Top 3 Favorites from AWS re:Invent 2020

As in years past, the buildup to re:Invent (annual AWS conference) creates a lot of anticipation for new features and services that will hit the market. While I can’t discuss every feature/release here (there were many), I’ll review a few that I found the most interesting.

This year started with the unexpected Kinesis outage, which affected many online sites and services. Surprisingly enough, this had nothing to do with the release of AWS’ new service, Fault Injection Simulator, which I’ll touch on first:

• Fault Injection Simulator – AWS is providing everyone with Chaos Engineering as a service. Previously, setting up applications such as Simian Army or Chaos Monkey were the preferred ways to test applications for resilience, bottlenecks, tolerance, etc. The idea is simple: create an unexpected failure within the application and understand how it is handled (not only by the application but by the Operations team as well). This service lets users target resources tagged in the UAT environment and gradually increase the processor speed to see how the application performs. Or learn what happens when API throttling occurs—and what bottlenecks result. This service is perfect for AWS GameDay I’m looking forward to seeing it in action.
• AWS Proton – This could simplify the way microservices are managed. As the idea of the monolith applications slowly shifts and decouples, it’s easy to start deploying hundreds or thousands of microservices within an environment. But managing the ever-changing infrastructure for those microservices can be extremely challenging. AWS is assuming the shift from the Infrastructure and Application teams has moved to a Platform team. Proton provides the Platform team the framework and best practices to build and deploy the whole CI/CD process—with everything except the actual application code.
• Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL – This is exciting, to say the least. Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL gives users the ability to run SQL applications on Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes, making it easier and cheaper to move SQL workloads to the cloud. The need to change libraries, update SQL statements, or modify database schemas is greatly reduced. Add moving to Aurora Serverless v2 and you will only pay for the resources that are consumed. This is a service that can be heavily used.

If you have not yet reviewed all the releases from ReInvent, I encourage you to take the time to see what else is out there. And as always, please feel free to reach out to us at any time for any cloud needs.