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Happy New Year! We are witnessing technology augment human ingenuity in inspiring ways. In the coming years, using technology for positive impact will redefine the way we think about success. Amazon CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels, offers five forward-looking tech predictions for 2025, and beyond:
- The workforce of tomorrow is mission-driven
- A new era of energy efficiency drives innovation
- Technology tips the scales in the discovery of truth
- Open data drives decentralized disaster preparedness
- Intention-driven consumer technology takes hold
Download the Werner Vogels’ Tech Predictions for 2025 and Beyond ebook, or read Werner’s All Things Distributed blog to learn more about how these technological trends are shaping our world and paving the way for a more innovative, efficient, and purposeful future.
AWS re:Invent 2025 videos and re:Caps
If you’re looking to catch up on re:Invent announcements or delve deeper into the latest AWS innovations, you have several options available:
Launches from the last few weeks
Since our last week in review on December 16, 2024, I’d like to highlight some launches from year end, as well as from last week:
Availability of Llama 3.3 70B in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and in Amazon Bedrock – Meta’s Llama 3.3 70B represents a significant advancement in model efficiency and performance optimization. Llama 3.3 70B is a text-only instruction-tuned model that provides enhanced performance relative to Llama 3.1 70B and Llama 3.2 90B, when used for text-only applications. You can now use the model in both Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, as well as Amazon Bedrock.
Availability of Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large in Amazon Bedrock – Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large by Stability AI is the most powerful model in the Stable Diffusion family at 8.1 billion parameters trained on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod. You can now use Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large in Amazon Bedrock to generate high-quality images from text descriptions.
New Amazon Kinesis source connector for Apache Flink – The Apache Flink community has released version 5.0.0 of AWS services connectors, an AWS open source contribution. This release introduces the Kinesis Streams Source, a new connector for reading data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, replacing the previous Kinesis Consumer.
Support of AWS Global Accelerator in Amazon WorkSpaces Personal – Amazon WorkSpaces Personal now integrates with AWS Global Accelerator (AGA) to enhance WorkSpaces connection performance by optimizing streaming traffic through the AWS Global Network and edge locations. This feature particularly benefits customers whose end users connect to WorkSpaces across long distances. You can enable the AGA feature at either the WorkSpaces directory level or for individual WorkSpaces running Amazon DCV protocol.
New resource insights in AWS Resource Explorer – With the enhanced Resource Explorer experience, relevant data and insights from multiple AWS services is centralized for supported resource types. You can use the new features to take actions on resources directly from the Resource Explorer console, such as manage tags, add resources to applications, and get additional information about a resource with Amazon Q.
General availability of custom billing view in AWS Billing and Cost Management – Custom billing view allows you to provide application and business unit owners access to relevant cost management data across multiple AWS accounts using a single view in AWS Cost Explorer without granting access to the AWS management account. You can create filtered views of cost management data based on cost allocation tags or specific AWS accounts.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.
Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:
AWS at CES 2025 (January 7-10) – AWS will be representing some of the latest cloud services and solutions that are purpose built for the automotive, mobility, transportation, and manufacturing industries. Join us to learn about the latest cloud capabilities across generative AI, software define vehicles, product engineering, sustainability, new digital customer experiences, connected mobility, autonomous driving, and so much more, in Amazon Experience Area.
AWS at NRF 2025 (January 12-14) – Join AWS at the retail’s big show to see generative AI and cutting-edge technologies in action. Listen to innovative big ideas sessions, curated TechTalks, and experience the latest in retail trends, technologies, and more.
Amazon QuickSight Learning Series – Kick off your 2025 by supercharging your data skills. Join the online Learning Series in January to learn about the cutting-edge features of Amazon QuickSight unveiled at re:Invent 2024.
You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.
That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
–Prasad
This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!
