My Shortlist Of re:Invent 2021 Announcements

AWS is in its third wave of services evaluation. First wave was the base services e.g. S3, EC2 and VPC, then came the second wave of services e.g. Lambda, EKS and Serverless RDS. Now we are entering the third wave, where we are seeing incremental maturity in these services. It’s at that level where we can stop using custom solution to compensate for any feature deficiencies and start using these newly developed ones. And that’s what I like about AWS, their obsession with customer needs. Hence this year’s re:Invent was all about incremental advances into existing services rather than introducing a plethora of new ones. And I see that trend developing in coming years.

Below is a list of most notable announcements from this year’s re:Invent. These are based on my own personal preference, which I expect would resonate with most of you.

AWS CDK V2 is GE: I am surprised on how many organisations are not using CDK and are still battling with CloudFormation. Not that there is anything wrong with CloudFormation, CDK however takes IaC to a whole new level.

EC2 M1 Mac Instances: This was a great hit from 2020 re:Invent and shows AWS’s ability to keep inventing and solving problems for their customers. I am sure this will be a welcome addition for anyone already using Mac instances.

EBS Snapshots Recycle Bin: As you would have guessed, Recycle Bin will allow recovery of accidentally deleted snapshots before their retention period expires.

EBS Snapshots Archive: This will save customers a lot of money with a low-cost storage of their snapshots. Snapshots is the best way to backup your EBS volumes and users like to keep them for as long as possible. This can be 7-10 years for some enterprises based on their data retention and if they don’t have a proper data archival solution.

Transit Gateway intra-region peering:This just makes sense and simplifies connectivity between regions. Considering new upcoming regions in APAC (Melbourne, Auckland), this is very timely.

VPC Network Access Analyzer: Network security teams would love this new service. Having the ability to view which network paths are vulnerable based on your compliance requirements is a godsend.

VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM): Throw those spreadsheets away, this is the way to go if you want to track IP utilization, troubleshoot, or perform any auditing.

AWS Cloud WAN: If you have a network that spans many regions and sites, you will find this service very handy. With a central dashboard and the ability to define network policies this service can take away a lot of complexity and ambiguity in your WAN.

AWS Direct Connect SiteLink: If you have offices around the globe and want to take advantage of AWS’s backbone for connectivity, this service will connect your sites directly to the nearest Direct Connect location.

Advanced Shield Automatic application-layer DDOS protection: This is just another incremental step towards making this service even better. DDOS protection was previously implemented by AWS support team if you had opted into Advanced Shield, now it will automatically create required rules in your WAF based on layer 7 DDOS events.

Sustainability Pillar for Well-Architected Framework: With so much focus on sustainability, this is a great way to play your part and reduce any environmental impacts of cloud workloads.

AWS re:Post: This is AWS Community rebranded. If you didn’t have a paid support, this was the only way to get any technical help. Looks like AWS is trying to improve this experience for its customers.

?Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS: This is Machine Learning (ML) powered anomaly detection and diagnostics for your RDS footprint. It can be very useful if you do not have dedicated DBA teams or want to take some load off them.

Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server: Most of the users might ignore this service but I think it can be a lifesaver for customers who neither have budgeting or resources to rearchitect their custom DB solutions in order to fit into current RDS implementations.

AWS DynamoDB Standard Infrequent-Access table class: This is a good cost saving feature for anyone with large DynamoDB tables that do not require frequent access. It can help reduce DynamoDB costs by up to 60 percent.

Going Serverless: There are some prominent services that are going serverless. These are Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), Managed Apache Kafka (MSK), RedShift and SageMaker Inference.

AWS Amplify Studio: This is basically a direct answer to Microsoft’s Power Apps platform. It allows non-developers to create applications using a visual development environment. It does look cool and probably worth checking out.

Amazon WorkSpaces Web: WorksSpaces Web will allow easy and low-cost access to business applications that are not exposed externally for various reasons. These could be technical, or compliance based. This should reduce our dependence on those VPN connections that we all love to hate.

IoT RoboRunner: This is an interesting one. It allows enterprises to build and deploy applications that help fleets of robots work together seamlessly. I think it probably came from Amazon’s warehousing team. Remember those Amazon smart warehouse videos.

?This is all I have got so far. I am sure I have missed quite a few but this is my shortlist for now.?