Late November marks the most important day in the calendar for all AWS fans. No, we’re not talking about Black Friday; we’re talking about the annual AWS conference – re:Invent. This year, the event united over 50,000 AWS community members in just one week, and believe us, some amazing announcements were made.
Would you like to stay in the loop with all the news? We’ve got you covered! In this blog article, we’ll walk you through the most important announcements of AWS re:Invent 2022 and what they mean for AWS.
#1 AWS Is Driving Positive Change Around The World
AWS leads the $200 billion public cloud industry with more than a third of the market share. This is with good reason – AWS is transforming the world.
It changes how we drive
BMW is working hard to build connected car systems to enable a better driving experience, and AWS is their leading partner in doing that.
It transforms how we play
Do you play Fortnite? If so, you’re among hundreds of millions of players who enjoy this killer title, with up to 13 million people playing simultaneously, all thanks to AWS.
It provides new ways to travel
Expedia group makes 600 billion AI predictions annually to help us decide where we go on holiday and how we get there, all powered by AWS.
It helps us find new experiences
Pinterest stores an exabyte, or a million terabytes, of data on Amazon S3, which enables people to find new styles, ideas, and projects.
Interesting fact: There are around a thousand unicorns, companies valued over $1 billion, and guess what? 83% of them run on AWS.
#2 AWS’ Assistance in Ukraine
2022 was a turbulent year, and the world was horrified in late February when Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine. This sent shockwaves across neighboring countries and companies operating in the region, forcing them to rethink their resiliency and disaster recovery strategies.
Ukraine was the most heavily impacted country, and AWS promptly offered its expertise. The company helped to move critical government and strategically important companies’ data and operations to the cloud to protect it from damage or sabotage.
Over the course of four months, working across timezones and language barriers, AWS solutions architects could securely migrate 10 petabytes of essential data during 61 government institution migrations. These efforts helped to preserve critical state and private financial, social security, medical, educational, and land ownership information.
It was one of the most rapid examples of state-wide digitalization in an almost impossibly short timeframe. It feels incredible that AWS, Cloudvisor’s main partner, is working so hard to assist the Ukrainian government at a time when AWS’s expertise and services are most helpful.
If you want to do your part to help Ukraine, the Cloudvisor resell package enables you to save money on AWS while donating 4% of your AWS spent to Ukraine at no extra cost to your business; learn more here.
#3 Lambda SnapStart Makes AWS Compute Faster Than Ever
Compute is at the core of all AWS services, and it just got better with the Lambda SnapStart performance optimization feature for latency-sensitive applications.
SnapStart eliminates cold start latency for rarerly used Lambda functions. It does this by taking and caching a snapshot of the function’s running environment post-initialization. When the function needs to be run, SnapStart simply resumes from a cached snapshot and launches up to 90% faster than previously. Currently, only java11 runtime is supported, but others should follow soon.
It’s a better user experience at no extra cost, which we would call a win-win.
#4 New AWS Regions Are Being Added
Citizens of Switzerland, Spain, and Hyderabad (India), will have something to celebrate this year as they get their own AWS regions, bringing the total number of AWS regions to 30. New AWS regions make AWS even more efficient for customers with significant user bases in those areas.
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#5 AWS is Releasing a Slew of New Features
Data is another key trend for AWS, as highlighted by AWS CEO Adam Selipsky in his keynote speech. That’s why AWS has released a number of features focused specifically on addressing data usage and storage:
- AWS has promised a zero ETL future for data workers, and Redshift is just one of the services that was put in the spotlight during this re:Invent. Redshift Auto copy from S3 feature allows users to automatically load new S3 data into their Redshift tables and generate insights without additional complicated ingestion of workloads.
- Amazon Aurora zero ETL integration to Redshift makes Aurora data available to Redshift analysis without any ETL pipelines while lowering costs as you no longer store duplicate data.
- Adding Redshift to Lake Formation, a centrally managed IAM-like service for data access permissions, enables easier management of data sharing between Redshift data warehouses.
- Redshift is part of a full-fledged integration with Apache Spark. So developers can now build spark applications interacting with Redshift data easier than ever before.
- AWS Vice President for Data and Machine Learning believes that data beats intuition, but too much low-quality data can make it hard to mine insights. AWS Glue data quality solves this by monitoring and analyzing data in your lake data ingestion pipelines. No more time-consuming manual creation of data quality rules and writing validation code.
- Amazon Datazone enables users to discover, catalog, share and govern data at scale. The service should make cross-team collaboration and data sharing easier across organizations and beyond.
#6 CloudFront Updates Just Got Safer
Updating a CloudFront distribution can be a scary task for even the most seasoned developers. A single misconfiguration results in arcane error messages and hours of bug-fixing. Amazon CloudFront continuous deployment support makes this a thing of the past by enabling users to quickly test and validate their update configuration against a small portion of all traffic, minimizing any potential problems.
The new version even comes with a panic button, making it possible to revert to the last known good configuration instantly should the error messages pile up. Once the update has passed your internal tests, all traffic will gradually migrate to the updated version.
[Security] #7 AWS Security Gets Some New Tools
Security is AWS priority zero in building any service, and security got some serious upgrades during this re:Invent.
As we gather more valuable information in databases, they become high-value targets. Amazon GuardDuty RDS protection offers threat detection for Amazon Aurora. It monitors database access patterns, logins, and uses machine learning models to identify and alert about potentially suspicious activities.
Another newly introduced security service was Amazon Security Lake. It is designed to centralize all security-related data, such as VPC flow and CloudTrail logs, GuardDuty, and Inspector findings, as well as 3rd party security data into a single centralized data lake.
The goal is to reduce data duplication, provide a normalized data format, and make security data storage easier. This gives organizations a complete picture of their security status.
#8 Developers Have A New Kit To Play With
Did you love playing with Lego as a kid? You can now build a serverless AWS application with simple blocks using the AWS Application Composer service. This UI-based service enables developers to build applications using a series of drag-and-drop Lambda functions, DynamoDB tables, API gateways, SQS queues, and other serverless services to accelerate your app architecture development and configuration. This enables you to get a visual representation of your workload, as well as export working CloudFormation templates to accelerate infrastructure deployment.
Another important development is the introduction of the Amazon CodeCatalyst service. It is a unified software development service aiming to accelerate AWS software development. CodeCatalyst provides integrated project experience by provisioning automated CI/CD pipelines, development environments, issue tracking systems, source code repositories, and collaboration tools to plan, code, build, test, and deploy. The new service also includes a library of blueprints, with common project resources for the right combination of architecture and infrastructure.
#9 AWS is More Sustainable Than Ever
With skyrocketing energy costs, sustainability has never been more critical, and AWS is working hard to reduce its energy costs. Whether it’s more efficiency specialized chips or better data center planning and design, AWS has put a real focus on energy and water efficiency.
AWS’ plan to shift to 100% renewable energy is five years ahead of schedule thanks to new renewable energy-based contracts. Additionally, AWS has shifted to evaporative cooling methods, which use 85% less water than conventional methods, but the company didn’t want to stop there. In an effort to become water-positive, AWS partners and various non-profit organizations have brought 2.4 billion liters of potable water for communities in need, setting a new standard in environmental social responsibility.
And That’s It!
We hope this AWS re:Invent 2022 recap has got you as fired up about AWS as we are.
Written by Jonas Jovaišas
Customer Success Manager at Cloudvisor
