Major Highlights from AWS re:Invent 2021

in AWS re:Invent, Launch, News

Welcome to AWS re:Invent! Below are some of the most significant announcements from our largest event of the year. AWS Chief Evangelist Alex Johnson and our team of AWS developer advocates from around the world share their insights and provide useful tips for getting started with some of their favorite new AWS offerings.

With so much incredible development happening at AWS, we can’t cover everything here. Be sure to check out the Previews section at the end of this post for brief overviews of additional noteworthy launches discussed in the keynotes, and don’t miss these additional resources to learn more:

(Last updated: 12:43 p.m. PST, Dec. 2, 2021.)

Quick Category Links:

Analytics

Introducing Amazon Redshift Serverless – Run Analytics At Any Scale Without Managing Data Warehouse Infrastructure. This new capability simplifies running analytics in the cloud with high performance at any scale. Just load your data and start querying without the hassle of setting up and managing clusters.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand – Stream Data at Scale Without Managing Capacity. This new capacity mode eliminates the need for provisioning and managing capacity for streaming data. Kinesis Data Streams On-demand automatically scales in response to varying data traffic.

AWS Lake Formation – General Availability of Cell-Level Security and Governed Tables with Automatic Compaction. This service makes it easy to establish a secure data lake in just days instead of weeks or months; new features further streamline data loading, optimize storage, and manage access.

Announcing AWS Data Exchange for APIs: Find, Subscribe to, and Use Third-party APIs with Consistent Authentication. This new capability eases the burden on developers and IT admins tasked with integrating and securing access to multiple third-party APIs.

Application Integration

New – Use Amazon S3 Event Notifications with Amazon EventBridge. We are streamlining how you can use EventBridge to develop applications that respond quickly and effectively to changes in your S3 objects. This new “directly wired” model is faster, more reliable, and more developer-friendly than ever.

Architecture

New – Sustainability Pillar for AWS Well-Architected Framework. The Sustainability Pillar contains questions designed to evaluate the design, architecture, and implementation of your workloads to reduce energy consumption and improve efficiency.

Announcing AWS Well-Architected Custom Lenses: Extend the Well-Architected Framework with Your Internal Best Practices. Custom Lenses offer a consolidated view and a consistent method to measure and enhance your workloads on AWS without relying on external spreadsheets or third-party systems.

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning

New AWS Scholarship Program Helps Underrepresented and Underserved Students Prep for Careers in AI and ML. The AWS AI & ML Scholarship program launches alongside the all-new AWS DeepRacer Student service and Student League.

Now in Preview – Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, a Free Service to Learn and Experiment with ML. We’re introducing a free service allowing anyone to learn and experiment with ML without needing an AWS account, credit card, or cloud configuration knowledge.

Announcing Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender. This new capability automates load testing and optimizes model performance across machine learning instances.

New – Introducing SageMaker Training Compiler. This capability automatically compiles your Python training code and generates GPU kernels specifically for your model, resulting in reduced memory and compute usage, and faster training times.

New – Create and Manage EMR Clusters and Spark Jobs with Amazon SageMaker Studio. Data scientists can now connect to and manage EMR clusters from within SageMaker Studio, eliminating the need to leave their familiar environment.

Announcing Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus. Ground Truth Plus is a turn-key service that uses an expert workforce to deliver high-quality training datasets quickly and reduces costs by up to 40 percent.

New – Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS to Detect, Diagnose, and Resolve Amazon Aurora-Related Issues using ML. Developers will now have sufficient information to determine the exact cause of database performance issues in Amazon Aurora, saving many hours of troubleshooting.

Announcing Amazon SageMaker Canvas – a Visual, No Code Machine Learning Capability for Business Analysts. Now business analysts can build machine learning models and generate accurate business predictions without writing code or needing ML expertise.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer Introduces Secrets Detector to Identify Hardcoded Secrets and Secure Them with AWS Secrets Manager. This automated tool helps developers find secrets in source code or configuration files, including passwords, API keys, and access tokens.

AWS Marketplace

New – AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere Lets You Deploy Your Kubernetes Cluster in Any Environment. This new set of capabilities allows customers to find, subscribe to, and deploy third-party Kubernetes applications from AWS Marketplace on any Kubernetes cluster in any environment.

Compute

Use New Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances to Build and Test Apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. The availability (in preview) of EC2 M1 Mac instances lets you access machines built around the Apple-designed M1 System on Chip. If you are a Mac developer and re-architecting your apps, you can now build and test them while taking advantage of all the benefits of AWS.

New Storage-Optimized Amazon EC2 Instances (Im4gn and Is4gen) Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors. We’re introducing two new families of storage-optimized instances, Im4gn and Is4gen, powered by Graviton2 processors. Both instances offer up to 30 TB of NVMe storage using custom-built AWS Nitro SSD devices.

New – AWS Outposts Servers in Two Form Factors. We are launching three AWS Outposts servers powered by the AWS Nitro System with your choice of x86 or Arm/Graviton2 processors.

Join the Preview – Amazon EC2 C7g Instances Powered by New AWS Graviton3 Processors. These instances are ideal for compute-intensive workloads, such as HPC, batch processing, and more.

New – Amazon EC2 M6a Instances Powered By 3rd Gen AMD EPYC Processors.

For more insights on job search strategies, visit this resource. Also, if you’re interested in organizational behavior, check out this authority on the impact of leadership. Lastly, for a better understanding of employee training, this excellent resource provides valuable context.