Top Announcements from AWS re:Invent 2020

AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global cloud computing community. Featuring keynote announcements, launches, sessions, and more, this year’s AWS re:Invent event took place over 3 weeks, from November 30th through to December 18th. Due to COVID-19, re:Invent took place virtually for 2020. With hundreds of sessions led by AWS experts, this blog post will highlight some of the key takeaways from this year’s event.

Keynote with Andy Jassy

Kicking off AWS re:Invent 2020, Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, welcomed viewers to the event. With re:Invent being virtual for the first time ever, Andy announced that over 500,000 people had registered for this year’s event. Andy noted the Cloud computing giant’s growth, with AWS now ranked 5th for Enterprise IT companies by revenue, behind Microsoft, Dell, IBM, and Cisco.

Andy also highlighted that COVID-19 is pushing companies towards the Cloud, showcasing that when we look back, we will realise that the pandemic has accelerated Cloud adoption by a couple of years.

8 Key Points to Enabling Reinvention

Don’t wait too long to ‘re:Invent’…

Andy shared his 8 key points to enabling reinvention, which businesses should consider to survive the rapidly changing environment in which we operate today:

• Will or intent by the organisation’s leadership to invent and reinvent
• Acknowledgement that you can’t fight gravity
• Talented employees that are hungry to invent
• Solving real customer problems with builders
• Speed
• Don’t “complexify”
• Use the platform with the broadest and deepest set of tools
• Pull everything together with aggressive top-down goals

Introducing Amazon ECS and EKS Anywhere

AWS has seen that customers want the same deployment methods on-premise as they do on AWS. To complement this, Andy Jassy announced the launch of Amazon ECS Anywhere, which allows users to run ECS in their own data centres.

Amazon EKS Anywhere was also announced, allowing users to run EKS in their own datacentres. Available in 2021, ECS and EKS Anywhere will allow customers to deploy native Amazon ECS tasks in any environment. This will include the traditional AWS managed infrastructure, as well as customer-managed infrastructure.

Launch of AWS Lamba Container Support

With hundreds of thousands of AWS customers using AWS Lambda, Andy also announced the launch of Lamba Container Support, which allows users to build Lambda based applications using existing container development.

Lambda users can now package and deploy Lambda functions as container images of up to 10 GB in size. In this way, users can also easily build and deploy larger workloads that rely on sizable dependencies, such as machine learning or data-intensive workloads.

AWS also has reduced the billing granularity for Lambda function duration, from 100ms to 1ms. This will lower the price for most Lamba functions and make it more cost-effective to run on Lambda.

Amazon Aurora – Aurora Serverless v2

Andy also highlighted Amazon Aurora, a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the Cloud. Customers are flocking to Aurora, with it being the fastest-growing AWS service with over 100,000 customers. With customers wanting a serverless mode, AWS has built Aurora Serverless v2, which allows scaling to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second. Compatibility for MySQL is ready now and PostgreSQL is becoming available in H1 of 2021. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 also provides the full breadth of Amazon Aurora’s capabilities, including Multi-AZ support, Global Database, and Read Replicas.

Learn more about Amazon Aurora and discover how Version 1 and Opsview reduced key inefficiencies through a complete redesign of Opsview Monitor’s architecture in line with modern principles in this article.

New Capabilities for Amazon Connect

Paul Cheesbrough, CTO and President of Digital at Fox, spoke about how Fox used Amazon Connect, an omnichannel cloud contact centre, to transform their entire business from creation to distribution.

Working with AWS, we have reinvented how we produce and distribute content to our consumers across all platforms and devices using the Cloud.

With thousands of users using Amazon Connect, AWS is using machine learning to make it smarter at analysing conversations in real-time, finding relevant information needed by contact centre agents, and authenticating customers by the sound of their voice.

Announcements for Amazon Connect include Contact Lens Real-Time, Connect Wisdom, Connect Voice ID, and Connect Profiles.

Amazon EC2 Updates

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Mac instances for macOS are now generally available for AWS customers. Built on Apple Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads on AWS for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers.

With millions of Apple developers, they are now able to leverage the flexibility, elasticity, and scale of AWS so they can increase their focus on core innovation such as developing creative and useful apps and spend less time on managing infrastructure.

Also in EC2 news, Amazon EC2 now provides new network performance metrics for EC2 instances, with five new metrics providing customers visibility on when their instances exceed the network allowances defined by AWS.

Introducing VPC Reachability Analyser

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud announced VPC Reachability Analyzer, a new feature that enables AWS users to perform connectivity testing between resources in their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Connectivity issues can be quickly troubleshooted and diagnosed by simply performing a reachability analysis between a given source and destination in the VPC network.

Announcing AWS Audit Manager

AWS Audit Manager is a new service available globally that helps AWS users continuously audit their AWS usage to simplify how they assess risk and compliance with regulations and industry standards. When the time comes for an audit, AWS Audit Manager helps manage stakeholder reviews of controls and enables users to build audit-ready reports with less manual effort and in less time.

AWS Well-Architected now Supports AWS SaaS Lens

The AWS SaaS Factory Program and AWS Well-Architected teams have combined their expertise in architectural best practices and knowledge of SaaS solutions to launch the new AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens.

The AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens adds questions tailored to SaaS workloads to the AWS Well-Architected tool. The questions drive crucial thinking for developing and operating SaaS workloads.

AWS CodeBuild

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, users don’t need to provision, manage, and scale their own build servers.

Find out more about AWS CodeBuild in this insightful session here.

For more information on AWS DevOps from Version 1, click here.

AWS Proton – Automated Management for Container and Serverless Deployments

AWS has also announced the launch of AWS Proton, the first fully managed deployment service for container and serverless applications. Teams can use AWS Proton to connect and coordinate all the different tools needed for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates. The benefits of AWS Proton include guardrails to be set, increasing developer productivity, and enforcing best practices.

AWS Premier Partner

Version 1 is a leader in Cloud Services and was one of the first AWS Consulting Partners in Europe. We are an AWS Premier Partner and help customers deliver integrated solutions that help enable digital transformation for the future. We specialise in migrating and running complex enterprise workloads in Public Cloud, Well-Architected Reviews and Cloud Economics, DevOps Framework, Alexa Skill and Microservices solutions, as well as the integration of Amazon Alexa, Amazon Lex, Amazon Connect and APIs. Our team works closely with AWS to help our customers navigate the rapidly changing world of IT. Whether you are beginning your Cloud journey and need some support to get things started or already have an existing AWS environment that needs optimising for enhanced performance, we can accelerate your Cloud journey and overall business transformation.