Celebrating the General Availability of Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio with a Sneak Peek

Celebrating 
the General Availability of Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio 
with a Sneak Peek

Written by Minhyeok Cha

Introduction

Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio became generally available in mid-March, so I thought I'd take a look at what it is and what it can do for you as a partner and as an AWS cloud user.

Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio is a new IDE environment that integrates services related to AI/ML data analytics that exist within AWS. These services include

Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA), and the capabilities and tools of the various standalone “studios”, query editors, and visual tools found in the existing SageMaker Studio

We were able to locate and access all of the data in our AWS organization and provide a single development environment for our practitioners. This allowed us to minimize access control management and focus on AI application development.

Additionally, Amazon Q Developer is included, which provides a chatbot interface like Chat GPT and accelerates tasks such as writing SQL queries, building ETL jobs, troubleshooting, and generating real-time code suggestions.

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Contents

1. From Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio domains to project creation

2. What else has been added since the general release?

3. Wrapping up

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From Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio domains to project creation

So let's create a domain directly from the console to see what features are available after the general release.

It says to create a domain first, so let's go ahead and do that.

First, the good news is that with the general release, we can create in the Seoul region.

When creating a domain, you need at least three Availability Zones to deploy to. You don't need to give permission to add it to the Glue database, it will be granted automatically when you create the domain and AWS Lake Formation will register it for you.

When you're done, you'll be greeted by the studio as shown in the photo.

In the center, click Create Project to create a space to work in.

During creation, you'll see the following items, where you'll name each of the DBs you'll use in the project.

Since we're just experimenting, we'll go with the default values.

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What else has been added since the general release?

First up is Amazon Bedrock.

Once all the FM models are available for selection. I only see one model request on my test account. It's a bit embarrassing.

In addition to selecting FM models, one of the main features, building a knowledge base, is now possible in the studio itself.

When sourcing documents from S3, local data, or web crawling within a project and creating a Knowledge Base, you can work with the FM model selection as above.

Based on the Knowledge Base you created, you can create a canvas that looks like this

Connect each node to create your own configured Bedrock.

Next up is the Amazon Q Developer install mentioned above.

Now you can write query statements with Q. It's a free version, and it works well.

Amazon Q Developer automatically adds a free subscription to Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio when you create it, so you don't need to touch it further.

Here is the integration of the DB mentioned when creating the project.

SageMaker Lakehouse unifies data lakes, data warehouses, and data sources for easier management.

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Wrapping up

We didn't organize the core features in the preview stage or at AWS Re:invent 2024.

What we got from this official launch is one word: “Convenient.” AWS has many services, so it was difficult to use the existing SageMaker, but with the release of SageMaker Unified Studio, it was good that even if you just build a domain, you can automatically assign permissions and integrate each DB for easy management.

Of course, when importing from the existing DB to SageMaker Unified Studio, it is cumbersome to assign permissions to each service and register Lake Formation permissions for data. However, for someone starting a project for the first time, I think this was enough to reduce the burden of access.