Episode 96 – re:Invent is here with presents for everyone!

Santa arrived early and he brought all the goods with him to The Cloud Pod this week. The team dives into all the big announcements from AWS re:invent 2020. 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

•  Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

• Amazon flips the bird at Microsoft with its Babelfish announcement. 
• AWS is angling for a free Jeep Wrangler with its new service.
• AWS is helping customers get out of the sticky situation they’re in and don’t know it. 

Amazon Web Services: Thankfully They Didn’t Ruin Our Predictions

• Amazon launches managed workflows for Apache Airflow to simplify data processing pipelines. Interesting to see it giving some alternative options.  
• AWS Lambda now has Code Signing, a trust and integrity control to confirm code is unaltered and from a trusted publisher. Not a nice way to start Thanksgiving if you are Palo Alto. 
• Amazon announces centralized account access management of AWS Single Sign-On and Attribute-based access control. Has a few rough edges.  
• Multi-Region Replication is now enabled for AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory. We’re so glad this is finally here.
• ♻️ Amazon announces reusable building blocks called modules to define infrastructure and applications in AWS CloudFormation. Amazon is jumping on the reusable elements bandwagon with this one.
• AWS Security Hub integrates with AWS Organizations for simplified security posture management. Basically a centralized security hub.

AWS Elasticsearch Announcements: 

• Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Elasticsearch version 7.9
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports anomaly detection for high cardinality datasets
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service introduces Piped Processing Language (PPL)
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Remote Reindex
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service revamps Kibana security user interface while integrating with other features

Smaller AWS Announcements: That’s Not All, Folks!

• ⚠️ Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer announces CodeQuality Detector to help manage technical debt and codebase maintainability. Ryan’s code better watch out.
• PostgreSQL 13 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database preview environment. Google did it first, though. 
• AWS Secrets Manager now supports 5,000 requests per second for the GetSecretValue API operation. A great way for hackers to get your secrets out faster!
• AWS CodeArtifact now supports NuGet. Not surprised by this.
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics launches enhancements for API monitoring. Nice!

re:Invent Recap: Get Comfy

Monday:

• Amazon announces C2 Mac instances to build and test macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and watchOS apps. Offering the same thing Apple Mac does but at 8x the price.  
• Amazon launches ECS circuit breaker to automatically roll back unhealthy service deployments. This is a nice improvement for ECS. 

Tuesday:

• ️ AWS launches D3 / D3en dense storage instances giving customers access to massive amounts of low-cost on-instance HDD storage.
• ⏩ Amazon announces new EC2 R5b instances to provide 3x higher EBS performance. 
• Amazon announces EC2 C6gn instances are coming soon, featuring 100 Gbps networking with AWS Graviton2 Processors.
• ☁️ New AWS EC2 M5zn instances have the fastest Intel Xeon scalable CPU in the Cloud.
• Amazon announces EC2 G4ad instances are coming soon and will feature AMD GPUs for Graphics Workloads.
• Amazon launches public Elastic Container Registry. Great for those suffering from those docker limits.
• Amazon announces new 1ms billing granularity adds cost savings for AWS Lambda. You could get multiple cost savings with this one, which is great.
• Amazon adds functions with up to 10 GB of memory and 6 vCPUs for AWS Lambda. Will save you a lot of time and money! 
• Announcing new AWS Wavelength Zone in Las Vegas. Makes no sense. 
• Announcing Cloud Audit Academy AWS-specific for audit and compliance teams. Really glad to see this!
• AWS announces plans to open source Babelfish for PostgreSQL. Biggest “eff you” to Microsoft licensing if we’ve ever seen one.
• AWS Proton is now in preview offering automated management for container and serverless deployments. This is an amazing add to its existing toolset.
• New Amazon EBS gp3 Volume lets customers set performance apart from capacity. A huge improvement over gp2.
• Amazon announces larger and faster io2 Block Express EBS Volumes with higher throughput are now in preview. This is massive!
• ‍♂️ AWS announces AQUA for Amazon Redshift is now in preview. One prediction point goes to Justin for this one.
• ️ Amazon announces new Container Image Support for AWS Lambda. Will change the way people build and test Lambdas.
• New Amazon DevOps Guru helps identify application errors and fixes. We’re curious to see how this will be implemented.
• Amazon announces AWS Glue Elastic Views is in preview. Nice to see but not sure about the use case for this one.
• AWS launches SageMaker Data Wrangler, a new data preparation service for machine learning. We love the name.
• New Amazon QuickSight Q answers natural-language questions about business data. You’ll need to make sure everything is linked properly for this one.
• Amazon Connect is now smarter and more integrated with third-party tools. Some pretty big improvements!
• ️ Introducing the next version of Amazon Aurora Serverless in Preview. This could be very compelling.
• Amazon announces Lookout for Equipment Analyzes Sensor Data to help detect equipment failure. Someone out there will be excited about this.
• Introducing Amazon Monitron, a simple and cost-effective service enabling predictive maintenance. Great for manufacturers!
• ️ Amazon announces Lookout for Vision, a new machine-learning service simplifies defect detection for Manufacturing. Cool but a bit dry for a keynote.
• ❄️ AWS Panorama Appliance brings computer vision applications to the Edge. Really cool feature.
• Amazon announces three more AWS Local Zones will be launched in 2020 and 12 more in 2021. Basically wherever they have Wavelength.
• Amazon makes some big preannouncements around AWS Outpost Form Factors, ECS and EKS. These will make people’s lives a lot easier.

Amazon EKS announcements:

• Amazon EKS simplifies installation and management for Kubernetes cluster add-ons
• Amazon EKS adds support for EC2 Spot Instances in managed node groups
• Amazon EKS Console Now Includes Kubernetes Resources to Simplify Cluster Management
• Introducing Amazon EKS Distro – an open source Kubernetes distribution used by Amazon EKS.  
• Introducing the new Amazon EKS console   

re:Invent Predictions – How Did We Do? 

1. Peter
   1. Integration between Sumerian and Chime/Slack (messaging service) for virtual in-person meetings 
   2. Major upgrade to CloudWatch/Logs/GuardDuty/CloudWatch Events (SIEM) but an actual SIEM product. Will have its own name or does something to GuardDuty 
   3. Robot SDK for tight integrations into AWS Cloud
2. Jonathan
   1. Serverless graph database (Neptune or something like Neptune)
   2. Live migration for some instance types between EC2 hosts so maintenance events don’t cause the same level of damage
   3. Detailed discussion of their use of IOT and AWS services for COVID-19 – Announced
3. Justin
   1. Snowflake report generation and capabilities in Redshift or new tool – Announced
   2. Cut in Bandwidth or C, M and R Instances by 10% minimum
   3. A Cloud Shell
4. Ryan
   1. Control plane for managing Kubernetes on premise or in other clouds – Announced
   2. An AI/machine learning-based observability tool
   3. COVID-19 response highlights the adoption rate of cloud computing because of the pandemic – Announced

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ The team took a break from the Lightning Round this week thanks to the re:Invent predictions, leaving scores at Justin (16 points), Jonathan (10 points), Ryan (six points) and Jacques (one point).