AWS unveils 10 new AI, GenAI, security and storage offerings at re:Invent 2024. Here are the new solutions every AWS partner needs to know about.

Amazon Web Services’ innovation engine is on fire as the $110 billion cloud giant unveiled 10 new products and offerings at AWS re:Invent 2024, including new generative AI and cybersecurity solutions.

New launches at AWS re:Invent this week included AWS Security Incident Response, a revamped Amazon Connect contact center portfolio, new Amazon Q integrations with Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, as well as new Amazon EC2 storage instances.

The Seattle-based company generated a record $27.5 billion in revenue during its third quarter 2024, representing a 19 percent sales increase year over year. AWS is the global cloud market leader, owning 31 percent share of the worldwide enterprise cloud infrastructure services market, followed by Microsoft at 20 percent share and Google Cloud at 12 percent share.

[Related: CEO Matt Garman: Why Partners Are Picking AWS Vs. Microsoft And Google Cloud]

AWS re:Invent 2024

Tens of thousands of AWS customers, developers, channel partners and IT leaders flocked to Las Vegas this week for the company’s popular AWS re:Invent conference that runs from Dec. 2 to Dec. 6.

In a recent interview with CRN, AWS CEO Matt Garman said a partner-centric strategy is how AWS can truly scale on a worldwide basis, particularly in the AI era.

“Generative AI is going to reshape almost every single industry and every single business,” Garman told CRN. “As we continue to expand globally, we lean more and more on our global and regional channel partners to help us because they’re the ones that oftentimes know the customers best.”

CRN breaks down 10 of the most important new AWS product launches and news announcements made at AWS re:Invent 2024 this week, thus far, that every channel partner, investor and customer needs to know about.

AWS Security Incident Response Service

AWS announced a new service designed to help organizations manage security events quickly and effectively: AWS Security Incident Response.

“The service is purpose-built to help customers prepare for, respond to, and recover from various security events, including account takeovers, data breaches, and ransomware attacks,” said Betty Zheng, senior developer advocate for AWS in a blog post.

Security Incident Response automates the triage and investigation of security findings from Amazon GuardDuty and integrated third-party threat detection tools through AWS Security Hub. It facilitates communication and coordination and provides 24/7 access to security experts from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) who can assist during security events.

The cybersecurity service simplifies incident response by offering preconfigured notification rules and permission settings that can be extended to both internal and external stakeholders, including third-party security providers.

AWS’ new service aims to provide customers with more comprehensive support across the phases of incident response lifecycle, from preparation to detection, analysis, and recovery.

Amazon Bedrock New RAG And LLM Capabilities

Amazon’s flagship AI platform, Bedrock, now supports RAG evaluation.

Customers can now run an automatic knowledge base evaluation to assess and optimize RAG applications using Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases. The evaluation proves uses a LLM to compute the metrics for the evaluation. With RAG evaluations, users can compare different configurations and tune their settings to get the correct results.

Additionally, Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation now includes what the company dubs, LLM-as-a-judge.

With LLM-as-a-judge, users can now perform tests and evaluate other models with humanlike quality at a fraction of the cost and time of running human evaluations, according to Danilo Poccia, chief evangelist at AWS, in a blog post.

Bedrock’s new evaluations assess multiple quality dimensions including correctness, helpfulness, and responsible AI criteria such as answer refusal and harmfulness. The evaluation results provide natural language explanations for each score in the output and on console, and the scores are normalized from 0 to 1 for ease of interpretability.

Amazon Connect Revamped With GenAI And Security

Amazon popular cloud contact center portfolio, Connect, is getting revamped with a new set of AI and security features.

At re:Invent, AWS introduced new features to Amazon Connect such as generative AI–powered customer segmentation for targeted campaigns; native WhatsApp Business messaging for omnichannel support; secure collection of sensitive customer data in chat interactions; simplified conversational AI bot management in the Amazon Connect interface; and new enhancements to Amazon Q in Connect.

Amazon Connect also added new analytics capabilities through Amazon Connect Contact Lens to help optimize bot performance and contact center operations.

On the GenAI front, Connect users can now create customer segments using conversational prompts to allow businesses to create precise customer segments using natural language descriptions. Users can now create, edit and management AI bots powered by Amazon Lex directly within the Connect web interface.

New Amazon Q Business Extensions And Integrations

Amazon Q is AWS’ flagship generative AI assistant.

AWS unveiled a new capability that now allows users to access Amazon Q assistant within popular web browsers—including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox—as well as productivity tools like Cisco Slack and Microsoft Teams.

This helps users save time, and complete work and tasks more efficiently without having to leave their preferred applications.

“Now, you can use Amazon Q Business directly from your web browser and other supported messaging and collaboration applications,” said Donnie Prakoso, principal developer advocate at AWS in a blog post. “For example, you can effortlessly analyze and summarize content, get explanations on complex topics, or create meeting summaries without switching between applications.”

