All The Biggest Reveals Coming Out From AWS re:Invent 2024

Some of the most awaited events in the tech world include the annual events conducted by big tech companies in which they reveal their new products and services, success stories, keynotes by leaders, and plans for the upcoming year and beyond.

This includes Amazon’s yearly AWS re:Invent, which finds its 2024 edition being held between December 2 and 6 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This year too, Amazon made some huge announcements within the first few days that are set to revolutionize cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and other industries.

So, what’s new with the e-commerce, cloud computing, and AI giant? Let’s explore!

Amazon Nova

As the world dives deeper into generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technology, Amazon has announced the introduction of a new set of GenAI foundation models—Amazon Nova.

As per the company, these new state-of-the-art foundation models are designed to deliver frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance.

They come with the ability to process text, image, and video as prompts, and can even help users better understand videos, charts, and documents. They support a wide range of tasks across 200 languages, are cost-effective, and support custom fine-tuning, allowing users to use their own proprietary data.

Available in Amazon Bedrock, the Nova family includes Amazon Nova Micro (a text-only model), Amazon Nova Lite (a low-cost model for processing image, video, and text inputs), Amazon Nova Pro (a multipurpose, accurate and quick model), Amazon Nova Premier (a powerful mode capable of complex reasoning), Amazon Nova Canvas (an image generation model) and Amazon Nova Reel (a video generation model).

“Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges for internal and external builders, and provide compelling intelligence and content generation while also delivering meaningful progress on latency, cost-effectiveness, customization, information grounding, and agentic capabilities,” said Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence.

Amazon Connect GenAI Enhancements

Amazon also brought the power of GenAI to AWS’s cloud contact center solution, Amazon Connect, which is used by tens of thousands of customers to support over 10 million contact center interactions every day.

The new features are aimed at enabling more personalized, efficient, and proactive customer service, and will help businesses segment their audiences to deliver personalized and timely communications across channels.

Ahead of this, Amazon is bringing Amazon Q, its GenAI-powered assistant, to Connect, allowing businesses to create relevant, automated, and dynamic self-service experiences. This will also come with customizable guardrails with stronger controls, ensuring they comply with their specific policies.

Furthermore, users can access GenAI-driven insights, helping them boost their performance, enhance training, and improve service quality.

Amazon Q

AWS also brought new enhancements to its GenAI-powered software application building assistant, Amazon Q Developer.

These include enabling users to deploy higher quality code with automated code reviews, resolve operational issues faster, get better and quicker test coverage, and maintain documentation.

Coming to Amazon Q Business, its GenAI assistant designed to help businesses with insights, information, and actions in business operations, AWS aims to help employees get more tedious, time-consuming work done faster.

Here, the new capabilities include unified insight generation, enhanced software vendor integration management, a library of over 50 new actions, new automation capability for complex workflows, and more.

Data Center Components

To support future AI initiatives and its growing dependency, AWS revealed a new set of data center components that will also help improve energy efficiency.

These new components comprise of enhancements made to power, cooling, and hardware.

These include a simplified electrical and mechanical design, innovations in cooling, rack design, and control systems that can deliver 12% more compute power per site, and a cooling system that reduces mechanical energy consumption by up to 46% among other benefits.

The company expects to begin construction on new data centers fitted with the new components in early 2025 in the United States.

Trainium3 Chips

AI and GenAI advancements are incomplete without AI chips, and AWS didn’t disappoint in that department. The cloud giant revealed the almighty and powerful new Trainium3, its next-generation AI chip, which will enable customers to build bigger models faster.

The chip will be the first one to be made with a 3-nanometer process node, bringing in new standards for performance, power efficiency, and density.

Expected to be available in late 2025, Trainium3-powered UltraServers are expected to be four times more performant than Trn2 UltraServers.

Until then, Amazon announced the general availability of AWS Trainium2-powered Amazon EC2 instances, along with unveiling the new Trn2 UltraServers.

As per the company, the new Amazon EC2 Trn2 instances, powered by AWS Trainium2 chips offer 30-40% better price performance than the current generation of GPU-based EC2 instances. 

