AWS re:Invent 2022 - Part Four

Introduction

For a decade - as long as Nasstar has been an?AWS Partner Network (APN), the AWS global cloud community has come together at re:Invent to meet, get inspired, and rethink what's possible. The event is hosted in Las Vegas and is AWS's biggest, most comprehensive, and most vibrant event in cloud computing. Executive speakers advise how to transform your business with new products and innovations.

This article is part four of a series of blog posts covering this historical event, with insight and analysis from?AWS Ambassador?and AWS Technical Practical Lead,?Jason Oliver.

Please see other posts in this series:

• AWS re:Invent 2022 - Part One
• AWS re:Invent 2022 - Part Two
• AWS re:Invent 2022 - Part Three
• AWS re:Invent 2022 - Part Four
• AWS re:Invent 2022 - Conclusion

Werner Vogels Keynote

Presented on Thursday 1st December, in Las Vegas and?online.

Dr Werner Vogels,?Amazon.com?Vice President (VP) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Amazon.com, showed how customers and AWS use novel architectural patterns to build scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant applications. The seasoned keynote presenter highlighted innovations and emerging technologies that enable builders to create systems that would have been previously unimaginable and described how the Cloud is at the centre of this new era of innovation.

Architectural Principles

Werner started with a deep dive into architectural principles such as asynchrony and how it mirrors our natural world and can be used to improve latency and throughput for systems.

Loose coupled architecture benefits from fewer dependencies, failure isolation, and an evolvable architecture.?

He talked about event-driven, which ultimately leads to loosely coupled systems, and workflow architecture patterns, before announcing the following service:

• AWS Step Functions Distributed Map. Generally available (GA), this feature of Step Function enables you to process a considerable amount of data using specific Lambda functions. A simplified map and reduce step to be performed very quickly. It can launch parallel instances of a Lambda function to process the data of a map, then another at the end to summarise this data.?

With the distributed map, users can iterate over millions of objects, like logs, images, or .csv files; it can launch thousands of parallel workflows, much higher than the concurrency of most other AWS services.

Distributed Map is an exciting innovation that should help build simple big-data solutions at a reduced price point.

With a stark evolve-or-die message regarding the importance of leveraging an event-driven architecture and that it can be daunting to bring developers on this journey, the CTO announced the following service:

• AWS Application Composer.?In preview, a service to simplify and accelerate the architecting, configuring, and building of serverless applications. It starts with a visual canvas, where you can drag and drop serverless resources onto. You can connect these resources to create a serverless application architecture. It makes common tasks such as generating SAM or CloudFormation templates easy. Also, it makes it easy to share the design with colleagues and customers.

I can see how AWS is again democratising powerful services to a non-technical audience, in this case, application developers from a non-architecting or -Cloud background, using a simple drag-and-drop interface. This approach could help a resource-constrained team accelerate and lower the bar for accessibility to this innovative technology. However, caution should be observed as doing something is one thing, but doing something?correctly?is another altogether. I always advocate using an expert to, at the very least, check best practices and security exposure before proceeding to production.

He continued with the power on pipes in Linux with the standard in (stdin) and standard out (stdout) interfaces and how it would be great to replicate this simplicity of integration in the AWS platform. He then announced the following:

• Amazon EventBridge Pipes. GA is a new feature to easily integrate AWS services similarly to how Linux pipes are used. It is specially designed for integrating messages from different AWS services; this could be point-to-point, event producers against consumers, and a way to manipulate the events that flow through the pipe. The aim is to negate the need to write Glue code. It also offers built-in filtering to limit output to a subset of events if needed.?

As a fan of the Linux pipe system to create powerful scripts, I am keen to see how this new feature lives up to the hype. If it is?even half?as advertised, then it will have a place at the core of most AWS environments.

Global Scale

Werner strongly believes that event-driven architectures should be used to build applications that must work globally.

He took us under the hood of Amazon DynamoDB global tables to advocate best practices for building global-scale applications. With this, he announced the following service:

• Amazon CodeCatalyst.?In preview, a new service to take away the heavy lifting that sits around Cloud development built with developers and teams in mind; it enables the sorting, planning, development, collaboration, and delivery of applications on AWS. It has all the tools needed to go from idea to production much faster. Based on common blueprints, incorporating business standards where available. The blueprint helps with the code and helps set up a project file, configures integrated tools, source control, CI/CD pipelines, and issue management. It allows you to swap in popular tools like GitHub, Jira and Slack. CodeCatalyst is an effortless way to deploy globally across AWS services, regions, and accounts. It has built-in support for code coverage, unit testing, automation, and report generation - all considered the heavy lifting for development.

Multidimensional

Werner foresees the use of 3D in our digital world - after all, the world is multidimensional.?

A 100-year-old technology called Photogrammetry takes 130,000 2D images to build a single 3D image. However, a science called Neural Radiance Fields (NRF) can be used to determine the number of 2D images needed with ML willing in the gaps. Using NRF, you need 12 images to create a simple 3D image. This will enable 3D to become as prevalent as video is today, states the CTO. Werner announced the following services:

• AWS Ambit Scenario Designer. A set of open-source tools available from GitHub to allow you to create 3D content at scale. With world generation, you can create a 3D world by importing one from an?OpenStreetMap?city, for example. Then you can place obstacles in that world, use rules for these obstacles, and then add environmental effects, daylight, nightlight, weather, etc. You can quickly generate different scenarios using these models with a single click.?

• AWS SimSpace Weaver. Since this was announced during the?previous keynote, they will not be covered again.

The CTO closed with Quantum Simulation is the ultimate response to simulation at any scale, and software engineers should begin evaluating Quantum technologies such as AWS Bracket to prepare for the inevitable future of computing.

Close

I enjoy Werner's keynotes, which, along with?Peter DeSantis, provide a real insight into the engineering behind the scenes to operate the giant orange Amazon and AWS engines.

Werner has always been a keen technologist at the pinnacle of his industry. I enjoy listening to his game-changing ideas for driving technological innovation and, more importantly, doing this to impact our world positively.

His key takeaways were that we should observe nature and draw asynchronous attributes from it when designing systems. Also, the age of simulation is here and should be adopted more widely to aid experimentation and innovation.?

Please see my conclusion and wrap-up for AWS re:Invent 2022, coming soon.

About Me

An accomplished?AWS ambassador, technical practice lead, principal Cloud architect and builder with over 25 years of transformational IT experience working with organisations of all sizes and complexity.

An SME in AWS, Azure, and security with strong domain knowledge in central government. Extensive knowledge of the Cloud, the Internet, and security technologies in addition to heterogeneous systems spanning Windows, Unix, virtualisation, application and systems management, networking, and automation.

I evangelise innovative technology, sustainability, best practices, concise operational processes, and quality documentation.?