AWS re:Invent 2019 pushed the cloud provider’s portfolio past 175 services. Headline announcements — AWS Outposts for hybrid cloud and the AWS Braket quantum computing preview — dominated coverage, but dozens of smaller launches quietly shipped during the same week. This recap focuses on the features and capabilities in compute, serverless, security, and application development that deserve a second look.
Amazon EC2 Updates
EC2 Image Builder
EC2 Image Builder automates the creation and ongoing maintenance of OS images for Windows Server and Amazon Linux 2. Before this service, teams had to manually snapshot virtual machines to keep golden images current — a time-consuming and error-prone process. Image Builder handles this automatically for both on-premises and EC2-hosted workloads.
AWS Compute Optimizer
AWS Compute Optimizer applies machine learning to historical resource utilization data and recommends the most appropriate EC2 instance type for each workload. The goal is to replace manual instance sizing guesswork with data-driven recommendations, which can improve both performance and cost efficiency.
Graviton2-Powered Instances (Preview)
AWS previewed the sixth generation of its Arm-based EC2 instances, powered by the in-house Graviton2 processor. These instances are designed to offer improved performance and security compared to the fifth-generation M5, C5, and R5 families. The first instance type made available for preview was the M6g, which supports up to 64 vCPUs and 512 GiB of memory.
AWS Wavelength (Preview)
AWS Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage capabilities directly within telecommunications providers’ 5G networks. The result is ultra-low latency for mobile and edge applications — relevant use cases include augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, and real-time analytics at the edge.
To use Wavelength, developers extend an existing VPC to include a Wavelength Zone, then provision standard AWS resources such as EC2 instances and CloudFormation stacks within that zone. At launch, Wavelength was announced in partnership with Verizon, with Vodafone, SK Telecom, and KDDI planned to follow in 2020.
Serverless Updates
Provisioned Concurrency for AWS Lambda
Cold starts are one of the most common complaints about AWS Lambda in latency-sensitive applications. Provisioned Concurrency addresses this by keeping a configurable number of Lambda execution environments initialized and ready to respond immediately. At launch, AWS priced this feature at $0.015 per GB-hour for provisioned concurrency and $0.035 per GB-hour for actual execution time.
EKS on AWS Fargate
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) gained the ability to run Kubernetes pods on AWS Fargate, Amazon’s serverless compute engine for containers. Originally teased at re:Invent 2017, the capability finally shipped two years later. With this integration, teams can run Kubernetes workloads without provisioning or managing EC2 node groups — scheduling and infrastructure management are handled entirely through the EKS console.
Fargate Spot
Fargate Spot is the serverless equivalent of EC2 Spot Instances. It offers spare Fargate compute capacity at a discounted price for Amazon ECS tasks. Like EC2 Spot, Fargate Spot tasks can be interrupted when AWS reclaims that capacity, so the feature is best suited for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads rather than mission-critical jobs.
Security Updates
AWS Nitro Enclaves (Preview)
Nitro Enclaves are isolated virtual machine environments that run attached to an EC2 instance. By isolating sensitive processing from the parent instance’s operating system and other software, enclaves reduce the attack surface for workloads that handle highly sensitive data — such as cryptographic key processing or personally identifiable information. The feature was in preview at the time of the announcement.
S3 Access Points
Managing access to shared S3 buckets through a single bucket policy becomes unwieldy as the number of consumers and use cases grows. S3 Access Points solve this by giving each application or team its own named endpoint — with a unique hostname and a dedicated IAM policy — that governs how that specific consumer can interact with data in the bucket. This makes per-application access control significantly easier to reason about and audit.
VPC Ingress Routing
VPC Ingress Routing lets teams route all inbound and outbound VPC traffic through a dedicated EC2 instance before it reaches production workloads. Security appliances, intrusion detection systems, or packet inspection tools running on that instance can inspect traffic in-line — bringing on-premises network security policy enforcement models into the AWS environment without significant architecture changes.
Developer Tools
Amazon CodeGuru (Preview)
Amazon CodeGuru is a managed service that uses machine learning to provide two distinct capabilities for improving code quality and application efficiency:
- CodeGuru Reviewer — Performs automated pull request reviews before code reaches production. It can identify potential problems such as unsanitized inputs, improper handling of sensitive data, and deviations from AWS best practices.
- CodeGuru Profiler — A lightweight runtime agent that continuously analyzes a running application, identifies CPU-intensive code paths and inefficient patterns, and surfaces actionable recommendations to improve performance and reduce compute costs.
At launch, CodeGuru supported integration with GitHub and AWS CodeCommit repositories. The service was available in preview at re:Invent 2019.
Summary
AWS re:Invent 2019 was dense with announcements. While Outposts and Braket earned most of the press coverage, the practical day-to-day impact for many engineering teams will come from services like Compute Optimizer, EC2 Image Builder, Provisioned Concurrency, and S3 Access Points. Review each capability against your current architecture to identify where they can reduce operational overhead, improve security posture, or lower your AWS bill.
Original reporting source: searchaws.techtarget.com