Another year, another blockbuster re:Invent for Amazon Web Services. This year brought nearly 55,000 attendees for a record attendance. The structure and format of the event largely stayed the same, with talks and sessions spread across the Aria, Venetian, and other hotels. Luckily for us, they kept both keynotes in the Venetian, which helped reduce a lot of the travel required to get around the city.
Before we get into the big takeaways from re:Invent, I have to mention my personal highlight from the expo hall: PINS! Seriously, I felt like I was walking around Walt Disney World watching people give away, share, and even trade pins. It was awesome to see, and I hope more and more vendors follow the lead (because pins are pretty awesome).
One of the largest parts of every AWS show are the many, many announcements from Amazon about new services they are launching, or are about to launch. This year was no exception as AWS shared many new and interesting services to their customer base. We could fill a book just detailing ALL the announcements. And in typical AWS style, there were so many announcements that they have a dedicated site to check them all out.
I’ve gone thru them all — and put together my personal top “awesome new AWS services” list. In no particular order whatsoever:
Amazon EC2 C5n Instances Featuring 100 Gbps of Network Bandwidth - AWS continuing to invest in the C5 class instances, now adding more and more bandwidth to their hosts. Their investment into the Nitro system continuing to pay dividends.
AWS Outposts - A shot across the bow to the “hybrid cloud” players. This was probably the most promising of all the AWS announcements. The ability to bring AWS APIs and services within your data center could be very compelling for users with low latency computing needs.
AWS Ground Station - One of the more “stranger” announcements (at least in my mind). But when you think about it — satellites generate lots of data, and if there is one thing that AWS loves, it’s data. There is definitely a need for this service, given AWS’s commitment to building what their customers ask for.
S3 Glacier is now a new S3 Storage Class - AWS has been making it easier and easier to use lifecycle policies to tier data over to Glacier in an easy and seamless way. Now you can use the S3 PUT API to upload objects directly to S3 Glacier without having to create lifecycle policies.
Announcing S3 Intelligent-Tiering - For a low low price, you can have AWS automatically send objects off to glacier that are infrequently used. Great for CHAOSSEARCH — after we index your data — if you never require the source, or only infrequently go back to the source, AWS will ship that off to Glacier, saving you even more money.
AWS Security Hub - After working at a security company in a previous life, I’m always interested when I see AWS building up their security tools within their cloud services. Security Hub fills a great void to centralize alerts and events coming from many disparate sources (including integration with 3rd party services which is equally cool).
AWS Firecracker - In my opinion, this was really one of the coolest new features announced. It includes the ability to launch lightweight microVMs in a fraction of a second, giving you both security and workload isolation of traditional VMs, but with the extremely low resource overhead of containers. Many of the new Lambda features announced obviously came because of this huge announcement. I can’t wait to watch the project evolve over the next few years.
AWS Lake Formation - Touted as a service that “makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days.” They take care of all the heavy lifting of “loading data from diverse sources, monitoring those data flows, setting up partitions, turning on encryption and managing keys, defining transformation jobs and monitoring their operation, re-organizing data into a columnar format.”
My only question: why does it take days?
Apart from being the only log and event solution designed to turn YOUR Amazon S3 account into a full-text search cluster, CHAOSSEARCH is also an extremely powerful analytics tool. Use S3 as your data lake, and we can process your data in minutes, making it available for questions — no DBAs or Data Engineers required!
In the end, another fantastic event — the first for CHAOSSEARCH, but definitely not our last. We had hundreds of great conversations with people interested in extending their Elasticsearch and ELK clusters, turning S3 into a full-text search cluster, and finally giving people the ability to cost-effectively do queries and ask questions of their data they never have been able to before.
If you missed meeting us, reach out and we’d love to give you a demo of what we are up to!
