After a bit of a drop in announced changes in September AWS bounced back strongly in October with over 300 updates. There were a number of updates again related to Machine Learning and AI supporting services. Additionally Quicksight and OpenSearch had a number of updates which should help with managing data reporting and visualization. There were a large number of regional expansions with services being extended into 64 additional regions.
At 317 updates this month there is a lot to digest for October, and with re:Invent happening now you can bet that there will be a lot more next month.
October by the Numbers
Let’s start with some high-level numbers around updates that occurred in October.
Total Updates: 317
Total Services With Feature Updates: 79
Average Daily Updates: 10
Average Updates Per Service: 3
Regional Service Expansions: 64
The following graph shows a breakdown of how many announcements AWS has made per month this year, and a projection for the balance of the year. It's almost guaranteed that November will be low with the fact that re:Invent is happening.
Services Specifics
Next let's take a look at the service updates that were released this month. The following are the top 5 services that received updates in October 2023:
Amazon EC2 13
Amazon OpenSearch Service 12
Amazon SageMaker 8
Amazon RDS 8
Amazon Aurora 7
Amazon released a couple of new services during October as follows:
Amazon DataZone: Allows for large scale data management, analysis, and governance across organizational boundaries.
EMR and EKS Interactive Endpoints: This addition to the EMR and EKS ecosystem now allows for interaction runs of Map Reduce structure from EMR studio by allowing interactive integration with the EMR resources.
Additionally the AWS Wickr service gained FedRamp compliance during the month.
Some services get more attention each month than others. The following graph shows a count of updates per service during October.
Notable Service Updates
When reviewing the October updates, the following items stood out to us as notable and worth calling out based on their potential to improve how AWS customers utilize these services.
The SAM CLI now supports sending test events to Lambda in local development which should speed up testing and validation of serverless development
Amazon QuickSight can now include predictive analytics in SageMaker Canvas allowing ML models to be more tightly integrated into QuickSight
Amazon QuickSight now supports accessing Redshift using IAM roles for security
Amazon CloudWatch now provides out-of-the-box alarm recommendations for AWS services that are in use within an account
Amazon Redshift is now supported as integration into Visual Studio Code to simplify development work that involves that data storage solution
AWS Glue for Apache Spark can now natively connect to Google BigQuery allow for efficient reading and writing of data
Amazon RDS support Optimized Writes and can be enabled in as quickly as a minute through the use of Blue/Green deployments for RDS. This can improve writes up to 2x throughout for RDS databases
AWS CodePipeline now allows for parameterized build pipelines which allows for pipeline reuse across applications with similar build features through the use of input parameters
Amazon S3 Object Lambda can now integrate to Athena which allows for modifying the data as it is returned to your application through the implementation of code in the S3 GET, HEAD, and LIST API requests
Conclusions
With 371 updates happening in October there weren’t a lot of obvious themes in the changes. Many of the changes were focused around data integration and access improvements between services. Many of the service changes seem to be preparations for new updates and service improvements that are going to be announced during re:Invent. Overall, this month includes a number of regional expansions and tighter service integrations. We are looking forward to how AWS will build on these changes in November with re:Invent updates coming.
Complete Announcement List
October Announcements