Announcements for days!
AWS re:Invent 2019 has come and gone, and now the collective audience has to sort through the massive list of AWS announcements released at the event. According to the AWS re:Invent 2019 Recap communication, AWS released 77 products, features and services in just 5 days! Many of the announcements were in the Machine Learning (ML) space (20 total), closely followed by announcements around Compute (16 total), Analytics (6 total), Networking and Content Delivery (5 total), and AWS Partner Network (5 total), amongst others. In the area of ML, things like AWS DeepComposer, Amazon SageMaker Studio, and Amazon Fraud Detector topped the list. While in the Compute, Analytics, and Networking space, Amazon EC2 Inf1 Instances, AWS Local Zones, AWS Outposts, Amazon Redshift Data lake, AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager, and Inter-Region Peering were at the forefront. Here at 2nd Watch we love the cutting-edge ML feature announcements like everyone else, but we always have our eye on those announcements that key-in on what our customers need now – announcements that can have an immediate benefit for our customers in their ongoing cloud journey.
All About the Network
In Matt Lehwess’ presentation, Advanced VPC design and new capabilities for Amazon VPC, he kicked off the discussion with a poignant note of, “Networking is the foundation of everything, it’s how you build things on AWS, you start with an Amazon VPC and build up from there. Networking is really what underpins everything we do in AWS. All the services rely on Networking.” This statement strikes a chord here at 2nd Watch as we have seen that sentiment in action. Over the last couple years, our customers have been accelerating the use of VPCs, and, as of 2018, Amazon VPCs is the number one AWS service used by our customers, with 100% of them using it. We look for that same trend to continue as 2019 comes to an end. It’s not the sexiest part of AWS, but networking provides the foundation that brings all of the other services together. So, focusing on newer and more efficient networking tools and architectures to get services to communicate is always at the top of the list when we look at new announcements. Here are our takes on these key announcements.
AWS Transit Gateway Inter-Region Peering (Multi-Region)
One exciting feature announcement in the networking space is Inter-Region Peering for AWS Transit Gateway. This feature allows the ability to establish peering connections between Transit Gateways in different AWS Regions. Previously, connectivity between two Transit Gateways could only be done through a Transit VPC which included the overhead of running your own networking devices as part of the Transit VPC. Inter-Region peering for AWS Transit Gateway enables you to remove the Transit VPC and connect Transit Gateways directly.
The solution uses a new static attachment type called a Transit Gateway Peering Attachment that, once created, requires an acceptance or rejection from the accepter Transit Gateway. In the future, AWS will likely allow dynamic attachments, so they advise you to create unique ASNs for each Transit Gateway for the easiest transition. The solution also uses encrypted VPC peering across the AWS backbone. Currently Transit Gateway inter-region peering support is available for gateways in US East (Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and EU (Frankfurt) AWS Regions with support for other regions coming soon. You also can’t peer Transit Gateways in the same region.
(Source: Matt Lehwess: Advanced VPC design and new capabilities for Amazon VPC (NET305))
On the surface the ability to connect two Transit Gateways is just an incremental additional feature, but when you start to think of the different use cases as well as the follow-on announcement of Multi-Region Transit Gateway peering and Accelerated VPN solutions, the options for architecture really open up. This effectively enables you to create a private and highly-performant global network on top of the AWS backbone. Great stuff!
AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager
This new feature is used to centrally monitor your global network across AWS and on premises. The Transit Gateway network manager simplifies operational complexity of managing networks across regions and remote locations. This AWS feature is another to take a dashboard approach to provide a simpler overview of your resources that may be spread over several regions and accounts. To use it, you create a Global Network within the tool which is an object in the AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager service that represents your private global network in AWS. It includes your AWS Transit Gateway hubs, their attachments, and on-premises devices, sites, and links. Once the Global Network is created, you extend the configuration by adding in Transit Gateways, information about your on-premises devices, sites, links, and the Site-to-Site VPN connections with which they are associated, and start using it to visualize and monitor your network. It includes a nice geographic world map view to visualize VPNs (if they’re up/down impaired) or Transit Gateway Peering connections.
https://d1.awsstatic.com/re19/gix/gorgraphic.cdb99cd59ba34015eccc4ce5eb4b657fdf5d9dd6.png
There’s also a nice Topology feature that shows VPCs, VPNs, Direct Connect gateways, and AWS Transit Gateway-AWS Transit Gateway peering for all registered Transit gateways. It provides an easier way to understand your entire global infrastructure from a single view.
Another key feature is the integration with SD-WAN providers like Cisco, Aviatrix, and others. Many of these solutions will integrate with AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager and automate the branch-cloud connectivity and provide end-to-end monitoring of the global network from a single dashboard. It’s something we look forward to exploring with these SD-WAN providers in the future.
AWS Local Zones
AWS Local Zones in an interesting new service that addresses challenges we’ve encountered with customers. Although listed under Compute and not Networking and Content Delivery on the re:Invent 2019 announcement list, Local Zones is a powerful new feature with networking at its core.
Latency tolerance for applications stacks running in a hybrid scenario (i.e. app servers in AWS, database on-prem) is a standard conversation when planning a migration. Historically, those conversations would be predicated by their proximity to an AWS region. Depending on requirements, customers in Portland, Oregon may have the option to run a hybrid application stack, where those in Southern California may have been excluded. The announcement of Local Zones (initially just in Los Angeles) opens up those options to markets that were not previously available. I hope this is the first of many localized resource deployments.
That’s no Region…that’s a Local Zone
Local Zones are interesting in that they only have a subset of the services available in a standard region. Local Zones are organized as a child of a parent region, notably the Los Angeles Local Zone is a child of the Oregon Region. API communication is done through Oregon, and even the name of the LA Local Zone AZ maps to Oregon (Oregon AZ1= us-west-2a, Los Angeles AZ1 = us-west-2-lax-1a). Organizationally, it’s easiest to think of them as remote Availability Zones of existing regions.
As of December 2019, only a limited amount of services are available, including EC2, EBS, FSx, ALB, VPC and single-zone RDS. Pricing seems to be roughly 20% higher than in the parent region. Given that this is the first Local Zone, we don’t know whether this will always be true or if it depends on location. One would assume that Los Angeles would be a higher-cost location whether it was a Local Zone or full region.
All the Things
To see all of the things that were launched at re:Invent 2019 you can check out the re:Invent 2019 Announcement Page. For all AWS announcements, not just re:Invent 2019 launches (e.g. Things that launched just prior to re:Invent), check out the What’s New with AWS webpage. If you missed the show completely or just want to re-watch your favorite AWS presenters, you can see many of the re:Invent presentations on the AWS Events Youtube Channel. After you’ve done all that research and watched all those videos and are ready to get started, you can always reach out to us at 2nd Watch. We’d love to help!
-Derek Baltazar, Managing Consultant
-Travis Greenstreet, Principal Architect
