Here are highlights of the event so far: 

AWS open sources Cedar policy language and SDK  

The Cedar language enables you to set permissions in your applications using easy-to-understand policies. By making use of Cedar, application teams can decouple access control from application logic. 

It supports role-based access control and attribute-based access control, and was developed using verification-guided development, which ensures Cedar is correct and secure. 

The language’s SDKs are also being made available, which include libraries for creating and evaluating policies. 

AWS hopes that by open sourcing the language, they can foster more innovation in the industry around fine-grained access management and make access control more accessible to all. 

AWS also announces new open-source fuzzing framework

According to AWS, current fuzzing practices require large codebases to be refactored in order to work properly. The new framework, Snapchange, allows targets to undergo fuzz testing with minimal modifications.

Built in Rust, Snapchange enables developers to build fuzzers that replay snapshots of physical memory in a KVM virtual machine.

SPDX Release Candidate 3.0 now available

Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) is an open source standard for communicating the information in a bill of materials. It is currently hosted by the Linux Foundation. 

In RC 3.0, there are now six unique profiles that are designed for popular use cases, with the goal being that SPDX better meets the needs of the industry. The profiles were created based on community input and include specifications for security, licensing, AI, datasets, and software packaging build processes. 

According to the Linux Foundation, the United States’ executive order on cybersecurity and Europe’s Cyber Resiliency Act served as inspiration for the need to have an international standard for supply chain security, which SPDX hopes to be. 

OpenSSF gets major funding from Google and Microsoft, new members

Through its Alpha-Omega Project, OpenSSF has recently received $2.5 million from Google and $2.5 million from Microsoft. 

OpenSSF also announced that Hitachi, Lockheed Martin, Salesforce, and SAP have become general members.

The foundation also announced that Omkhar Arasaratnam will be its new general manager and Brian Behlendorf will be chief technology officer. 

Meta joins the OpenJS Foundation

The OpenJS Foundation provides support for the open source JavaScript community. With Meta joining the foundation as a Gold Member, they will be able to contribute and advocate in the community further.

Meta had already been highly involved with the open source JavaScript community, through its projects React, Jest, and Flow. Jest is an open source testing framework, which Meta contributed to the OpenJS Foundation last year. 

“The broader JavaScript ecosystem benefits from Meta becoming an OpenJS Foundation member. In fact, we’ve already been working together in multiple different ways, and this makes official what has already been a great relationship,” said Shayne Boyer, OpenJS Foundation Board Director. “

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The tool is especially useful for creating code for routine and time-consuming tasks, and working with unfamiliar APIs or SDKs and it makes correct and effective use of AWS APIs and common coding scenarios such as reading and writing files, image processing, writing unit tests, and more. 

“Helping to keep developers in their flow is increasingly important as, facing increasing time pressure to get their work done, developers are often forced to break that flow to turn to an internet search, sites such as StackOverflow, or their colleagues for help in completing tasks,” Steve Roberts, a senior developer advocate focused on .NET and PowerShell development on AWS. “Instead, CodeWhisperer meets developers where they are most productive, providing recommendations in real time as they write code or comments in their IDE.” 

On the security front, CodeWhisperer filters out code suggestions that might be considered biased or unfair, and it can filter or flag code suggestions that may resemble particular open-source training data. The AI companion includes security scanning for finding and suggesting remediations for hard-to-find vulnerabilities. 

It can be used with Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript,  C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala. 

CodeWhisperer offers a professional tier that adds administration features like SSO and IAM Identity Center. There is also an Individual tier that is free to use for all developers.

Additional details are available here. 

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The partnership is geared at assisting businesses in providing users with accelerated, tailored, and conversational experiences spanning every channel while also working to enhance support operations with AI tools, bots, and analytics.

According to the companies, by improving customer experience, businesses can remain competitive, gain customer loyalty, and adapt to the conditions of the market as it changes and evolves. 

“Zendesk has been both a member of the AWS Partner Network and a customer for many years, leveraging our cloud services to create innovative customer and employee experience solutions for customers,” said Ruba Borno, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances at AWS. “This strategic collaboration agreement with Zendesk allows companies to personalize experiences using data, taking customer experiences to the next level and helping businesses automate and scale their customer service operations on the cloud.”

