This post looks at the AWS re:Invent 2021 announcements from the perspective of a web developer
Background and Context
AWS has come a long way since 2006 when they first introduced EC2 service and ushered us into a new era of cloud computing.
Today, AWS offers hundreds of different services both specialised and general purpose - and it is truly an archetype of a long-tail service provider in computing - the same way that their parent company is in retail.
AWS re:Invent has seen the introduction of new products across the AWS target markets including: Machine Learning, Internet of Things, general purpose networking, hardware and software improvements of the infrastructure etc.
Out of 140 or so announcements presented during the re:Invent, in this post I've decided to focus on only a handful that were most exciting to me as a Web developer.
I’ve grouped the announcements based on a topic they belong to:
- Price Reductions
- New features to popular services
- Serverless
- Monitoring and alerting
- Security features
- Developer tooling
💰 Price Reductions
S3 is Amazon’s immensely popular object storage product which has seen price reductions in terms of:
- Reductions across the storage classes
- Intelligent tiering
- The introduction of a new storage class - Glacier Instant Retrieval
DynamoDB is Amazon’s fully managed NoSQL database which has seen the introduction of Infrequent Access table - which can reduce the price of using DynamoDB for some use-cases.
All of these reductions will automatically be reflected in your AWS bill without any involvement from your side.
🔗 Links:
- Amazon S3 announces a price reduction up to 31% in three storage classes
- Announcing the new S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Instant Access tier - Automatically save up to 68% on storage costs
- Announcing the new Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class - the lowest cost archive storage with milliseconds retrieval
- Amazon S3 Glacier storage class is now Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval; storage price reduced by 10% and bulk retrievals are now free
- Amazon DynamoDB announces the new Amazon DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access table class, which helps you reduce your DynamoDB costs by up to 60 percent
✨ New features to popular services
The most interesting announcement in this section are the S3 Event Notifications within Amazon EventBridge. I’m all about serverless and eliminating state in my applications, and with this feature it’s now easier to build applications which are event driven and react to changes in your S3 objects.
Another new feature added to S3 buckets is called AWS Backup. This feature allows easy central governance of the account-wide back-up policy. This means that from now on you can control the backup strategy for many AWS services from a central place in your AWS account.
🔗 Links:
- Amazon S3 Event Notifications within Amazon EventBridge help you build advanced serverless applications faster
- Announcing preview of AWS Backup for Amazon S3
- Amazon S3 adds new S3 Event Notifications for S3 Lifecycle, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, object tags, and object access control lists
⚡️ Serverless
AWS has been a consistent competitor in serverless space, offering many products that are priced on a pay-as-you-go-basis. Being a serverless proponent myself, I was happy to see the introduction of a several new serverless offerings:
- AWS MSK - pay as you go, fully managed Apache Kafka cluster
- Serverless EMR - which will allow serverless analysis of big data
- Serverless Redshift - would provide a pay-as-you-go pricing model for your Data Warehousing needs. I’d say that this last one was expected since almost all of the AWS database offerings already have a serverless version, so it was only a matter of time before Redshift got one as well.
🔗 Links:
- Introducing Amazon MSK Serverless in public preview
- Introducing Amazon EMR Serverless in preview
- Announcing Amazon Redshift Serverless (Preview)
🚨 Monitoring and alerting
In terms of Monitoring and Alerting, I was particularly excited about the introduction of Amazon CloudWatch RUM for monitoring applications’ client-side performance. AWS finally has a tool in this category. I’ve previously used NewRelic’s RUM solution and from my experience, having access to a tool like this makes optimising the performance of Web applications significantly easier.
Another announcement in this category is the CloudWatch Metrics Insights, a new product that offers a fast, flexible, SQL based query engine for your metrics. To illustrate how compelling this is: imagine analysing thousands of EC2 instances by CPU Utilisation to troubleshoot an underperforming application. And don’t worry, if you’re not that into SQL, there’s a visual query builder.
🔗 Links:
- Introducing Amazon CloudWatch RUM for monitoring applications’ client-side performance
- Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights (Preview)
🔐 Security features
Most of the notable security features from re:Invent are related to S3:
AWS has introduced a new Object Ownership setting known as Bucket owner enforced ownership, which disables access control lists and will let you dramatically simplify access management for data stored in S3 - which is awesome.
The S3 console now reports security errors, warnings and suggestions from IAM Access Analyzer, which is very valuable for tracking access to data stored in S3. In addition to that, there’s now a way of validating S3 policies programmatically by using the Access Analyzer API.
One other security feature that caught my eye is the automatic Application-layer DDoS mitigation in AWS Shield Advanced, which is available at no additional cost if you’re already a Shield Advanced subscriber. I’m a fan of not getting DDoSed and of automating things I would otherwise need to do myself, so this is a clear win.
🔗 Links:
- AWS Shield Advanced introduces automatic application-layer DDoS mitigation
- Amazon S3 Object Ownership can now disable access control lists to simplify access management for data in S3
- Amazon S3 console now reports security warnings, errors, and suggestions from IAM Access Analyzer as you author your S3 policies
🛠 Developer tooling
The biggest number of announcements from re:Invent that are related to Web development fit the category of Developer Tooling, so here’s my list:
- The AWS Amplify Studio is a visual editor which automatically translates designs made in Figma to “human-readable” React UI component code.
- After this translation you can use Amplify Studio to set up a backend using Amplify CLI and AWS CDK.
- This product comes with a pre-built React component library which is fully customizable in Figma.
If AWS Amplify Studio delivers on its promise, someone with a design skill-set could build a full-stack application via this visual editor.
- The general availability of AWS CDK v2 for JavaScript and other languages. This toolkit has become a very popular way to provision infrastructure recently and it’s nice to see AWS’ continued support for it.
Other notable products and features in this section that I’m just going to mention quickly are:
Pull through cache repositories for the Amazon Elastic Container Registry
General availability of “Construct Hub” - a registry of open-source reusable building blocks of AWS CDK apps
AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET which is an assistive tool that analyzes your .NET source code and runtime metrics so you can refactor your codebase into smaller code projects.
Terraform account provisioning and customization with AWS Control Tower
Amazon Karpenter (with a ‘K’) which is a new open-source Kubernetes cluster autoscaling project from AWS
🔗 Links:
- Introducing AWS Amplify Studio
- AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) v2 is now generally available
- Amazon WorkSpaces introduces Amazon WorkSpaces Web
- AWS announces Construct Hub general availability
- AWS Karpenter v0.5 Now Generally Available
- AWS Control Tower introduces Terraform account provisioning and customization
- Introducing AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET
- AWS customers can now find, subscribe to, and deploy third-party applications that run in any Kubernetes environment from AWS Marketplace
- Amazon ECR announces pull through cache repositories