10 Announcements from AWS re:Invent 2022 You Might Have Missed
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AWS re:Invent 2022 was really special for me, as I attended this year in person! I watched Dr. Werner Vogels live keynote and saw him open up with a Matrix-styled video, taking the red pill and entering the synchronous world 🤣, most importantly, I have met many like-minded DevOps and Cloud Enthusiasts.
Last year, I shared a post about 10 announcements from AWS re:Invent 2021 that many might have missed, so I wanted to write a similar post for re:Invent 2022.
1. Aurora zero-ETL integration with Redshift
This is actually quite a big announcement because right now, to achieve a similar task you would have to do a custom ETL, “But what if we could do more? What if we could eliminate ETL entirely?” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said.
Eliminate ETL? wow! Overall I think it’s nice to see that AWS makes this kind of task easier for everyone.
2. AWS Verified Access
Do you love Zero Trust security principles? then you will love AWS Verified Access, basically, if you have an application endpoint, for example, https://cool-app.my-website.com you can now protect and require authentication without having to manage VPN and whitelist IP addresses.
An example use case is blocking the staging/dev endpoint from the internet and only allowing users from the organization’s email @amazon.com by using policies.
3. Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) Express for Amazon EC2
Current EC2 instances use ENA, however, the new ENA Express is a game changer!
The ENA Express uses AWS Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol, it increases the maximum single flow bandwidth of EC2 instances from 5 Gbps up to 25 Gbps, and it can provide up to 85% improvement in P99.9 latency for high throughput workloads.
I recommend reading about SRD protocol from In the search for performance, there’s more than one way to build a network AWS blog.
4. AWS Marketplace for containers now supports direct deployment to EKS clusters
If you are Kubernetes and containers fan, then I’m sorry to say that this year’s re:Invent is not for you, as this is the only big announcement from AWS this year that is related to containers/Kubernetes.
The new feature is an extension to EKS add-ons from other software vendors such as kubecost, teleport, tetrate, etc…
5. VPC Reachability Analyzer now supports network reachability analysis across accounts
Before we could only do network reachability analysis within an account, which made this service use case very limited as most network issues are cross-account issues, with the support of cross-account analysis now will make this service more useful for sure!
6. OpenSearch Serverless
Ok, this is a big one too and you probably did not miss this announcement but I had to include this in the list because I can 😛, no seriously, if you are managing your own ElasticSearch/OpenSearch cluster, then you know how much time and effort it takes for the day 2 operation!
OpenSearch Serverless automatically provisions and scales the underlying resources, but if you are still on ElasticSearch and thinking about switching to OpenSearch then I recommend reading the migration guide
7. AWS AppConfig Agent for containers
I love AppConfig as it simplifies feature flags and runtime configurations, but before this new agent, it was not easy to retrieve the config from the AppConfig service itself, now with the AppConfig Agent running in ur ECS/EKS cluster, it will query AWS AppConfig service for configuration and make it available locally within the cluster!
You can try this now as the agent is available in Public ECR
8. AWS re:Post Login with AWS Builder ID
If you have a passion for helping the AWS community or you would like to ask any questions to AWS Community experts, then you should check out AWS re:Post.
The new feature makes on-boarding new users way easier and without requiring to have an AWS Account! I have just created the Builder ID myself and it took less than 3 minute.
I also had the pleasure of meeting Nitin Tomar, he is the product manager of AWS re:Post and we had an awesome time exchanging ideas!
9. Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments
This new feature will make any DBA or anyone who manages AWS RDS/Aurora happy, the feature makes it easier and safer to upgrade/patch RDS instances because you can now switch back easily to the previous version(blue).
Currently only supported for Aurora MySQL and RDS for MariaDB, not RDS Postgres or Aurora Postgres yet 😥. I recommend reading Channy Yun Blog to learn more about the blue/green deployment feature.
10. CloudWatch Cross-Account Observability across multiple AWS accounts
Now you can easily search, visualize, and analyze metrics, logs, and traces from a centralized account.
As you can see from the screenshot, we can now define which account is the monitoring account and which account is the source account with just a few clicks!
Over to you
Which new services or features you are ready to try out from re:Invent 2022? Let me know!
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