The agreement brings Zendesk Suite’s capabilities to AWS and AWS Marketplace. This provides users with the ability to create enterprise-grade customer service programs and chatbots on cloud architecture, build conversational experiences across customer channels and devices, and provide multi-channel support in Zendesk Sunshine Conversations, Amazon Connect, and AWS Contact Center Intelligence.

Furthermore, the companies stated that productivity will be improved due to the AI-based tools that have been built to help agents respond to and mitigate issues quickly through self-service options, time-saving routing, and AI-powered workflows.

To learn more, visit the website. 

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According to Amazon, there are many reasons why different parties would need to do this. For example, in marketing, brands, publishers, and partners need to analyze data stored in many different channels in order to improve their campaigns. However, they also want to protect their customer’s sensitive data and prevent raw data from being shared.

Clean rooms are the answer to this problem, but they can be difficult to set up, requiring complicated privacy controls, specialized tools to protect collaborator data, and customization of analytics tools, which can take months. This complexity just increases with each new collaborator that is added. 

With AWS Clean Rooms, they will be a bit easier to set up and more approachable for more companies to utilize. According to Amazon, it only takes a few minutes to set up an AWS Clean Room.

AWS Clean Rooms can be used for advertising campaigns, investment decisions, clinical research, and more. 

It includes built-in controls that can be customized to restrict the queries that are run on each participant in the clean room. 

One of the query controls is analysis rules, of which there are two types: aggregation analysis rules and list analysis rules. Aggregation analysis rules allow aggregation of data without revealing user-level information. List analysis rules enable queries that will output user-level attribute analysis of overlap between a customer’s table and the tables of the member who can run a query. 

“Analysis rules allow collaboration members to restrict the types of queries that can be performed against their datasets and the usable output of the query results,” Donnie Prakoso, senior developer advocate at AWS, wrote in a blog post. 

Another control in AWS Clean Rooms is query logging, which enables collaborators to receive logs of queries that their data is part of. 

The data can also be encrypted using advanced cryptographic techniques to help further preserve privacy.

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With this release, users gain heightened security standards with new preconfigured policies that simplify the process of implementing common industry guidelines. These policies can be configured either at launch time or run time.

Amazon Linux 2023 is also intended to make it easier for users to plan and manage the life cycle of their operating systems, with a new major version released every two years. Throughout those two years, each major release will also receive an update every three months, including security updates, bug fixes, and new features.

AWS also stated that each major version will come with five years of long-term support. This is made up of the initial two years as well as a three-year maintenance period.

Lastly, Amazon Linux brings users deterministic updates through versioned repositories. The distribution locks to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository, providing users with improved control over how and when updates are implemented. 

With this, a “dnf update” command won’t update installed packages automatically, offering users more control over their updates.

“Deterministic updates also promote usage of immutable infrastructure, where no infrastructure is updated after deployment,” the team at AWS wrote in a blog post. “When an update is required, you update your infrastructure as code scripts and redeploy a new infrastructure. Of course, if you really want to update your distribution in place, you can point dnf to an updated package repository and update your machine as you do today.”

To get started with Amazon Linux 2023, use the EC2 run-instances API, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the AWS Management Console, and one of the four Amazon Linux 2023 AMIs provided by the company.

To learn more, read the blog post.

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Check here for recaps from the previous days: 

Day 1 

Day 2

Here are the latest updates from the event: 

Amazon previews CodeCatalyst

CodeCatalyst is a platform for software developers to plan, develop, collaborate on, build, and deliver applications on AWS. 

According to Amazon, the goal of this new platform is to cut down on friction throughout the development life cycle by providing a unified set of tools to do the above. 

Key features that will be included in the platform are blueprints to set up project resources, cloud-based development environments, issue management, automated build and release pipelines, dashboards, and unified search. 

AWS Step Functions now offers a distributed map

Step Functions is a visual workflow service for developers, and the new map will extend support for large-scale parallel workloads. The existing map state was limited to 40 parallel iterations, which made it challenging to process workloads with thousands of items. 

