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December 2023 Amazon Web Services Announcements

We are back with a rundown of the updates from AWS that were announced to close out the year. As expected the update counters were far lower than November, but still almost 200 announcements were made. Additionally, services expanded into almost an additional 100 regions as AWS continues to work to provide access to all services in all regions. There are also a couple of additional new services announced during the month.


Before we jump into December lets take a look at 2023 as a whole at a high level. In the course of the year AWS made 2,480 update announcements. This is an average of 207 updates a month. AWS also expanded various services into 1,236 new locations which is an average of 103 region expansions per month. This is a daunting number of updates and changes in the AWS services for any development team or engineering organization to keep track of while still moving their roadmap forward. Hopefully these monthly updates have helped your team keep on top of what is going on at AWS. Now, let's get back to December.


December by the Numbers:

Let’s start with some high-level numbers around updates that occurred in December.


  • Total Updates: 193

  • Total Services With Feature Updates: 79

  • Average Daily Updates: 9

  • Average Updates Per Service: 2

  • Regional Service Expansions: 96


The following graph shows a breakdown of how many announcements AWS has made per month for the duration of 2023.


Bar graph with update counts per month for 2023
Graph 1: Monthly Update Counts for 2023

Service Specifics

Next let's take a look at the service updates that were released this month. Amazon Connect continued to be the most updated service. There was a notable shift away from AI/ML enablement technologies this month with some observability and specialty services coming into play. The following are the most updated services during December:


  • Amazon Connect 14

  • Amazon Cloudwatch 9

  • Amazon FinSpace 5

  • Amazon RDS 5

  • Amazon Aurora 5


Amazon announced a couple of new services in December as follows.


  • AWS has a new no-code service for creation dashboard applications to visualize IoT data

  • AWS announces a new AI Service Cards approach to advance responsible AI

  • AWS Thinkbox Deadline 10.3.1 was announced which is the database backend for the Thinkbox cloud artistic rendering tools


Some services get more attention each month than others. The following graph shows a count of updates per service during December.


Bar graph showing the count of updates in December per AWS service
Graph 2: Update Counts per Service

Notable Service Updates:

When reviewing the December 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.


  • AWS Lambdas have been updated to allow them to scale up at up to 12x faster than previously

  • Amazon QuickSight has enhanced the SPICE engine to increase ingestion performance by up to 4x by ingesting data in parallel streams

  • AWS Amplify has added the ability to use existing entity relationship data to more easily integrate data across disparate databases and specifically MySQL and PostgreSQL data sources

  • You can now gain cross account insights for EKS from Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights

  • Developers can now run SageMaker studio locally through the use of Docker


Conclusions:

2023 has seen a lot of evolution in the AI/ML space and AWS was no exception as they worked to improve their tooling and services in that area to stay competitive. As we saw at re:Invent this was a major focus. December added a number of additional developer tools for integrating between various services and code storage and build functions. We hope you have enjoyed these updates throughout 2023 and hope that you have a successful and interesting 2024 building new solutions on AWS. Please reach out if we can assist your team in ensuring effective use of AWS services, or if you need help accelerating any part of your roadmap.


Complete Announcement List:


December Announcements




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