This year marked the 6th annual AWS re:Invent and boy were there a ton of announcements, not surprising coming from this colossal tech event. During re:Invent week, AWS rolled out over 60 new product announcements and updates, 20 of them in which AWS CEO, Andy Jassy announced in the 1st night keynote.
Some of the most exciting new products announced were:
AWS Fargate – Allows you to deploy and manage containers without having to manage any of the underlying infrastructure. One of the many serverless announcements made by AWS.
Amazon Elastic Containers for Kubernetes (EKS) – What we have all been waiting for!!! A managed service for Kubernetes without having to be an expert at operating it.
Aurora Serverless – Service will save you time and money by automatically matching your database according to your application’s needs.
AWS CloudTrail Adds Logging of Execution Activity for AWS Lambda Functions – Record Lambda data events and get additional details on when and by whom an Invoke API call was made and which Lambda function was executed.
Amazon GuardDuty – AWS has added an extra layer of threat detection by allowing you a more accurate and easy way to continuously monitor and protect your accounts and workloads.
Amazon S3 Select – Allows you to retrieve only a subset of data within an S3 object. Filtering the data before it is retrieved sounds like it is going to save S3 users some major money and improve performance.
Those are just a handful of our favorite service announcements. AWS also announced two new and improved instance types which we recommend upgrading to for quick cost and performance optimization.
H1 Instances – New family. Good option for people using “D” family.
This new family offers more vCPUs and memory per terabyte of local magnetic storage compared to D2 instances. Ideal for use of data intensive workloads. Offers best price/performance for magnetic disk storage EC2 instance family.
M5 Instances – Upgrade!
These next generation general purpose instances are based on the new lightweight Nitro Hypervisor which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. They deliver up to 14% improvement in price/performance compared to M4 instances. If you are using M4, make this easy upgrade to optimize your costs. And if you need a little more this instance type comes in m5.24xlarge to keep up with your increasing workload.
During the 2nd Keynote presentation Amazon.com CTO, Werner Vogels, focused less on announcements, which was a relief and more on AWS fundamentals. Vogels took us back to the basics, he started off with AI, which isn’t basic at all you might say, but according to him the future is “voice” something we all can use no matter which age, geographical location, or education level we have. It’s human. He brought examples from the operating room to the home and office. He announced Alexa for Business which is an intelligent assistant for organizations to use in the workplace.
After that he went of to talk about security and emphasized the necessity to encrypt data. “Dance like no one is looking, encrypt like everyone is.” was one of the slogans of his presentation. Another main theme of the keynote was Serverless, it seems this is the direction that AWS is headed. Vogels encouraged users to “go build”, an opportunity that serverless allows developers to do without ever provisioning or managing any infrastructure. He also announced something very cool, AWS Serverless Application Repository. This is like an AWS open source for serverless, which will create a community for sharing knowledge between developers, companies and partners. The keynote also touched on managed services, Big Data and machine learning, all in one, with its announcement of AWS SageMaker, a fully-managed service that enables data scientists and developers to quickly and easily build and deploy scalable machine learning models. And of course the keynote didn’t fail to mention Netflix and bring them up on stage for their unique form of experimental testing, Chaos Engineering.
The keynote was filled with a lot of other game changing updates and interesting presenters. When AWS said they were going back to basics, they took it literally and introduced Bare Metal Instances which offer direct access to underlying infrastructure and are an example of AWS’ flexibility and that they are really listening to all of their customers, even the more traditional ones.
If i had to summarize AWS’ message in one idea it would be “The only code you will ever need to write is your business logic.”, all of the new features support and bring us back to the fact AWS wants us to build better businesses and leave the rest up to them. Last comment that must mention about the keynotes is that there were quite a few women up on stage this year. Very refreshing.
Read more about all of AWS re:Invent announcements here.