We attended AWS re: Invent, the largest cloud computing event, which was held 100% virtual for the first time; and we want to share the most outstanding announcements with you.

Launches and new services.

The «Automatic Table Optimization» for AWS Redshift, which automatically improves the performance of queries, generating indexes for distribution and ordering, is now available from version 1.0.21291 in all regions where Redshift Advisor is accessible.

New, type RA3.xlplus nodes are now available, improving the offer of this family of nodes with managed storage. It also allows to easily move clusters between AWS Availability Zones.

AWS EC2 introduces new network performance metrics for instances allowing a more detailed analysis when instances exceed their capacity and make better decisions about the appropriate size. Metrics include: allowance for inbound and outbound bandwidth, packets-per-second (PPS), connections tracked and PPS to link-local services.

These metrics are already available for all instances running the latest ENA driver version on Linux and will be released for Windows instances soon.

AWS Transit Gateway Connect, a new AWS Transit Gateway feature, will make it much easier to deploy SD-WAN solutions on AWS. It is already supported by several SD-WAN product providers such as Cisco (SD-WAN, ACI), Aruba (HPE), Silver Peak, Fortinet, Versa Networks, Palo Alto Networks (CloudGenix, VM series), Citrix, Aviatrix, 128 Technology, Sophos, Arista Networks, Aryaka and Alkira. Available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon, N. California) and Europe (Ireland) regions.

Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS will allow to run AWS EMR workloads in a container cluster on AWS EKS. It is already supported in the US West (Oregon), US East (N Virginia) and Europe (Ireland) regions.

No more analyzing VPC, Route Tables, and Security Groups trying to understand connectivity issues in AWS VPC. VPC Reachability Analyzer is here now! A new feature that allows us to test connectivity between resources in a VPC. Now available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific ( Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Milan ), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), South America (Sao Paulo) and Middle East (Bahrain).

AWS Audit Manager is the new service to continuously audit the AWS resources that are being used and map it with industry standards such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) to verify the compliance level of any architecture.
AWS CloudShell was introduced. A shell embedded in the browser that will allow immediate access, through the AWS web console, to Amazon Linux 2 instances. Also, the Common tools and AWS CLIs will be automatically available allowing to select between Bash, zsh and PowerShell. It is now available in the US-East-1 (N. Virginia), US-East-2 (Ohio), US-West-2 (Oregon), AP-Northeast-1 (Tokyo), and EU-West- regions. 1 (Ireland).

Amazon Location Service launch in Preview mode. A new AWS cloud contribution that will allow adding location functionality to applications in a secure way, complying with privacy standards. It will provide maps, points of interest, geocoding, geofences and tracking for applications, using high quality data that will provide the great Esri and HERE. It is now available (preview) in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-East (Ohio), US-West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

The launch of Prometheus as a service with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) was announced. This AWS service will facilitate the monitoring of containerized applications with robustness and resilience. It is also integrating with other AWS services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS PrivateLink, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. It is now available in Preview mode in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), and EU (Ireland) regions.

AWS Systems Manager Change Manager was also part of the announcements. It allows to establish flows with approvals for changes in applications components. This minimizes the chances of errors, conflicts, and unexpected results. It can be integrated with services like AWS CloudWatch alarms for rollbacks, AWS Organizations, AWS SSO. It is now available in all AWS Business Regions that offer Amazon Systems Manager, except AWS GovCloud and the China Regions.

In addition, the introduction of the Grafana managed service was announced. It integrates easily with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS IoT SiteWise, AWS X-Ray, Amazon Timestream, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Amazon Aurora PostgresSQL. It also provides an in-console upgrade to Grafana Enterprise, allowing integration with external data sources such as Datadog, MongoDB, New Relic, Splunk and ServiceNow, allowing access to training and consulting from Grafana Labs.

In 2021, AWS Fault Injection Simulator will be launched. A service that will allow simulating controlled failures in applications and discovering points of failure, weak points, bottlenecks, edge case errors, blind spots (not monitored); Following the movement of Chaos Engineering!

Updates and new versions

Now AWS CloudGuru allows application memory profiling, enabling developers to better understand the memory usage of their code to find memory overflows, identify high computing cost code lines and improve costs and performance.

AWS ECR, the AWS container image repository, now enables easy replication of images across regions, increasing resiliency and making it easier to create new environments. Something that previously involved an additional and manual effort.

AWS Batch is allowing to use AWS Fargate as a computing backend. This improves the workloads initialization times and allows to obtain all the serverless world of AWS Fargate benefits.

Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights is now widely available.

AWS Fargate is recharged with a few releases this year:

• Persistent storage support with AWS EFS
• Ephemeral storage increased to 20 GB
• Ephemeral storage encrypted by default
• Network performance metrics now showing in CloudWatch Container Insights
• Supports CAP_SYS_PTRACE
• The container runtime is no longer Docker and now uses ContainerD
• Incorporates usage metrics in relation to service fees (also known as limits)
• Increased default service quotas for tasks / pods

AWS Launch Wizard now makes it easier to implement the following SAP applications: SAP NetWeaver 7.5 SPS02 – 7.5 SPS00 on HANA, SAP S / 4HANA 1909 & 2020 and SAP BW / 4HANA 2.0.

New C6gn instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. It offers up to 40% better performance and price than the C5n family instances. Ideal for optimized workloads requiring high network performance.

Elastic Fabric Adapter offers network bandwidth of up to 400 Gbps and Libfabric replaces the TCP / IP stack, simplifying and accelerating network loads. At hardware and operating system level, it changes the network driver for a kernel-level driver and proprietary hardware.

AWS Systems Manager is loaded with new features! The Application Manager will allow to publish proprietary applications to be managed through Systems Manager. These applications can be present in services such as AWS CloudFormation stacks, AWS Resource Groups, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters, and AWS Launch Wizard.

In addition, Application Manager allows us to run diagnostic and maintenance routines on the AWS resources used by these applications. It is now available in all AWS business regions, AWS GovCloud (US), AWS China (Beijing), operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia), operated by NWCD.