Every year on March 14 (3.14), AWS Pi Day highlights AWS innovations that help you manage and work with your data. What started in 2021 as a way to commemorate the fifteenth launch anniversary of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) has now grown into an event that highlights how cloud technologies are transforming data management, analytics, and AI.

This year, AWS Pi Day returns with a focus on accelerating analytics and AI innovation with a unified data foundation on AWS. The data landscape is undergoing a profound transformation as AI emerges in most enterprise strategies, with analytics and AI workloads increasingly converging around a lot of the same data and workflows. You need an easy way to access all your data and use all your preferred analytics and AI tools in a single integrated experience. This AWS Pi Day, we’re introducing a slate of new capabilities that help you build unified and integrated data experiences.

The next generation of Amazon SageMaker: The center of all your data, analytics, and AI
At re:Invent 2024, we introduced the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, the center of all your data, analytics, and AI. SageMaker includes virtually all the components you need for data exploration, preparation and integration, big data processing, fast SQL analytics, machine learning (ML) model development and training, and generative AI application development. With this new generation of Amazon SageMaker, SageMaker Lakehouse provides you with unified access to your data and SageMaker Catalog helps you to meet your governance and security requirements. You can read the launch blog post written by my colleague Antje to learn more details.

Core to the next generation of Amazon SageMaker is SageMaker Unified Studio, a single data and AI development environment where you can use all your data and tools for analytics and AI. SageMaker Unified Studio is now generally available.

SageMaker Unified Studio facilitates collaboration among data scientists, analysts, engineers, and developers as they work on data, analytics, AI workflows, and applications. It provides familiar tools from AWS analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) services, including data processing, SQL analytics, ML model development, and generative AI application development, into a single user experience.

SageMaker Unified Studio also brings selected capabilities from Amazon Bedrock into SageMaker. You can now rapidly prototype, customize, and share generative AI applications using foundation models (FMs) and advanced features such as Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, Amazon Bedrock Agents, and Amazon Bedrock Flows to create tailored solutions aligned with your requirements and responsible AI guidelines all within SageMaker.

Last but not least, Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in SageMaker Unified Studio. Amazon Q Developer provides generative AI powered assistance for data and AI development. It helps you with tasks like writing SQL queries, building extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs, and troubleshooting, and is available in the Free tier and Pro tier for existing subscribers.

You can learn more about SageMaker Unified Studio in this recent blog post written by my colleague Donnie.

During re:Invent 2024, we also launched Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse as part of the next generation of SageMaker. SageMaker Lakehouse unifies all your data across Amazon S3 data lakes, Amazon Redshift data warehouses, and third-party and federated data sources. It helps you build powerful analytics and AI/ML applications on a single copy of your data. SageMaker Lakehouse gives you the flexibility to access and query your data in-place with Apache Iceberg–compatible tools and engines. In addition, zero-ETL integrations automate the process of bringing data into SageMaker Lakehouse from AWS data sources such as Amazon Aurora or Amazon DynamoDB and from applications such as Salesforce, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, ServiceNow, SAP, Zendesk, and Zoho CRM. The full list of integrations is available in the SageMaker Lakehouse FAQ.

Building a data foundation with Amazon S3
Building a data foundation is the cornerstone of accelerating analytics and AI workloads, enabling organizations to seamlessly manage, discover, and utilize their data assets at any scale. Amazon S3 is the world’s best place to build a data lake, with virtually unlimited scale, and it provides the essential foundation for this transformation.

I’m always astonished to learn about the scale at which we operate Amazon S3: It currently holds over 400 trillion objects, exabytes of data, and processes a mind-blowing 150 million requests per second. Just a decade ago, not even 100 customers were storing more than a petabyte (PB) of data on S3. Today, thousands of customers have surpassed the 1 PB milestone.

