Amazon AWS introduced almost eighty new services or service enhancements this year at re:Invent. Let’s go over a few of the more important ones.
Serverless
Serverless was one of the main focuses of re:Invent 2019. The big announcement was the launch of ‘provisioned concurrency’ for Lambda. Currently, there is some latency the first time Lambda is invoked because of ‘cold starts’, when containers need to initialize in the background to do processing for your functions. Provisioned concurrency mitigates this by allocating a pool of pre-initialized Lambda containers in the background. This should allow for better latency when a Lambda function is initialized for the first time.
Link to announcement: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/aws-lambda-announces-provisioned-concurrency/
A few other major announcements in the serverless compute space:
- Cheaper HTTP requests on API Gateway: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-api-gateway-offers-faster-cheaper-simpler-apis-using-http-apis-preview/
- Ability to run EKS on Fargate: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/run-serverless-kubernetes-pods-using-amazon-eks-and-aws-fargate/
- Amazon RDS Proxy: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-rds-proxy-available-in-preview/
Security
IAM Access Analyzer was the biggest security announcement from re:Invent. This new feature continuously monitors your IAM policies for changes and alerts if anything has changed. When an IAM policy violates your security and access standards, it can be remediated faster.
Link to announcement: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-aws-identity-and-access-management-access-analyzer/
Other major releases and announcements in the security space:
- S3 Access Points: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-s3-access-points-manage-data-access-at-scale-shared-data-sets/
- Amazon Detective: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-amazon-detective/
Compute
ARM based compute is the coolest thing that came out of the major compute announcements. Graviton processors, custom ARM based CPUs designed by Amazon, can perform almost as well as x86 CPUs at a fraction of the cost.
Link to announcement: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/announcing-new-amazon-ec2-m6g-c6g-and-r6g-instances-powered-by-next-generation-arm-based-aws-graviton2-processors/
Other major releases and announcements in the AWS compute space:
- AWS Compute Optimizer: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-aws-compute-optimizer/
- Inf1 Instances: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-amazon-ec2-inf1-instances-high-performance-and-the-lowest-cost-machine-learning-inference-in-the-cloud/
- Fargate Spot: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/aws-launches-fargate-spot-save-up-to-70-for-fault-tolerant-applications/
Networking
The big announcement here seems to be AWS Wavelength, AWS services embedded into the datacenters of telecommunications providers. This will provide very low latency for sensitive applications.
Link to Announcement: https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/
Other major networking releases and announcements:
- Transit Gateway Inter-Region Peering: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/aws-transit-gateway-supports-inter-region-peering/
- VPC Ingress Routing: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-vpc-ingress-routing-insert-virtual-appliances-forwarding-path-vpc-traffic/
Database
- Elasticsearch UltraWarm: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/aws-announces-ultrawarm-preview-for-amazon-elasticsearch-service/
- Redshift Federated Query: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-redshift-federated-query-preview/
- Cassandra: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/announcing-amazon-managed-apache-cassandra-service-now-in-preview/
Enterprise
AWS Outpost was announced in 2018, but is now generally available. This allows for true hybrid functionality for the cloud with AWS services on-prem and in the public cloud. VMware also offers VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost for customers that want to bring the strengths of AWS and VMware together in their datacenters.
Link to Outposts GA announcement: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/announcing-general-availability-of-aws-outposts/
AWS re:Invent 2019 Keynotes & Further Announcements
If you’re interested in watching any of the keynotes, the re:Invent 2019 YouTube channel has them all here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukcAXSVwQ3L9cWD4QgKPCQ5S
Announcements for the dozens of other new technologies we didn’t cover here can be found on the 2019 re:Invent announcement page:
https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/
That’s about everything we’re going to cover. There was so much more announced this year, but these are what I think they key highlights are for. Thanks for reading!
