We are well settled into 2025 by now, but many people are still catching up with all the exciting new releases and announcements that came out of re:Invent last year. There have been hundreds of re:Invent recap events around the world since the beginning of the year, including in-person all-day official AWS events with multiple tracks to help you discover and dive deeper into the releases you care about, as well as community and virtual events.

Last month, I was lucky to be a co-host for AWS EMEA re:Invent re:Cap which was a nearly 4-hour livestream with experts featuring demos, whiteboard sessions, and a live Q&A. The good news is that you can now watch it on-demand! We had a great team and thousands of people enjoyed learning through the virtual experience. I recommend you check it out or share it with colleagues who have not been able to attend any re:Invent re:Cap events.

The Korean team also did an amazing job hosting their own virtual re:Invent re:Cap event, and it’s also now available on-demand. So if you speak Korean I do recommend you check it out.

If you’re more of a reader, then we have a treat for you. You can download the full official re:Invent re:Cap deck with all the slides covering releases across all areas by visiting community.aws! While there, you can also check all the upcoming in-person re:Invent re:Cap community events remaining across the globe for a chance to still attend one of those in a city near you.

But as we know, new releases, announcements, and updates don’t stop at re:Invent. Every week there are even more, and this is why we have this Weekly Roundup series that you can read every Monday to get the AWS news highlights from the week before.

So here’s what caught my attention last week.

Last week’s AWS Launches
If you use AWS Step Functions you may be interested in these:

• New data source and output options for Distributed Maps – Distributed Maps area a great fit for large-scale parallel document processing. Now, in addition to the already existing support for JSON and CSV files, it can process JSONL, as well as semicolon or tab-delimited files. You can also use new output transformations such as FLATTEN to combine result sets without any additional code.
• Default quota increased to 100,00 state machines and activities per AWS account – the previous default quota for the number of registered state machines and activities per AWS account was 10,000, making this a 10x increase.

Amazon Q Developer also got a couple of updates:

• New simplified setup experience for Amazon Q Developer Pro tier subscriptions – You can now create Amazon Q Developer subscriptions for standalone or AWS Organizations member accounts from the Amazon Q console with a 2-step setup.
• Amazon Q Developer can now troubleshoot console errors in all AWS Commercial Regions – Amazon Q Developer helps you to diagnose common errors when working with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Lambda and AWS CloudFormation in the console. It can identity permissions issues, incorrect configurations, and more. This was previously limited to a few Regions, but now this feature has been made available to all AWS Commercial Regions.

Here are some other releases that caught my attention this week from a variety of other AWS services:

AWS CloudFormation introduces stack refactoring – You can now split your CloudFormation stacks, move resources from one stack to another, and change the logical name of resources within the same stack. This adds a lot of flexibility enabling you to keep up with changes within your organization and architectures, such as streamlining resource lifecycle management for existing stacks, keeping up with naming convention changes, and other cases. You can refactor your stacks by using the AWS command line interface (CLI) or AWS SDK.

AWS Config now supports 4 new release types – AWS Config is great for monitoring resources across your AWS environment and help you towards ensuring alignment with your company and security policies as well as compliance requirements. It now has four new types of resources enabling you to monitor Amazon VPC block public access settings, any exceptions made within those settings, as well as monitor S3 Express One Zone bucket policies and directory bucket settings.

Automated recovery of Microsoft SQL Server on EC2 instan ces with VSS – You can now use a new feature called Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) to backup Microsoft SQL Server databases to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots while the database is running. You can then use AWS Systems Manager Automation Runbook to set a recovery point of time of your preference and it will restore the database automatically from your VSS-based EBS snapshot without incurring any downtime.

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

Other updates
Upcoming changes to the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) global endpoint – To help improve the resiliency and performance of your applications, we are making changes to the AWS STS global endpoint (https://sts.amazonaws.com), with no action required from customers. Starting in early 2025, requests to the STS global endpoint will be automatically served in the same Region as your AWS deployed workloads. For example, if your application calls sts.amazonaws.com from the US West (Oregon) Region, your calls will be served locally in the US West (Oregon) Region instead of being served by the US East (N. Virginia) Region. These changes will be released in the coming weeks and we will gradually roll it out to AWS Regions that are enabled by default by mid-2025.

Looking for some reading recommendations? At the beginning of every year Dr. Werner Vogles, VP and CTO of Amazon, publishes a list of recommended books that he believes should have your attention. This year’s list is looking particularly good in my opinion!

Upcoming AWS and community events
AWS Public Sector Day London, February 27 — Join public sector leaders and innovators to explore how AWS is enabling digital transformation in government, education, and healthcare.

AWS Innovate GenAI + Data Edition — A free online conference focusing on generative AI and data innovations. Available in multiple Regions: APJC and EMEA (March 6), North America (March 13), Greater China Region (March 14), and Latin America (April 8).

Browse more upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual developer-focused events.

That’s it for this week! See you next time 🙂

Matheus Guimaraes | @codingmatheus