It’s AWS Summit season! Free events are now rolling out worldwide, bringing our cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn. Whether you prefer joining us online or in-person, these gatherings offer valuable opportunities to expand your AWS knowledge. I’ll be attending the AWS Amsterdam Summit and would love to meet you—if you’re planning to be there, please stop by to say hello! Visit the AWS Summit website today to find events in your area, sign up for registration alerts, and reserve your spot at an AWS Summit near you.

Speaking of AWS news, let’s look at last week’s new announcements.

Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention.

AWS WAF integration with AWS Amplify Hosting now generally available – You can now directly attach AWS WAF to your AWS Amplify applications through a one-click integration in the Amplify console or using infrastructure as code (IaC). This integration provides access to the full range of AWS WAF capabilities, including managed rules that protect against common web exploits like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). You can also create custom rules based on your application needs, implement rate-based rules to protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by limiting request rates from IP addresses, and configure geo-blocking to restrict access from specific countries. Firewall support is available in all AWS Regions in which Amplify Hosting operates.

Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import introduces real-time cost transparency – If you’re using Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import to run your customized foundation models (FMs), you can now access full transparency into compute resources and calculate inference costs in real time. Before model invocation, you can view the minimum compute resources (custom model units or CMUs) required through both the Amazon Bedrock console and Amazon Bedrock APIs. As models scale to handle increased traffic, Amazon CloudWatch metrics provide real-time visibility into total CMUs used, enabling better cost control through near-instant visibility. This helps you make on-the-fly model configuration changes to optimize costs. The feature is available in all Regions where Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import is supported, with additional details available in Calculate the cost of running a custom model in the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.

Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports Amazon OpenSearch Managed Cluster for vector storage – Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases securely connects FMs to company data sources for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), delivering more relevant and accurate responses. With this launch, you can use Amazon OpenSearch Managed Cluster as a vector database while using the full suite of Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases features. This integration expands the list of supported vector databases, which already includes Amazon OpenSearch Serverless, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Neptune Analytics, Pinecone, MongoDB Atlas, and Redis. The native integration with vector databases helps mitigate the need to build custom data source integrations. This feature is now generally available in all existing Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and OpenSearch Service Regions.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announces the general availability of industry-leading image content filters – This new capability offers industry-leading text and image content safeguards that help you block up to 88% of harmful multimodal content without building custom safeguards or relying on error-prone manual content moderation. Image content filters can be applied across all categories within the content filter policy including hate, insults, sexual, violence, misconduct, and prompt attacks. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides configurable safeguards to detect and block harmful content and prompt attacks, define topics to deny and disallow specific topics, redact personally identifiable information (PII) such as personal data, and block specific words. It also provides contextual grounding checks to detect and block model hallucinations and to identify the relevance of model responses and claims, and to identify, correct, and explain factual claims in model responses using Automated Reasoning checks. This capability is generally available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions. To learn more, visit Amazon Bedrock Guardrails image content filters provide industry-leading safeguards in the AWS Machine Learning Blog and Stop harmful content in models using Amazon Bedrock Guardrails in the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.

Scenarios capability now generally available for Amazon Q in QuickSight – This capability guides you through data analysis by uncovering hidden trends, making recommendations for your business, and intelligently suggesting next steps for deeper exploration using natural language interactions. Now you can explore past trends, forecast future scenarios, and model solutions without needing specialized skill, analyst support, or manual manipulation of data in spreadsheets. With its intuitive interface and step-by-step guidance, the scenarios capability of Amazon Q in QuickSight helps you perform complex data analysis up to 10x faster than spreadsheets. Whether you’re optimizing marketing budgets, streamlining supply chains, or analyzing investments, Amazon Q makes advanced data analysis accessible so you can make data-driven decisions across your organization. This capability is accessible from any Amazon QuickSight dashboard, so you can move seamlessly from visualizing data to asking what-if questions and comparing alternatives. Previous analyses can be easily modified, extended, and reused, helping you quickly adapt to changing business needs.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

We launched existing services and instance types in additional Regions:

