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What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas – but not the news from AWS re:Invent!

Kevin Davis, AWS Technical Lead at Cloudreach, takes us through his top picks of technical announcements made at re:Invent 2021. Kevin also summarizes three big trends in “Sustainability, Edge Computing and Data are Trendsetters” plus you can learn about Cloudreach’s awards and see a recap of our AWS presentations at “Cloudreach Awards, Presentations and Demos and get access to our 6 cloud trends of 2022 podcasts – with a bonus – at “Cloud Trends 2022 Podcasts.”  

Reduce Management of Systems

Amazon Redshift Serverless – Managing Redshift Clusters can become a consuming effort that often requires specialist knowledge. Redshift Serverless is an opportunity to run analytics against datasets that fit without having to invest in the management of clusters.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand – You no longer need to monitor and predict throughput of data streams into your Kinesis implementation for capacity purposes. This fully managed serverless service enables you to stream data at scale without managing capacity.

Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS – This is long-awaited news! Developers can now gain ML insights on performance and operations of fleets of RDS databases that wouldn’t otherwise be possible without highly specialized expertise. Amazon Aurora-related issues can be detected, diagnosed and resolved so that developers can automatically manage and take real-time action. 

These two new announcements for EBS Snapshots will reduce the management of snapshots and may even deliver significant savings on your total storage footprint costs…

Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive is a new storage tier for the long-term retention of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBES) snapshots of your EBS volumes.

Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots is a two-level model that gives you more control over the deletion process. By setting up rules to retain deleted snapshots, they can be recovered after an accidental deletion.

Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights (Preview) – You may have deployed many different solutions to search through logs and identify patterns of application and infrastructure operations management. This new feature (in preview) makes that a native capability in the Amazon Cloudwatch service. Metrics Insights is a fast, flexible, SQL-based query engine that enables developers, operators, systems engineers and architects to identify trends and patterns in real-time.

Innovation in Compute

The release of Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances Mac IOS on M1 processors opens up the opportunity to run Mac IOS on Instances rather than hosted MacMini fleets.

AWS Outposts Servers in Two Form Factors – These new smaller form factors give customers the opportunity to run AWS compute and APIs into smaller branch offices and many other edge location use cases – all managed from the same familiar console as AWS regions.

The latest in the AWS Graviton processor family, AWS Graviton3 processors provide up to 25% better compute performance, up to 2x higher floating-point performance, up to 2x faster cryptographic workload performance and up to 3x better performance for ML workloads as compared with AWS Graviton2 processors.

Here’s a hidden gem: Offline Tape Migration Using AWS Snowball Edge. Many companies still require large scale tape libraries they ship off to Iron Mountain. Restoring from tape is both cumbersome and time-consuming due to the speed and difference in the media from its origination. This use case for Snowball Edge allows customers to retire those large scale libraries and store their long-term cold storage in S3 Glacier without changing media and sacrificing speed of recovery for near time restores.

AWS Mainframe Modernization (Preview) services won’t run your mainframe workloads in the cloud, but it will make it easier to execute a plan to modernize the mainframe portion of your estate –  and for customers with mainframes, this is the biggest barrier to transformation.

Security and Governance

AWS Lake Formation – General Availability of Cell-Level Security and Governed Tables with Automatic Compaction – Some proxy products out there provide cell-level permissions from data lakes. Other work-around approaches have been leveraged in years past that also increase costs and impact performance. Cell-Level Security allows complex organizations to govern data access with policy without managing multiple datasets.

In enterprise environments, platform teams often struggle to train everyone to do the right thing with their secrets and passwords. Amazon CodeGuru helps to improve code quality by automating the task of finding and correcting actions developers sometimes take as they rapidly develop new functionality.

AWS Cloud Development Kit is often used to develop guard rails and standards for cloud consumption in the enterprise. AWS Cloud Development Kit Version 2 makes the code more efficient and introduces new capabilities.

Additional guardrails in AWS Control Tower are now available to help global and multinational organizations enforce data residency requirements rather than relying on documented corporate policies.

AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform replaces automation many organizations had written for their own purposes.

And so much more…

This is just a sampling of the hundreds of announcements made at AWS re:Invent 2021. For the complete list, check out this AWS page. And remember to check out Kevin’s summary of the three big trends, “Sustainability, Edge Computing and Data are Trendsetters,” Cloudreach Awards, Presentations and Demos and get access to our 6 cloud trends of 2022 podcasts – with a bonus – “Cloud Trends 2022 Podcasts.”  

As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with 11 competencies and over AWS 600 certifications, Cloudreach has helped deliver hundreds of AWS migration and modernization projects for customers. Ask us for more information on how these new product and service announcements can help drive transformation at your organization.