AWS re:Invent 2022 Recap (Part One)
Sun, Feb 12, 2023
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Re:Invent Recap is a survey of recent product launches and new features announced around AWS re:invent 2022. In Part One, we look at what's new in Serverless, DevOps, and Developer Tools categories.
NOTE: If you would prefer a video presentation of this content – you can catch the session here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJQQA0wUwYw
We recently conducted a one-hour session : AWS re:invent 2022 recap (part one)
Part One covered recent product launches and feature announcements in the space of Serverless, DevOps, and Developer Tools.
New in Developer Tools
AWS Application Composer (Preview)
AWS Application Composer is a brand new product launch that helps you visually compose and configure AWS services into serverless applications backed by infrastructure as code (IaC).
You can rapidly generate ready to deploy IaC that follows best practices, and maintain a model of your architecture that’s easier to share and build on with team members.
Detailed blog post: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/visualize-and-create-your-serverless-workloads-with-aws-application-composer/
Amazon Code Catalyst (Preview)
Amazon CodeCatalyst is one more brand new launch – and is available in its own user interface outside the AWs Management console. It is a unified software development service that makes it faster to build and deliver software on AWS.
CodeCatalyst provides software development teams with an integrated project experience that brings together the tools needed to plan, code, build, test, and deploy applications on AWS. It aims to reduce the heavy-lifting involved on the part of dev teams in establishing and operating the development environments and pipelines for common application patterns and technology stacks.
Product Detail Page - https://aws.amazon.com/codecatalyst/
Launch Announcement - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/12/announcing-amazon-codecatalyst-preview/
Enhancements in Amazon CodeWhisperer (Preview)
Amazon CodeWhisperer is a machine learning (ML)–powered service that helps improve developer productivity by generating code recommendations based on developers’ comments in natural language and their code in the integrated development environment (IDE).
Amazon CodeWhisperer now provides AWS administrators the ability to enable CodeWhisperer for their organization with Single Sign-On authentication. Administrators can easily integrate CodeWhisperer with their existing workforce identity solutions, provide access to users and groups, and configure organization-wide settings. Additionally, individual users who do not have AWS accounts can now use CodeWhisperer with their personal email using AWS Builder ID.
The programming language support for CodeWhisperer is also being expanded. In addition to Python, Java and JavaScript, developers can now use CodeWhisperer to accelerate development on their C# and TypeScript projects.
New in Serverless
AWS Lambda SnapStart
In many cases the execution of Lambda function takes milliseconds to begin. In others, the ‘init’ phase can take longer due to a number of reasons and is seen especially starkly in Java runtimes. This event is known as a cold start.
Lambda SnapStart is a new feature available for Java runtime at no additional cost – hat virtually eliminates cold starts. This utilizes the firecracker lightweight VM technology developed by AWS to take a snap shot of the virtual machine after the init phase is done – and utilizes that cached image, upon a cold invocation, to near-instantly provision an execution-ready environment for Lambda’s handler execution.
Detailed Blog posts -
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/starting-up-faster-with-aws-lambda-snapstart/
Amazon EventBridge Pipes
This new feature aims to make it easy to build event-driven architectures, and create point-to-point integrations between event producers and consumers - and remove the need for creating “glue” code integrating various AWS Services.
At the moment EventBridge supports 14 different AWS Services as event producers or consumers, with optional filtering and enrichment steps.
Detailed Blog Post -
Re:invent 2022 Talk -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXGXCOc3cBs
Distributed Map for AWS Step Functions
The new distributed map state allows you to write Step Functions to coordinate large-scale parallel workloads within your serverless applications.
The new distributed map state can launch up to ten thousand parallel workflows to process data. And you can now iterate over millions of objects such as logs, images, or .csv files stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Detailed Blog Post –
New in DevOps
Amazon ECS Service Connect
ECS Service Connect provides an easy network setup and seamless service communication deployed across multiple ECS Clusters and VPCs. This allows us to refer and connect to services by logical names using a namespace provided by AWS Cloud Map and automatically distribute traffic between ECS tasks without deploying and configuring load balancers.
The ECS Console also displays dashboards with real-time network traffic metrics for operational monitoring and debugging.
Announcement -
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/amazon-ecs-service-connect/
Detailed Blog Post -
Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments
Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments, is a new feature for Amazon Aurora (MySQL) and Amazon RDS (MySQL and MariaDB) that makes database updates safer, simpler, and faster.
The heavy-lifting of provisioning a green environment and switching over from blue to green is automated, fully managed, and provided with a few clicks or CLI commands.
This allows us to make changes, such as major and minor version upgrades, schema modifications, and operating system or maintenance updates, to the staging environment without impacting the production workload.
Detailed Blog Post -
Amazon Elastic Disaster Recovery Automated Failback
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) enables customers to use AWS as an elastic recovery site for their on-premises applications without needing to invest in on-premises DR infrastructure that lies idle until needed. Once enabled, DRS maintains a constant replication posture for your operating systems, applications, and databases.
AWS announced that DRS now also supports in-AWS failback. he new automated support provides a simplified and expedited experience to fail back Amazon EC2 instances to the original Region, and both failover and failback processes (for on-premises or in-AWS recovery) can be started from the AWS Management Console.
Blog Post –
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/automated-in-aws-failback-for-aws-elastic-disaster-recovery/
Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor
Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor is a new capability of CloudWatch that gives visibility into how an internet issue might impact the performance and availability of your applications. It allows you to reduce the time it takes to diagnose internet issues from days to minutes.
Blog Post -
Summary
The part one of our session with the above topic is covered here in this video -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJQQA0wUwYw
(Please reach out to me if you are interested in the slides.)
These were just some of the select highlights from reinvent 2022 announcements. There were many more feature announcements and enhancements that you might want to check out on official AWS blogs and website. Keeping up with the pace of changes in this space is a full-time engagement. And we are trying. Part Two covering more domains is in the works, along with some quizzes and takeaways.