New Storage Optimized Amazon EC2 I8g Instances

AWS launched its new Amazon EC2 I8g instances, now generally available.

AWS’ new storage optimized instance provides the highest real-time storage performance among storage-optimized EC2 instances with the third generation of AWS Nitro SSDs and AWS Graviton4 processors.

The EC2 I8g instances are the first instance type to use third-generation AWS Nitro SSDs. These instances offer up to 96 vCPUs, 768 GiB of memory, and 22.5 TB of storage to deliver more compute and storage choices compared with I4g instances.

AWS said Graviton4 processors offer users enhanced security by fully encrypting all high-speed physical hardware interfaces.

Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection

AWS has injected advanced AI and machine learning threat detection capabilities for users’ applications, workloads, and data inside Amazon GuardDuty.

GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection employs sophisticated AI and ML to identify both known and previously unknown attack sequences, while introducing new attack sequence findings and improves actionability for existing detections in areas such as credential exfiltration, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration.

The new capabilities correlate security signals to identify active attack sequences in an AWS environment. These sequences can include multiple steps taken by an adversary, such as privilege discovery, API manipulation, persistence activities, and data exfiltration.

“These detections are represented as attack sequence findings, a new type of GuardDuty finding with critical severity,” said Esra Kayabali, senior solutions architect for AWS in a blog post. “Previously, GuardDuty had never used critical severity, reserving this level for findings with the utmost confidence and urgency.”

These new findings introduce critical severity and include a natural language summary of the threat’s nature and significance, observed activities mapped to tactics and techniques from the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and prescriptive remediation recommendations based on AWS best practices.

Amazon FSx Intelligent-Tiering

Amazon’s new FSx Intelligent-Tiering storage class is now available for use with Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file systems.

Delivering network-attached storage (NAS) capabilities with automatic data tiering Amazon FSx Intelligent-Tiering offers high performance up to 400K IOPS, 20 GB/s throughput, and integration with AWS services.

Customer data moves between three storage tiers—Frequent Access, Infrequent Access, and Archive—with no effort needed by the user. Customers get automatic cost savings with no upfront costs or commitments.

Regardless of the storage tier, data is stored across multiple AWS Availability Zones for redundancy and availability.

AWS said the new storage class is priced 85 percent lower than the existing SSD storage class and 20 percent lower than traditional HDD-based deployments on-premises, and brings full elasticity and intelligent tiering to NAS data sets.

Amazon OpenSearch Services Integrates With Amazon Security Lake

AWS has integrated its Amazon OpenSearch Servies with Amazon Security Lake, now generally available.

This integration lets customers efficiently search, analyze, and gain actionable insights from their security data, streamlining complex data engineering requirements and unlocking the full potential of security data.

“It’s a new way to in-place query and analyze logs in Security Lake that minimizes the need to duplicate data and reduces the operational overhead of managing custom data pipelines. You can directly query your Security Lake data, saving the costs of moving data,: said Channy Yun, principal developer advocate for AWS, in a blog post.

With OpenSearch Service zero-ETL integration with Security Lake, users can use analytics capabilities of OpenSearch Dashboards to query and visualize their data in Security Lake. Customers can also analyze multiple data sources within a single tool and a single schema, the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), to help with threat-hunting and investigation scenarios.

Amazon Bedrock PartyRock Revamped; Free Daily Usage

AWS PartyRock is an intuitive generative AI app-building playground inside Amazon Bedrock that lets users create GenAI applications by simply describing the app they want to build without needing to write any code.

AWS said due to customer demand, starting in 2025, all users will have a recurring free daily usage granted, with no credit card required.

Additionally, PartyRock users can now explore hundreds of thousands of applications in the PartyRock catalog to find the right app for use cases by category or functionality. Relevant and popular apps are highlighted to showcase the creativity of the community.

Lastly, users can now upload and process multiple documents simultaneously, making it easier to build apps that handle batch processing, document comparison, or content aggregation.

New Storage Browser For Amazon S3

AWS introduced Storage Browser for Amazon S3, a new open source interface component that lets users add their web applications to enable them to interact with their data stored in Amazon S3.

With this frontend component, authorized end users can browse, upload, download, copy, and delete data from Amazon S3 based on their specific permissions that is controlled using AWS identity and security services or custom managed solutions.

“Storage Browser for S3 eases the strain on developers looking to provide end users with access to data in S3, and it is designed so that end users—such as customers, partners, and employees—can efficiently work with data regardless of their familiarity with Amazon S3 or AWS,” said Matheus Guimaraes, senior developer advocate for AWS in a blog post.

Additionally, developers can customize the look and feel of the Storage Browser interface to align with their application’s design.