Month: <span>December 2022</span>

New – Bring ML Models Built Anywhere into Amazon SageMaker Canvas and Generate Predictions

Amazon SageMaker Canvas provides business analysts with a visual interface to solve business problems using machine learning (ML) without writing a single line of code. Since we introduced SageMaker Canvas in 2021, many users have asked us for an enhanced, seamless collaboration experience that enables data scientists to share trained models with their business analysts with a few simple clicks.

Today, I’m excited to announce that you can now bring ML models built anywhere into SageMaker Canvas and generate predictions.

New – Bring Your Own Model into SageMaker Canvas
As a data scientist or ML practitioner, you can now seamlessly share models built anywhere, within or outside Amazon SageMaker, with your business teams. This removes the heavy lifting for your engineering teams to build a separate tool or user interface to share ML models and collaborate between the different parts of your organization. As a business analyst, you can now leverage ML models shared by your data scientists within minutes to generate predictions.

Let me show you how this works in practice!

In this example, I share an ML model that has been trained to identify customers that are potentially at risk of churning with my marketing analyst. First, I register the model in the SageMaker model registry. SageMaker model registry lets you catalog models and manage model versions. I create a model group called 2022-customer-churn-model-group and then select Create model version to register my model.

Amazon SageMaker Model Registry

To register your model, provide the location of the inference image in Amazon ECR, as well as the location of your model.tar.gz file in Amazon S3. You can also add model endpoint recommendations and additional model information. Once you’ve registered your model, select the model version and select Share.

Amazon SageMaker Studio - Share models from model registry with SageMaker Canvas users

You can now choose the SageMaker Canvas user profile(s) within the same SageMaker domain you want to share your model with. Then, provide additional model details, such as information about training and validation datasets, the ML problem type, and model output information. You can also add a note for the SageMaker Canvas users you share the model with.

Amazon SageMaker Studio - Share a model from Model Registry with SageMaker Canvas users

Similarly, you can now also share models trained in SageMaker Autopilot and models available in SageMaker JumpStart with SageMaker Canvas users.

The business analysts will receive an in-app notification in SageMaker Canvas that a model has been shared with them, along with any notes you added.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas - Received model from SageMaker Studio

My marketing analyst can now open, analyze, and start using the model to generate ML predictions in SageMaker Canvas.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas - Imported model from SageMaker Studio

Select Batch prediction to generate ML predictions for an entire dataset or Single prediction to create predictions for a single input. You can download the results in a .csv file.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas - Generate Predictions

New – Improved Model Sharing and Collaboration from SageMaker Canvas with SageMaker Studio Users
We also improved the sharing and collaboration capabilities from SageMaker Canvas with data science and ML teams. As a business analyst, you can now select which SageMaker Studio user profile(s) you want to share your standard-build models with.

Your data scientists or ML practitioners will receive a similar in-app notification in SageMaker Studio once a model has been shared with them, along with any notes from you. In addition to just reviewing the model, SageMaker Studio users can now also, if needed, update the data transformations in SageMaker Data Wrangler, retrain the model in SageMaker Autopilot, and share back the updated model. SageMaker Studio users can also recommend an alternate model from the list of models in SageMaker Autopilot.

Once SageMaker Studio users share back a model, you receive another notification in SageMaker Canvas that an updated model has been shared back with you. This collaboration between business analysts and data scientists will help democratize ML across organizations by bringing transparency to automated decisions, building trust, and accelerating ML deployments.

Now Available
The enhanced, seamless collaboration capabilities for Amazon SageMaker Canvas, including the ability to bring your ML models built anywhere, are available today in all AWS Regions where SageMaker Canvas is available with no changes to the existing SageMaker Canvas pricing.

Start collaborating and bring your ML model to Amazon SageMaker Canvas today!

— Antje

Heads-Up: Amazon S3 Security Changes Are Coming in April of 2023

Starting in April of 2023 we will be making two changes to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to put our latest best practices for bucket security into effect automatically. The changes will begin to go into effect in April and will be rolled out to all AWS Regions within weeks.

Once the changes are in effect for a target Region, all newly created buckets in the Region will by default have S3 Block Public Access enabled and access control lists (ACLs) disabled. Both of these options are already console defaults and have long been recommended as best practices. The options will become the default for buckets that are created using the S3 API, S3 CLI, the AWS SDKs, or AWS CloudFormation templates.

As a bit of history, S3 buckets and objects have always been private by default. We added Block Public Access in 2018 and the ability to disable ACLs in 2021 in order to give you more control, and have long been recommending the use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies as a modern and more flexible alternative.

In light of this change, we recommend a deliberate and thoughtful approach to the creation of new buckets that rely on public buckets or ACLs, and believe that most applications do not need either one. If your application turns out to be one that does, then you will need to make the changes that I outline below (be sure to review your code, scripts, AWS CloudFormation templates, and any other automation).

