It has been an exciting time for AC3, with AWS Summit Sydney 2024 now behind us. It is always thrilling to hear about AWS's latest innovations and announcements during the keynotes, and this year was no exception. At the heart of this summit was the exploration of Generative AI (GenAI) and how AWS can help organisations bring GenAI capabilities into production.
GenAI, a topic currently dominating industry discussions, is not just a buzzword. It's a transformative technology that is revolutionising industries, pushing the boundaries of what is possible through AI, and igniting a sense of anticipation in the tech world.
Amazon Bedrock Comes to Sydney!
This year's major AWS Summit announcement was the expansion of Amazon Bedrock to the Sydney region. Initially launched in September 2023, Amazon Bedrock was only accessible in the US East (North Virginia) or US West (Oregon) AWS regions until now. This limited availability meant companies interested in incorporating GenAI into their products could only conduct proof of concepts (POCs) or trials in the US regions.
So, what is Amazon Bedrock? Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service offering the choice of high-performing foundational models from leading AI companies through a single API. Along with selecting foundational models, it also natively provides capabilities to build GenAI applications with security, privacy and responsibility in mind. Use cases for Amazon Bedrock include text generation, virtual assistants, text and image search, text summarisation, image generation and many more!
Amazon Bedrock lets you quickly experiment with and evaluate multiple foundation models to fit your use case. It also lets you privately customise these models with your data by fine-tuning them using Resource-Augmented Generation (RAG) and build agents that execute tasks using your data sources.
AWS builds and maintains the complicated infrastructure required to run these complex models as a serverless service, allowing organisations to focus on their business goals with minimal cost and overhead.
What Does This Mean For Us?
With the expansion in the Sydney region, we can now move beyond POCs and start integrating GenAI capabilities into our products! The availability of Amazon Bedrock in Sydney directly addresses a crucial concern: data residency.
Data residency is a crucial aspect of GenAI, as companies and end-users rightfully demand that their data remain within the country where they reside and operate. Organisations can easily comply with strict regulatory requirements and confidently introduce AI capabilities without data ever leading the Australian border by storing and processing data through the Sydney region. Data residency is especially critical in tightly regulated industries such as banking, medicine, government, and education, to list a few.
Another significant advantage of Amazon Bedrock's availability in Sydney is that data interception between countries is less likely as traffic to and from Amazon Bedrock always stays within Australia or the Sydney region. To further secure your data, AWS PrivateLink can establish a private connection between the VPC or your physical data centres and the Bedrock service, ensuring that your traffic never gets exposed to the public internet.
Summary
The introduction of Amazon Bedrock to the Sydney region and its simplification of GenAI accessibility brings us new and exciting possibilities. Australian organisations can now confidently introduce GenAI capabilities into products and services securely within AWS.
Would you like to hear more about GenAI and how AC3 can help? Contact us to get started on your journey!