Amazon EMR announces Amazon Redshift integration with Apache Spark. This integration helps data engineers build and run Spark applications that can consume and write data from an Amazon Redshift cluster. Starting with Amazon EMR 6.9, this integration is available across all three deployment models for EMR – EC2, EKS, and Serverless.

Amazon Security Lake automatically centralizes security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in your account. Security Lake makes it easier to analyze security data so that you can get a more complete understanding of your security across the entire organization. You can also improve the protection of your workloads, applications, and data. Security Lake automatically gathers and manages all your security data across accounts and Regions. You can use your preferred analytics tools while retaining control and ownership of your security data. Security Lake has adopted the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), an open standard. It helps normalize and combine security data from AWS and a broad range of enterprise security data sources. Now, your analysts and engineers can get broad visibility to investigate and respond to security events and improve your security across the cloud and on premises.

Today, Amazon QuickSight announces support for two new question types that simplify and scale complex analytical tasks using natural language. Business users type “forecast” to see future trajectories for up to 3 measures simultaneously. “Why” performs contribution analysis to automatically identify key drivers.

Today, AWS announces the preview of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Inf2 instances, which are designed to deliver high performance at the lowest cost in Amazon EC2 for the most demanding deep learning (DL) inference applications. Inf2 instances are powered by up to 12 AWS Inferentia2, the third AWS-designed DL accelerator. Inf2 instances offer 3x higher compute performance, up to 4x higher throughput, and up to 10x lower latency compared to Inf1 instances.

Torn Write Prevention (TWP) is a feature that ensures 16KiB write operations are not torn in the event of operating system crashes or power loss during write transactions. This feature is available for AWS customers using instance store on AWS Nitro SSD based EC2 I4i storage optimized instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), a block storage service, when attached to all EC2 Nitro-based instances, and Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), a fully managed, open-source cloud database.

Today, AWS announces AWS SimSpace Weaver, a new fully managed compute service that helps you deploy large-scale spatial simulations in the cloud. With SimSpace Weaver, you can create seamless virtual worlds with millions of objects that can interact with one another in real time without managing the backend infrastructure.

AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc6id instances. These instances are optimized to efficiently run memory bandwidth-bound, data-intensive high performance computing (HPC) workloads, such as finite element analysis and seismic reservoir simulations. With EC2 Hpc6id instances, you can lower the cost of your HPC workloads while taking advantage of the elasticity and scalability of AWS.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect now provides conversational analytics capabilities for Amazon Connect Chat , extending the machine learning powered analytics to better assess chat contacts. These capabilities enable businesses to understand customer sentiment in both agent and chatbot conversations, redact sensitive customer information, and monitor agent compliance with company guidelines to help improve agent performance and customer experience. 

AWS Supply Chain is a cloud-based application that helps supply chain leaders mitigate risks and lower costs to increase supply chain resilience. AWS Supply Chain unifies supply chain data, provides machine learning (ML)–powered actionable insights, and offers built-in contextual collaboration, all of which help you increase customer service levels by reducing stock outs and help you lower costs from overstock.

Amazon Connect agent workspace now provides a step-by-step experience (preview) that guides agents by identifying customer issues and recommending subsequent actions. With Amazon Connect, you can create workflows that walk agents through custom UI pages that suggest what to do at a given moment during a customer interaction. Detailed step-by-step guides increase agent productivity and decrease training time.