Bedrock

The Bedrock documentation has all the details on the service but can be a little dry as an initial read. I have therefore highlighted some great blog articles from the service team covering key features.

We group all Bedrock blog posts under the category Amazon Bedrock which also includes lots of mini case studies from early adopters. We also have a workshop/tutorialwhich walks you through various use cases with Bedrock. It has 10 modules (Chatbots, summarization etc) which can be run independently in your AWS account. PartyRock is also a fun way of simply trying out Bedrock.

Bedrock Knowledge Bases

Connect Foundation Models to your company data for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/knowledge-bases-now-delivers-fully-managed-rag-experience-in-amazon-bedrock/
• https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/knowledge-bases/

Agents for Bedrock

Agents use developer provided instruction to create an orchestration plan and then carry out the plan by invoking company APIs and accessing knowledge bases using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide a final response to the end user.

• https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/agents/
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/agents-for-amazon-bedrock-is-now-available-with-improved-control-of-orchestration-and-visibility-into-reasoning/

Model Evaluation

Automatic or human evaluation with Bedrock to select the best model for your use case.

• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/evaluate-compare-and-select-the-best-foundation-models-for-your-use-case-in-amazon-bedrock-preview/

Guardrails

Promote safe interactions between your users and generative AI applications

• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/guardrails-for-amazon-bedrock-helps-implement-safeguards-customized-to-your-use-cases-and-responsible-ai-policies-preview/

Amazon Q

Amazon Q is a fully managed, generative-AI powered assistant that can be configured to answer employee questions, provide summaries, generate content, and complete tasks based on data in your enterprise.

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/business-use-dg/what-is.html
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-q-a-new-generative-ai-powered-assistant-preview/
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-q-brings-generative-ai-powered-assistance-to-it-pros-and-developers-preview/

Vector Databases

We are investing heavily in Vector technologies and delivering choice to development teams.

• Amazon Opensearch Service supports k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) search
• PostgreSQL on Amazon supports the pgvector extension to store embeddings from machine learning (ML) models
• Amazon Neptune ML uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to make accurate predictions using graph data
• Vector search for Amazon MemoryDB for Redis supports storing millions of vectors, with single-digit millisecond query and update response times
• Vector search for Amazon DocumentDB can search millions of vectors with millisecond response times

Videos

I know this is a reading list – but feel free to pass these video tasters on to a friend  They are recordings from our large annual event which took place in November.

• AWS re:Invent 2023 – Build your first generative AI application with Amazon Bedrock (AIM218) 
• AWS re:Invent 2023 – Use RAG to improve responses in generative AI applications (AIM336)

Yesterday (Feb 5th) we launched a new feature that makes it easy to generate AWS CloudFormation templates and AWS CDK apps for existing AWS resources that are managed outside CloudFormation, allowing you to onboard workloads to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in minutes, eliminating weeks of manual effort and head scratching.

Check out the the IaC generator and CDK Migrate and a nice walkthrough blog post.

January 2023 was month 2 of my journey (and still Day One) to be a useful Solutions Architect within AWS. I wasn’t really aware of much that was going on for the rest of my team and the org where I sit. I was focused on simple things – like trying to remember the name of every database we make and which floor my desk was on my fortnightly trips down to London.

January 2024 has been totally different for me. January is when so much changes inside AWS as we re-align ourselves to do an even better job of helping our customers be successful with our technologies in response to what we learnt the previous year and what we expect will be important to our customers in the next 12 months. For me this meant being part of new organisational structure created to focus even harder on helping software companies (aka ISVs) along with a new set of goals to work towards. In parallel I got a new Account Manager, I switched from helping 23 small/medium customers to 4 large customers and January was also the month I had set aside to go for my Solutions Architect Professional Certification (I did indeed Pass – but more on that in a future post).

I did want to say a brief public thank you to those 23 companies I worked with in 2023 – I will miss you all…

Finally, to be clear, January has also been….super fun. I can’t wait to start February … oh, hang on…. it is the 6th!!

If you use Amazon EC2 for compute, you may choose to adopt a highly-flexible approach to instance provisioning. If availability and price are key factors, you can utilize any instance type available while minimizing cost. This flexibility is made possible by two features of EC2 Auto Scaling Groups:

• Mixed Instance Policies allow you to use different instance types and even different EC2 Launch Templates within the same Auto Scaling Group.
• Attribute-Based Instance Selection allows you to choose a set of instance types by attributes such as the number of vCPUs and amount of memory provided by the instance, which frees you from the burden of enumerating specific instance types

And here is the post with the CloudFormation YAML to get started…

Fast forward 21 years and .NET is still an amazing technology and one used by many of my UK ISVs – but in a variety of flavours. The last significant Windows only version of the .NET Framework was 4.8 released in 2019 – but alongside that a new flavour emerged, a version of .NET that worked great on Windows, MacOS and Linux and simply called .NET (Ok – originally it was called .NET Core but now it is simply .NET). What a journey!

My ISVs (and perhaps your company) are now looking at ways to take their significant investment in .NET Framework based solutions to the AWS cloud. First up – those .NET Framework solutions will run just fine on Microsoft Windows running on AWS as EC2 instances or containers within ECS. But ….there are significant benefits around cost efficiency if you take those applications and move them from the .NET Framework running on Windows to .NET running on Linux. Handily some of my colleagues have pulled together a fine blog post talking through those options – check out Refactor to Modern .NET and Move to Linux published Oct 2023.

