re:Invent 2021 - A summary

So re:Invent2021 is over and I'm gutted I wasn't able to attend in person, especially as it was the 10th reinvent. It looks like it was a great event and lots of cool things definitely came out in the keynotes and sessions. One good thing is that I had booked the week off to attend and as a result got to watch some sessions virtually. The rest I'll try and catch up on over the next few weeks.

So what are my key thoughts so far?

Firstly from Werner Vogels, apart from the service sprawl being our fault because we ask for too much, it was that "The Cloud" and concepts are nothing new. The same comments and thoughts from the 1st reinvent 10 years ago still hold true. In addition the cloud is a continuum (think he stole that from Accenture) with solutions available from the cloud to the edge. There are new wavelength zones planned, 30 new local zones next year in addition to the 7 new regions. With the availability of snowballs this now means Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now available where and when you need it.

The other message from Werner's keynote seemed to be "build how you want". There were 3 new SDKs announce, CDK version 2, more “drag and drop” interfaces for things like amplify, step functions as well as integrations for Terraform. So you can build what you want how you want.

The second the biggest thing I picked up on across the event was sustainability is core. As well as making the cloud greener with renewable energy Werner highlighted that the greenest cloud is by removing waste in processes and not using energy. With this in mind there is a new sustainability pillar in the well architected review. I'm also sure Werner mentioned being able to see our own energy usage or carbon impact, but I'll have to review and see what that was about.

So moving onto my favorite area, networking. In addition to the pre-event IPv6 announcements the following items caught my eye.

For AWS Transit Gateway there is now the ability for Intra-Region Peering. This is a feature I could have done with and I think really useful for large enterprises where they might have multiple entities and organization that need to communicate. More information is on Whats-New

The new AWS Direct Connect Site Link service allows companies to connect their sites using AWS Backbone. For companies with disperse sites this reduces the need for a global MPLS or internet based transfers. Along with AWS Cloud WAN this could change global networks dramatically.

For organization with no integrated IP Address Management solution the new IP Manager for VPCs allows you to manage those scarce IP ranges as well as allocate IP addresses/ranges to services. This is especially useful for managing firewall rules as IPs can now be reserved and allocated to know hosts/services and allowed in NACLs or on-premise devices.

For troubleshooting the ever more complex networking in AWS, A new VPC Network Analyzer has been launched which offers improvements over the Reachability Analyzer by using automated reasoning. This should make troubleshooting that much

Other Key Announcements for me were:

AWS re:Post (Stack Overflow for AWS) will improve the answers side of AWS. Hopefully it will mean information and solutions are shared more widely and also troubleshooting steps easily available rather than logging a support ticket every time.

Private 5G for those areas where Wi-Fi just wont work will be a game changer. There are many location such as industrial sites where either the volume of devices or interference means that Wi-Fi performance is poor will now have private 5G networks with all the benefits that offers.

There also seems to be a push on Legacy Migrations with ZFS, Migrating tape to AWS with snowball edge?and a new mainframe modernization service.

There were also lots of S3 changes with what looks like a push to become the core data plane for cloud-native. The big two for me were S3 Backup and Event Bridge integration. Backup was something that was key for many people. Although versioning was an option it could lead to high cost or not having "snapshot" of a date if there was frequent data change.

I'm sure there are still a lot more I've missed but these were my initial highlights.

Now as Werner says "go build".