Optimizing Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for speed and scale

After several public betas, we launched Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) in 2006. Nearly two decades later, this fully managed service is still a fundamental building block for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications, processing over 100 million messages per second at peak times. Because there’s always a better way, we continue to look for ways to improve performance, security, internal efficiency, and so forth. When we do find a potential way to do something better, we are careful to preserve existing behavior, and often run new and old systems in parallel to allow us to compare results. Today I would like to tell you how we recently made improvements to Amazon SQS to reduce latency, increase fleet capacity,…

IAM Access Analyzer Update: Extending custom policy checks & guided revocation

We are making IAM Access Analyzer even more powerful, extending custom policy checks and adding easy access to guidance that will help you to fine-tune your IAM policies. Both of these new features build on the Custom Policy Checks and the Unused Access analysis that were launched at re:Invent 2023. Here’s what we are launching: New Custom Policy Checks – Using the power of automated reasoning, the new checks help you to detect policies that grant access to specific, critical AWS resources, or that grant any type of public access. Both of the checks are designed to be used ahead of deployment, possibly as part of your CI/CD pipeline, and will help you proactively detect updates that do not conform…

Amazon EC2 high memory U7i Instances for large in-memory databases

Announced in preview form at re:Invent 2023, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) U7i instances with up to 32 TiB of DDR5 memory and 896 vCPUs are now available. Powered by custom fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids), these high memory instances are designed to support large, in-memory databases including SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server. Here are the specs: Instance Name vCPUs Memory (DDR5) EBS Bandwidth Network Bandwidth u7i-12tb.224xlarge 896 12,288 GiB 60 Gbps 100 Gbps u7in-16tb.224xlarge 896 16,384 GiB 100 Gbps 200 Gbps u7in-24tb.224xlarge 896 24,576 GiB 100 Gbps 200 Gbps u7in-32tb.224xlarge 896 32,768 GiB 100 Gbps 200 Gbps The new instances deliver the best compute price performance for large in-memory workloads, and offer the highest…

Amazon Bedrock model evaluation is now generally available

The Amazon Bedrock model evaluation capability that we previewed at AWS re:Invent 2023 is now generally available. This new capability helps you to incorporate Generative AI into your application by giving you the power to select the foundation model that gives you the best results for your particular use case. As my colleague Antje explained in her post (Evaluate, compare, and select the best foundation models for your use case in Amazon Bedrock): Model evaluations are critical at all stages of development. As a developer, you now have evaluation tools available for building generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. You can start by experimenting with different models in the playground environment. To iterate faster, add automatic evaluations of the models. Then,…