Now with the distributed map, users will be able to iterate over millions of objects, like logs, images, or .csv files. It can launch up to 10,000 parallel workflows, which is much higher than the concurrency most other AWS services offer, Amazon explained. 

AWS Application Composer available as a preview

The new tool is intended to enable easy creation of serverless applications. It will allow developers to drag and drop AWS services into an application architecture. 

It handles the infrastructure as code definitions and provides integration configuration for the services, enabling developers to focus more of their attention on developing. 

It is currently in preview, and available for free in a number of AWS regions, such as US East (both Ohio and North Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt and Ireland). 

Amazon EventBridge Pipes 

This new offering will allow developers to create point-to-point integrations between event producers and consumers when building event-driven applications. This removes the need to write glue code. 

While the simplest pipe option is just a source and target, there is also an optional filtering step, which will allow you to restrict the events that flow in, and an optional enrichment step to transform events before they reach the target.

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The latest highlights from the event include: 

Amazon previews OpenSearch Serverless

This new offering will enable customers to do analytics on their data without having to manage any of the underlying infrastructure. The platform will automatically provision and scale underlying resources for the user. 

A benefit of the platform is that users don’t even have to take into account factors like frequency and complexity of queries, or the volume of data, as these can be difficult to predict in advance. 

AWS DataZone announced

The new solution will make it easy to catalog, discover, share, and govern data that is stored across AWS, on-premises, or third-party sources. 

It uses machine learning to suggest metadata for datasets and improve over time by training on the customer’s data taxonomy and preferences. 

It also enables administrators to set the appropriate privilege levels for users to ensure that engineers, data scientists, product managers, analysts, and business users can access the data they need. 

Integrations in Amazon Aurora with Amazon Redshift and Apache Spark

These two new integrations make it easier for customers to analyze their data across different storage locations, without having to move that data to do so. Typically, a user would need to perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) on that data. 

Amazon is trying to move its customers toward a zero-ETL future, and these new capabilities help bring them a step closer to that. 

“The vastness and complexity of data that customers manage today means they cannot analyze and explore it with a single technology or even a small set of tools. Many of our customers rely on multiple AWS database and analytics services to extract value from their data, and ensuring they have access to the right tool for the job is important to their success,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS. “The new capabilities announced today help us move customers toward a zero-ETL future on AWS, reducing the need to manually move or transform data between services. By eliminating ETL and other data movement tasks for our customers, we are freeing them to focus on analyzing data and driving new insights for their business—regardless of the size and complexity of their organization and data.”

Five new capabilities added to Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is another business intelligence tool that can be used for analytics at scale. Amazon QuickSight Q, which is a natural language querying capability, now offers support for asking “why” questions, such as “why did sales increase last month?” Amazon QuickSight Q also now automatically infers and adds semantic information to data. This significantly reduces the amount of time that is spent on data preparation. 

Reporting capabilities have also been updated with the addition of paginated reports. These reports offer a formatted summary of data to share critical information. According to Amazon, with other solutions companies need to maintain multiple systems to produce paginated reports: one for analyzing the data and another for producing reports. 

 Billion-row support has been added to the calculation engine SPICE, which will allow teams to analyze larger datasets. 

And finally, QuickSight now enables customers to create, manage, and edit business intelligence assets through an API. This will allow them to accelerate migrations from legacy systems. 

Amazon Security Lake available in preview

This new service provides a centralized location for storing security data to enable customers to act on insights from that data faster.

It includes customizable data retention settings for data throughout its life cycle. It converts incoming data into the Apache Parquet format, then conforms it to the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework standard. 

According to Amazon, most companies rely on log and event data from multiple sources, which must then be converted to a consistent format before it can be analyzed. Customers often rely on various solutions to do these analyses, which leads to duplicate data, which is time consuming and costly. 

“Amazon Security Lake lets customers of all sizes securely set up a security data lake with just a few clicks to aggregate logs and event data from dozens of sources, normalize it to conform with the OCSF standard, and make it more broadly usable so customers can take action quickly using their security tools of choice. With Amazon Security Lake, customers get superior visibility and control, with help from the largest ecosystem of security partners and solutions,” said Jon Ramsey, vice president for Security Services at AWS.