What’s Changing
Let’s take a closer look at the changes that we are making:

S3 Block Public Access – All four of the bucket-level settings described in this post will be enabled for newly created buckets:

A subsequent attempt to set a bucket policy or an access point policy that grants public access will be rejected with a 403 Access Denied error. If you need public access for a new bucket you can create it as usual and then delete the public access block by calling DeletePublicAccessBlock (you will need s3:PutBucketPublicAccessBlock permission in order to call this function; read Block Public Access to learn more about the functions and the permissions).

ACLs Disabled – The Bucket owner enforced setting will be enabled for newly created buckets, making bucket ACLs and object ACLs ineffective, and ensuring that the bucket owner is the object owner no matter who uploads the object. If you want to enable ACLs for a bucket, you can set the ObjectOwnership parameter to ObjectWriter in your CreateBucket request or you can call DeleteBucketOwnershipControls after you create the bucket. You will need s3:PutBucketOwnershipControls permission in order to use the parameter or to call the function; read Controlling Ownership of Objects and Creating a Bucket to learn more.

Stay Tuned
We will publish an initial What’s New post when we start to deploy this change and another one when the deployment has reached all AWS Regions. You can also run your own tests to detect the change in behavior.

Jeff

Facet Enhancements for Cloud Search

What’s changing

It’s now easier to configure and use Cloud Search search filters and facets with multiple enhancements to our existing functionalities. With this launch, you can use the Cloud Search Query API to configure new additional capabilities: 
  • Faceting support for integer type fields, such as priority levels for support tickets or the number of pages in a document 
  • Out of the box Faceting support for document size, document creation, and custom date fields 
  • New default reserved operators for document size and created date fields
  • Simplified Query API response with filters being directly provided in the response 
Expanding filter options creates a more user friendly search experience, making it easier and faster to narrow search results to the most relevant documents. 

Getting started 

  • Admins and developers: See our developer documentation for more information about using new facet enhancements
  • End users: There is no end user action required. You will automatically see new filter options once your admin has configured them 

Rollout pace

  • This feature is available now for all users. 

Availability 

  • Available to Google Cloud Search Customers

Resources 

AWS Week in Review – December 12, 2022

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

The world is asynchronous, is what Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, reminded us during his keynote last week at AWS re:Invent. At the beginning of the keynote, he showed us how weird a synchronous world would be and how everything in nature is asynchronous. One example of an event-driven application he showcased during his keynote is Serverlesspresso, a project my team has been working on for the last year. And last week, we announced Serverlesspresso extensions, a new program that lets you contribute to Serverlesspresso and learn how event-driven applications can be extended.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports fine-grained data access control with AWS LakeFormation when accessing data through Amazon EMR. Now, when you connect to EMR clusters to SageMaker Studio notebooks, you can choose what runtime IAM role you want to connect with, and the notebooks will only access data and resources permitted by the attached runtime role.

Amazon Lex has now added support for Arabic, Cantonese, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, and Finnish. This opens new possibilities to create chat bots and conversational experiences in more languages.

Amazon RDS Proxy now supports creating proxies in Amazon Aurora Global Database primary and secondary Regions. Now, building multi-Region applications with Amazon Aurora is simpler. RDS proxy sits between your application and the database pool and shares established database connections.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP launched many new features. First, it added the support for Nitro-based encryption of data in transit. It also extended NVMe read cache support to Single-AZ file systems. And it added four new features to ease the use of the service: easily assign a snapshot policy to your volumes, easily create data protection volumes, configure volumes so their tags are automatically copied to the backups, and finally, add or remove VPC route tables for your existing Multi-AZ file systems.

I would also like to mention two launches that happened before re:Invent but were not covered on the News Blog:

Amazon EventBridge Scheduler is a new capability from Amazon EventBridge that allows you to create, run, and manage scheduled tasks at scale. Using this new capability, you can schedule one-time or recurrent tasks across 270 AWS services.

AWS IoT RoboRunner is now generally available. Last year at re:Invent Channy wrote a blog post introducing the preview for this service. IoT RoboRunner is a robotic service that makes it easier to build and deploy applications for fleets of robots working seamlessly together.

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

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news that you may have missed:

I would like to recommend this really interesting Amazon Science article about federated learning. This is a framework that allows edge devices to work together to train a global model while keeping customers’ data on-device.

Podcast Charlas Técnicas de AWS – If you understand Spanish, this podcast is for you. Podcast Charlas Técnicas is one of the official AWS podcasts in Spanish, and every other week there is a new episode. Today the final episode for season three launched, and in it, we discussed many of the re:Invent launches. You can listen to all the episodes directly from your favorite podcast app or at AWS Podcasts en español.

AWS open-source news and updates–This is a newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo to bring you the latest open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS Resiliency Hub Activation Day is a half-day technical virtual session to deep dive into the features and functionality of Resiliency Hub. You can register for free here.

AWS re:Invent recaps in your area. During the re:Invent week, we had lots of new announcements, and in the next weeks you can find in your area a recap of all these launches. All the events will be posted on this site, so check it regularly to find an event nearby.

AWS re:Invent keynotes, leadership sessions, and breakout sessions are available on demand. I recommend that you check the playlists and find the talks about your favorite topics in one collection.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Marcia