AWS Re:Invent 2020 Announcements, Updates and Recap

AWS re:invent conference organized by AWS this year was virtual, free and almost three weeks long. AWS announced new features, improvements and new products and cloud services. Following is a quick review of the important highlights of the conference impacting compute, database, storage, machine learning and Data Analytics. https://reinvent.awsevents.com

Highlights

1. S3 Storage Lens — New Dashboard in S3 Console to check for Data Lake Insights and outliers
2. EKS and ECS Anywhere — Allows you to run ECS and EKS anywhere in On-premise or any other data center.
3. Aurora Serverless V2 — Allows you to quickly scale to as big as you want in fraction of seconds, along with features of read replicas, Multi AZ
4. Redshift AQUA — High-speed cache on top of Redshift Managed Storage

Storage

S3 Updates:

1. S3 Outposts that allows you to add storage of 48TB or 96TB and S3 Data Sync can be used to keep the data sync between Outpost and AWS.
2. S3 Intelligent Tiering is extended to 4 Access Tiers (Standard, Infrequent, Archive and Deep Archive)
3. S3 now has Strong Consistency which will be of great benefit when you are running analytics directly on top of Data Lake and you always want to read the latest record
4. S3 Replication will support Bi-Directional Replication, Multi Destination Replication and also provides replication notifications with metrics.
5. S3 Security Update Features now include Bucket Level Owner Overwrite.

EBS Updates

1. EBS — GP3 Volumes which separates out IOPS and Throughput from Storage and optimizes storage cost.

Compute

1. EKS Anywhere and ECS Anywhere allows you to run AWS Services anywhere like On-premise or any Data Center.
2. Lambda compute cost reduced by 1ms instead of 100ms, also now supports 10GB memory and 6 VCPU’s and now supports Container images as a packaging format.
3. AWS CloudShell is a browser-based shell that makes it easy to securely manage, explore, and interact with your AWS resources. CloudShell is pre-authenticated with your console credentials.

Database

1. Aurora Serverless V2 — Scales as big as you want to in fraction of seconds, Multi AZ, Read replicas. MySQL version this year, PostgreSQL early next year
2. Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL — will work with Application code that uses SQL Server to directly work on using Aurora and Babelfish will be made open source
3. Redshift AQUA — AQUA is a high-speed cache on top of Redshift Managed Storage that can scale out and process data in parallel across many AQUA nodes.

Machine Learning, IOT and Analytics

1. SageMaker — has made significant improvements with the following features

• SageMaker Studio — Integrated tools for SageMaker
• SageMaker Data Wrangler — Comes with 300 built-in transformations for data preparation
• SageMaker Feature Store — Helps store and share machine learning features
• SageMaker Pipelines — Helps run all the steps involved in preparing data and running models

2. AWS Proton — Will be used as a service for management and deployment of containers and Serverless processes.

3. DEVOPS Guru — Makes it easy for Developers to identify operational issues, Uses machine learning to identify the configuration issues

4. AWS Glue Elastic Views — Works like materialized views using different data stores like Dynamo DB, Elastic Search or Redshift

• It can be used for Combine or replicate into a target Data Store
• Any changes in source will be propagated to target data store

5. Quicksight Q — Ask any question in NL and dashboard with results will be displayed

6. AWS Wavelength — Optimized for 5G Mobile Computing