Shamelessly borrowed from Bill Tarr

Breakouts

• ARC311 – Building cost-optimized multi-tenant SaaS architectures (Nov. 27 | 9:00 AM) Tod Golding
• SAS406 – SaaS DevOps Deep Dive: Automating multi-tenant deployments (Nov. 27 | 3:00 PM) Alex PulverAnubhav Sharma
• SAS304 – Real-world SaaS scaling strategies: Maximizing multi-tenant efficiency (Nov. 28 | 2:30 PM) Tod Golding
• BWP301 – SaaS operations in action: Buy with Prime (Nov. 29 | 4:00 PM) Jimin KimJiwon Yeom
• PEX205 – Benchmarking your SaaS business on AWS (Nov. 29 | 5:30 PM) Craig WicksMerve Soner
• SAS308 – SaaS Anywhere: Designing distributed multi-tenant architectures (Nov. 29 | 5:30 PM) Peter YangDhammika Sriyananda
• SAS306 – SaaS meets AI/ML and GenAI: Multi-tenant patterns and strategies (Nov. 30 | 1:00 PM) Tod GoldingJames Jory
• SAS305 – SaaS architecture pitfalls: Lessons from the field (Dec. 1 | 11:30 AM) Michael Beardsley Bill Tarr

Chalk Talks

• SAS307 – SaaS tenant isolation: Patterns and strategies (Nov. 27 | 4:30 PM) Dave RobertsHumberto Somensi
• SAS404 – Designing and implementing a SaaS cost-per-tenant strategy (Nov. 28 | 11:00 AM) Bill Tarr Anubhav Sharma
• ARC205 – SaaS jump-start: Exploring core multi-tenant strategies (Nov. 28 | 11:00 AM) Tod Golding Ujwal Bukka
• BIZ207 – Quickly generate insights across your SaaS application activity (Nov. 28 | 11:30 AM) Pratima G.Ashish Khare
• SAS302 – A look inside SaaS networking, routing, and integration patterns (Nov. 28 | 1:00 PM) Alex Pulver Peter Yang
• SAS405 – Federating identity in multi-tenant SaaS (Nov. 29 | 10:30 AM) Toby Buckley Dhammika Sriyananda
• SAS408 – Chaos and SaaS: Pushing your multi-tenant architecture (Nov. 29 | 1:30 PM) Tod Golding Anthony McClure
• SVS320 – Building multi-tenant applications with AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate (Nov. 29 | 4:30 PM) Anton AleksandrovTod Golding
• SAS303 – Inside the SaaS control plane (Nov. 30 | 11:30 AM) Anthony McClureRanjith Raman

Workshops

• PEX401 – Building a multi-tenant SaaS control plane: An inside look (Nov. 27 | 11:30 AM) Michael Beardsley Babak Parvizi
• DAT402 – Build a multi-tenant SaaS solution using AWS purpose-built databases (Nov. 27 | 2:00 PM) Sean ShriverAditya SamantLeonid Koren
• SAS301 – SaaS and AI/ML: Inside a multi-tenant AI/ML solution (Nov. 27 | 2:00 PM) Ujwal Bukka Mehran Najafi, PhD Najafi
• SAS402 – SaaS multi-tenancy meets Amazon EKS: A hands-on deep dive (Nov. 28 | 11:30 AM) Ranjith RamanToby Buckley
• SAS401 – SaaS microservices deep dive: Multi-tenancy meets microservices (Nov. 29 | 3:00 PM) Humberto Somensi  Syed Umair H.
• SAS403 – SaaS survivor: Designing and building a rich multi-tenant operations experience (Nov. 30 | 11:30 AM) Dave RobertsZp Bappi

Builder Session

• SAS407 – Kubernetes DevOps tooling meets SaaS: Automating tenant provisioning (Nov. 27 | 2:30 PM) Humberto Somensi Tiago Miguel ReichertLucas Soriano Alves DuarteFarooq AshrafRodrigo Bersa

Amazon Redshift: The Definitive Guide by O’Reilly. Published October 2023.
Register (takes 1 minute) to download the pdf

There are over 2000 sessions to choose from in the hub including 40+ session on SaaS (Filter on Area of Interest). I watched several of the sessions from 2022 on-demand when I joined AWS and they were excellent. Easy to recommend attending if you can and your boss agrees

If you are not able to attend re:Invent in person, we will livestream our Keynotes and Innovation Talks for free with virtual registration plus access to the content on-demand after the event.

My colleague and on-boarding mentor Josh Hart is a star when it comes to databases and SaaS – and is one of three great presenters at this all day event in November. If you are a software company looking to make the leap to SaaS but struggling with a legacy database then this is for you.

Get expert guidance through hands on labs to migrate, modernise, build and manage AWS Databases for SaaS.

• Level 400+ AWS Database enablement to build and manage SaaS Applications
• hands on experience of building database architecture to support SaaS application development
• guidance to manage AWS databases using infra structure as code
• Learn how to optimise database performance for a SaaS application
• Understand how to modernise their application using AWS Database services

Agenda

• 9am | Introduction – AWS Databases and SaaS
• 10am | Practical Lab: Modernising a monolith
• 1pm | Operations: RDS & Performance Optimisation
• 2pm | Multi tenant data isolation with AWS database
• 3.15pm | Practical Lab: Multi tenant data isolation

Register Now

But for this post I just want to focus on what you can access for free as an individual.

First up – sign up to SkillBuilder with your AWS Builder ID (You can easily create one…)

Then Browse all courses and filter on Domain:SaaS (This link should work for English). Enjoy…