• Amazon DataZone is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Europe (Paris) AWS Regions – Amazon DataZone is a fully managed data management service to catalog, discover, analyze, share, and govern data between data producers and consumers in your organization.
• The next generation of Amazon SageMaker is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Europe (Paris) AWS Regions – Amazon SageMaker is the center for all your data, analytics, and AI. SageMaker Unified Studio provides a single development environment that consolidates AWS analytics and AI/ML tools.
• Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 is now available in Mexico (Central) and Asia Pacific (Thailand) AWS Regions – Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 makes data in your Amazon Redshift data warehouse and data lake more accessible with a web-based tool for SQL users such as data analysts, data scientists, and database developers.
• Amazon Keyspaces expands Multi-Region Replication to support all AWS Regions – Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, highly available, managed Cassandra-compatible database service that helps you run your Cassandra workloads on AWS using existing application code and developer tools.
• AWS Network Firewall is now available in the Asia Pacific (Thailand) and Mexico (Central) AWS Regions – AWS Network Firewall is a managed firewall service that automatically scales with traffic, requires no infrastructure maintenance, and integrates with AWS Firewall Manager for centralized policy control across AWS accounts.
• Amazon CloudWatch RUM is now generally available in Israel (Tel Aviv) and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Regions – CloudWatch RUM monitors web applications by collecting real-time client-side performance data and providing dashboards that show end-user experience metrics, including page load anomalies, core web vitals, and errors across different geolocations, browsers, and devices.
• Amazon VPC IP Address Manager is now available in Asia Pacific (Thailand) and Mexico (Central) AWS Regions – Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) IP Address Manager (Amazon VPC IPAM) makes it easier to plan, track, and monitor IP addresses for AWS workloads, helping you organize addresses based on routing and security needs and set simple business rules to govern IP address assignments.
• Amazon Q Business now available in Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Region – Amazon Q Business is the most capable generative AI–powered assistant for finding information, gaining insight, and taking action at work. It can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems.
• Amazon EC2 P5en instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia) and Asia Pacific (Jakarta) AWS Regions – P5en instances feature 8 H200 GPUs with 1.7x memory size, paired with 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors and Gen5 PCIe for 4x CPU-GPU bandwidth. This helps improve collective communications performance for distributed training workloads such as deep learning, generative AI, real-time data processing, and high performance computing (HPC) applications.
• Amazon EC2 R8g instances now available in US West (N. California) AWS Region – These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPU (up to 48xlarge) and memory (up to 1.5 TB) than AWS Graviton3 based R7g instances. These instances are up to 30% faster for web applications, 40% faster for databases, and 45% faster for large Java applications compared to Graviton3 based R7g instances.
• Amazon EC2 C8g instances now available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Region – These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPUs and memory compared to Graviton3 based Amazon C7g instances. AWS Graviton4 processors are up to 40% faster for databases, 30% faster for web applications, and 45% faster for large Java applications than AWS Graviton3 processors.
• Amazon SageMaker AI is now available in Mexico (Central) and Asia Pacific (Thailand) AWS Regions – Amazon SageMaker AI is a fully managed platform that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly.
• Amazon ElastiCache now supports AWS PrivateLink in Asia Pacific (Jakarta) and Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) AWS Regions – AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises networks without exposing traffic to the public internet and securing your network traffic. To use AWS PrivateLink with Amazon ElastiCache, you create an interface VPC endpoint for Amazon ElastiCache in your VPC using the Amazon VPC console, AWS SDK, or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

Other AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events.

AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events here.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Esra

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

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The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Bedrock, Amazon QuickSight, AWS Amplify, and more (March 31, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, a single data and AI development environment where you can find and access all of the data in your organization and act on it using the best tool for the job across virtually any use case. Introduced as preview during AWS re:Invent 2024, my colleague, Antje, summarized it as:

SageMaker Unified Studio (preview) is a single data and AI development environment. It brings together functionality and tools from the range of standalone “studios,” query editors, and visual tools that we have today in Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA), and the existing SageMaker Studio.

Here’s a video to see Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio in action:

SageMaker Unified Studio breaks down silos in data and tools, giving data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, ML developers and other data practitioners a single development experience. This saves development time and simplifies access control management so data practitioners can focus on what really matters to them—building data products and AI applications.