Amazon Aurora DSQL

Among the various new capabilities announced for Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB, AWS introduced Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless, distributed SQL database that enables customers to build applications with 99.999% multi-region availability, strong consistency, PostgreSQL compatibility, up to four times faster reads and writes, virtually unlimited scalability, and zero infrastructure management.

As for Amazon DynamoDB, AWS said it is now using the same technology used by Aurora DSQL to enhance DynamoDB global tables, which comes with additional enhancements.

Next-Gen Amazon SageMaker

AWS unveiled the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, which comes with a comprehensive set of new features and capabilities.

These include SageMaker Unified Studio, which offers a single data and AI development environment that unifies purpose-built AWS analytics, machine learning (ML), and AI capabilities.

SageMaker Catalog, which allows customers to easily define and enforce permissions across models, tools, and data sources while safeguarding their AI models with data classification, toxicity detection, guardrails, and responsible AI policies.

SageMaker Lakehouse enables unified access to data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), data lakes, Redshift data warehouses, and federated data sources, with integrated, robust access controls.

AWS's zero-ETL integrations simplify accessing enterprise data from SaaS applications like Zendesk and SAP in tools like SageMaker Lakehouse, eliminating the need for complex, error-prone data pipelines, while providing faster, more efficient insights.

Amazon SageMaker AI

AWS also announced four new innovations for Amazon SageMaker AI, which is used by hundreds of thousands of customers to build, train, and deploy AI models for any use.

Three of these pertain to Amazon SageMaker HyperPod and are aimed at making the process even easier, faster, and more cost-efficient.

SageMaker HyperPod will now bring over 30 curated model training recipes for many popular publicly available models. It will also come with flexible training plans to enhance training timelines and budgets, while better task governance will maximize accelerator utilization.

The fourth innovation will make it easier for users to discover, deploy, and use best-in-class generative AI and ML development applications from leading partners within SageMaker.

Amazon Bedrock

AWS announced the new Amazon Bedrock Marketplace, offering access to over 100 popular and specialized AI models, including tools for finance, translation, biology, and more.

Customers can deploy these models on AWS using managed endpoints, integrating securely with Bedrock’s APIs, and leveraging built-in tools like Guardrails. Amazon Bedrock Marketplace is available now.

It will also include new capabilities to help customers more effectively manage prompts at scale, along with enhancements for Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases.

Furthermore, AWS revealed Amazon Bedrock Data Automation to help customers automatically extract, transform, and generate data from unstructured content at scale using a single API.

AWS announced it will soon be the first cloud provider to offer Luma AI’s advanced Ray 2 model, a breakthrough in generative AI for video creation. Ray 2 allows customers to create high-quality videos from text and images, experiment with camera angles, and deliver realistic visuals for industries like architecture, film, and design.

AWS will also debut poolside’s malibu and point models, which enhance code generation, testing, and documentation, as well as poolside’s Assistant, which integrates poolside tools directly into developers' integrated development environments (IDEs). Stability AI’s new Stable Diffusion 3.5 text-to-image model will be added to Amazon Bedrock.

All of these will be coming soon.

Other Announcements

 

• One of the more interesting revelations included one shared by industry leader Apple. Benoit Dupin, Apple’s senior director of machine learning and AI, revealed that the company leverages AWS’ infrastructure to accelerate its AI training.

• Amazon revealed the new AWS Education Equity Initiative, which includes a commitment of up to $100 million in cloud credits to help underserved and underrepresented communities.

• AWS also announced a new strategic partnership with Orbital Materials to enhance its data center decarbonization and efficiency efforts.

• AWS announced a new Buy with AWS button specifically for cloud software partners to embed on their sites for customers to pay.

• The company is also launching new tools that help tackle AI hallucinations and combat cybersecurity threats.

• Amazon’s new Data Transfer Terminal comprises of devices set at physical locations, which will enable users to plug in their storage devices to upload data to the AWS cloud.

What do you think about these updates?

Let us know in the comments below!