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AWS Glue 4.0 released

The new version of the scalable serverless tool built to accelerate the development and execution of data integration and ETL workloads received updated engines, support for additional data formats, Ray support, and more. 

Glue 4.0 includes Python 3.10 and Apache Spark 3.3.0. The Spark version includes low-level runtime filtering, improved error messages, and additional built-in functions.

It also adds native support for the Cloud Shuffle Plugin so that users can scale their disk usage and the new Adaptive Query Execution can help optimize queries. 

Support for Pandas, the open-source data analysis and manipulation tool as well as new data formats such as Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg, and Delta Lake are now supported. 

Amazon CodeWhisperer preview gets many enhancements

The ML-powered service that helps improve developer productivity by generating code recommendations now includes Single Sign-On authentication for AWS administrators.

With this improvement, they can easily integrate CodeWhisperer with their existing workforce identity solutions, provide access to users and groups and configure organization-wide settings. 

Users who don’t have AWS accounts can use CodeWhisperer with their personal email using AWS Builder ID.

Language support has been expanded to C# and TypeScript projects in addition to Python, Java and JavaScript.

Amazon ECS Service Connect enables easy communication between microservices

The new capability provides an easy network setup and seamless service communication deployed across multiple ECS clusters and virtual private clouds.

Users can refer and connect their services with logical names on AWS Cloud Map, which can then automatically distribute traffic between ECS tasks. 

ECS Service Connect is fully supported in AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, AWS Copilot, and AWS Proton for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, and monitoring of services.

AWS Config rules now support proactive compliance

Proactive mode with AWS Config enables users to run rules at any time before provisioning to save time on implementing custom pre-deployment validations. 

“When implementing a new service or a new functionality, development teams can run rules in proactive mode as part of their continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to identify noncompliant resources,” Danilo Poccia, chief evangelist at AWS wrote in a post. 

Users can also employ AWS CloudFormation Guard in deployment pipelines to check for compliance proactively.

The full list of releases from today’s AWS re:Invent is available here. 

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Users are also enabled to provide rich insights for their own end-users where they are most needed, without server or software setup or any infrastructure management. 

Fine-Grained Visual Embedding allows developers and ISVs to embed any visuals from dashboards into their own applications using APIs. Enterprises can embed visuals into their sites using 1-Click Embedding. Finally, it offers end-users an integrated experience to access several key data visuals in order to access insights. 

The embedded visuals are updated automatically when the source data changes or whenever the visual is updated. Additionally, embedded visuals scale automatically without needing to manage servers and are optimized for high performance even on crowded pages.

Users can use Fine-Grained Visual Embedding either with 1-Click Embedding or QuickSight APIs in order to generate the embedded URL.

The 1-Click embedding feature simplifies the process for nontechnical users to generate embed code that can then be inserted directly into internal portals or public sites.

By utilizing APIs, ISVs and developers can embed visuals into their applications with secure data access from row-level security. This allows users the ability to access only their own data. 

For more detailed information, visit the documentation page.

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Cloudscape consists of a set of guidelines to create web applications, along with the design resources and front-end components to streamline implementation.

AWS created it in 2016 to improve the user experience across AWS web applications and has used it in the AWS Management Console. 

“We are releasing Cloudscape as open source so that anyone building cloud products can benefit from our design system, and also join a community of designers and developers who continually improve it. Whether you’re building a product that extends the AWS Management Console, designing a user interface for a hybrid cloud management system, or setting up an on-premises solution that uses AWS, Cloudscape offers a solid base of 60+ components, 30+ pattern guidelines, and 20+ demos to make your work easier,” AWS wrote in a post. 

Cloudscape supports a number of visual modes, enables accessibility, facilitates responsive design, and offers broad browser coverage. This means that services that are build using the tool are designed for all customers, regardless of browser, screen size, or ability, Amazon explained.

Designers can use the available visual foundation, UX guidelines, and Figma resources to reduce the time needed to get from project start to wireframe and prototype. 

According to Amazon, developers can quickly integrate to the system and just start developing. In addition, they can utilize React components to quickly create high-quality interfaces.

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