Amazon S3 stores exabytes of tabular data, and it averages over 15 million requests to tabular data per second. To help you reduce the undifferentiated heavy lifting when managing your tabular data in S3 buckets, we announced Amazon S3 Tables at AWS re:Invent 2024. S3 Tables are the first cloud object store with built-in support for Apache Iceberg. S3 tables are specifically optimized for analytics workloads, resulting in up to threefold faster query throughput and up to tenfold higher transactions per second compared to self-managed tables.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon S3 Tables integration with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse  Amazon S3 Tables now integrate with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse, making it easy for you to access S3 Tables from AWS analytics services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, and Apache Iceberg–compatible engines such as Apache Spark or PyIceberg. SageMaker Lakehouse enables centralized management of fine-grained data access permissions for S3 Tables and other sources and consistently applies them across all engines.

For those of you who use a third-party catalog, have a custom catalog implementation, or only need basic read and write access to tabular data in a single table bucket, we’ve added new APIs that are compatible with the Iceberg REST Catalog standard. This enables any Iceberg-compatible application to seamlessly create, update, list, and delete tables in an S3 table bucket. For unified data management across all of your tabular data, data governance, and fine-grained access controls, you can also use S3 Tables with SageMaker Lakehouse.

To help you access S3 Tables, we’ve launched updates in the AWS Management Console. You can now create a table, populate it with data, and query it directly from the S3 console using Amazon Athena, making it easier to get started and analyze data in S3 table buckets.

The following screenshot shows how to access Athena directly from the S3 console.

When I select Query tables with Athena or Create table with Athena, it opens the Athena console on the correct data source, catalog, and database.

Since re:Invent 2024, we’ve continued to add new capabilities to S3 Tables at a rapid pace. For example, we added schema definition support to the CreateTable API and you can now create up to 10,000 tables in an S3 table bucket. We also launched S3 Tables into eight additional AWS Regions, with the most recent being Asia Pacific (Seoul, Singapore, Sydney) on March 4, with more to come. You can refer to the S3 Tables AWS Regions page of the documentation to get the list of the eleven Regions where S3 Tables are available today.

Amazon S3 Metadata—announced during re:Invent 2024— has been generally available since January 27. It’s the fastest and easiest way to help you discover and understand your S3 data with automated, effortlessly-queried metadata that updates in near real time. S3 Metadata works with S3 object tags. Tags help you logically group data for a variety of reasons, such as to apply IAM policies to provide fine-grained access, specify tag-based filters to manage object lifecycle rules, and selectively replicate data to another Region. In Regions where S3 Metadata is available, you can capture and query custom metadata that is stored as object tags. To reduce the cost associated with object tags when using S3 Metadata, Amazon S3 reduced pricing for S3 object tagging by 35 percent in all Regions, making it cheaper to use custom metadata.

AWS Pi Day 2025
Over the years, AWS Pi Day has showcased major milestones in cloud storage and data analytics. This year, the AWS Pi Day virtual event will feature a range of topics designed for developers and technical decision-makers, data engineers, AI/ML practitioners, and IT leaders. Key highlights include deep dives, live demos, and expert sessions on all the services and capabilities I discussed in this post.

By attending this event, you’ll learn how you can accelerate your analytics and AI innovation. You’ll learn how you can use S3 Tables with native Apache Iceberg support and S3 Metadata to build scalable data lakes that serve both traditional analytics and emerging AI/ML workloads. You’ll also discover the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, the center for all your data, analytics, and AI, to help your teams collaborate and build faster from a unified studio, using familiar AWS tools with access to all your data whether it’s stored in data lakes, data warehouses, or third-party or federated data sources.

For those looking to stay ahead of the latest cloud trends, AWS Pi Day 2025 is an event you can’t miss. Whether you’re building data lakehouses, training AI models, building generative AI applications, or optimizing analytics workloads, the insights shared will help you maximize the value of your data.

Tune in today and explore the latest in cloud data innovation. Don’t miss the opportunity to engage with AWS experts, partners, and customers shaping the future of data, analytics, and AI.

If you missed the virtual event on March 14, you can visit the event page at any time—we will keep all the content available on-demand there!

— seb

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