a secure sandbox environment. As usual, my colleague Mike Chambers has created a great video and blog post on community.aws showing how you can start using it today.
That’s it for this week. Check back next Monday for another weekly recap!