This post focuses on several important announcements that we’re excited to share:

• New capabilities for Amazon Bedrock in SageMaker Unified Studio — The integration now supports new foundation models (FMs), including Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1, enables data sourcing from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) folders within projects for knowledge base creation, extends guardrail functionality to flows, and provides a streamlined user management interface for domain administrators to manage model governance across multiple Amazon Web Service (AWS) accounts.
• Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in SageMaker Unified Studio — Amazon Q Developer, the most capable generative AI assistant for software development, streamlines development in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio by providing natural language, conversational interfaces that simplify tasks like writing SQL queries, building ETL jobs, troubleshooting, and generating real-time code suggestions. 

To get started, go to the Amazon SageMaker console and create a SageMaker Unified Studio domain. To learn more, visit Create an Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio domain in the AWS documentation.

New capabilities for Amazon Bedrock in SageMaker Unified Studio
The capabilities of Amazon Bedrock within Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio offer a governed collaborative environment for developers to rapidly create and customize generative AI applications. This intuitive interface caters to developers of all skill levels, providing seamless access to the high-performance FMs offered in Amazon Bedrock and advanced customization tools for collaborative development of tailored generative AI applications.

Since the preview launch, several new FMs have become available in Amazon Bedrock and are fully integrated with SageMaker Unified Studio, including Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1. These models can be used for building generative AI apps and chatting in the playground in SageMaker Unified Studio.

Here’s how you can choose Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet on the model selection in your project.

You can also source data or documents from S3 folders within your project and select specific FMs when creating knowledge bases. 

During preview, we introduced Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to help you implement safeguards for your Amazon Bedrock application based on your use cases and responsible AI policies. Now, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails is extended to Amazon Bedrock Flows with this general availability release.

Additionally, we have streamlined generative AI setup for associated accounts with a new user management interface in SageMaker Unified Studio, making it straightforward for domain administrators to grant associated account admins access to model governance projects. This enhancement eliminates the need for command line operations, streamlining the process of configuring generative AI capabilities across multiple AWS accounts.

These new features eliminate barriers between data, tools, and builders in the generative AI development process. You and your team will gain a unified development experience by incorporating the powerful generative AI capabilities of Amazon Bedrock — all within the same workspace.

Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in SageMaker Unified Studio
Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, providing data professionals with generative AI–powered assistance across the entire data and AI development lifecycle.

Amazon Q Developer integrates with the full suite of AWS analytics and AI/ML tools and services within SageMaker Unified Studio, including data processing, SQL analytics, machine learning model development, and generative AI application development, to accelerate collaboration and help teams build data and AI products faster. To get started, you can select Amazon Q Developer icon.

For new users of SageMaker Unified Studio, Amazon Q Developer serves as an invaluable onboarding assistant. It can explain core concepts such as domains and projects, provide guidance on setting up environments, and answer your questions.

Amazon Q Developer helps you discover and understand data using powerful natural language interactions with SageMaker Catalog. What makes this implementation particularly powerful is how Amazon Q Developer combines broad knowledge of AWS analytics and AI/ML services with the user’s context to provide personalized guidance.

You can chat about your data assets through a conversational interface, asking questions such as “Show all payment related datasets” without needing to navigate complex metadata structures.

Amazon Q Developer offers SQL query generation through its integration with the built-in query editor available in SageMaker Unified Studio. Data professionals of varying skill levels can now express their analytical needs in natural language, receiving properly formatted SQL queries in return.

For example, you can ask, “Analyze payment method preferences by age group and region” and Amazon Q Developer will generate the appropriate SQL with proper joins across multiple tables.

Additionally, Amazon Q Developer is also available to assist with troubleshooting and generating real-time code suggestions in SageMaker Unified Studio Jupyter notebooks, as well as building ETL jobs.

Now available

• Availability — Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio is now available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London), South America (São Paulo). Learn more about the availability of these capabilities on supported Region documentation page.
• Amazon Q Developer subscription — The free tier of Amazon Q Developer is available by default in SageMaker Unified Studio, requiring no additional setup or configuration. If you already have Amazon Q Developer Pro Tier subscriptions, you can use those enhanced capabilities within the SageMaker Unified Studio environment. For more information, visit the documentation page.
• Amazon Bedrock capabilities — To learn more about the capabilities of Amazon Bedrock in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, refer to this documentation page. 

Start building with Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio today. For more information, visit the Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio page.

Happy building!

— Donnie Prakoso

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