Thursday’s General Session Keynote kicked off with Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, taking the stage to deliver additional product and services announcements with the inclusion of deeper, technical content. Revisiting his vision for 21st Architectures from the 1st Re:Invent in 2012, Werner focused on what he sees as key guiding principles for next-gen workloads.
- Voice represents the next major disruption in computing. Stressing this point, Werner announced the general availability of Alexa for Business to help improve productivity by introducing voice automation into your business.
- Use automation to make experimentation easier
- Encryption is the ‘key’ to controlling access to your data. As such, encrypting data (at rest and in transit) should be a default behavior.
- All the code you should ever write is business logic.
Werner also highlighted the fact that AWS now has over 3,951 new services released since 2012. These services were not built for today but built for the workloads of the future. The goal for AWS, Werner says, is to be your partner for the future.
One of the highlights of the keynote was when Abby Fuller, evangelist for containers at AWS, came on stage to talk about the future of containers at AWS. She demoed the use of Fargate which is AWS’s fully managed container service. Think of Fargate as Elastic Beanstalk but for containers. Per AWS documentation “It’s a technology that allows you to use containers as a fundamental compute primitive without having to manage the underlying instances. All you need to do is build your container image, specify the CPU and memory requirements, define your networking and IAM policies, and launch. With Fargate, you have flexible options to closely match your application needs and you’re billed with per-second granularity.”
The Cloud9 acquisition was also a highlight of the keynote. Cloud9 is a browser-based IDE for developers. Cloud9 is completely integrated with AWS and you can create cloud environments, develop code, and push that code to your cloud environment all from within the tool. It’s really going to be useful for writing and debugging lambda functions for developers that have gone all in on serverless technologies.
New Announcements
AWS Lambda Function Execution Activity Logging – Log all execution activity for your Lambda functions. Previously you could only log events but this allows you to log data events and get additional details.
AWS Lambda Doubles Maximum Memory Capacity for Lambda Functions – You can now allocate 3008MB of memory to your AWS Lambda functions.
AWS Cloud9 – Cloud9 is a cloud based IDE for writing, running, and debugging your code.
API Gateway now supports endpoint integrations with Private VPCs – You can now provide access to HTTP(S) resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without exposing them directly to the public Internet.
AWS Serverless Application Repository – The Serverless Application Repository is a collection of serverless applications published by developers, companies, and partners in the serverless community.
We expect AWS to announce many more awesome features and services before the day ends so stay tuned for our AWS re:Invent 2017 Products & Services Review and 2017 Conference Recap blog posts for a summary of all of the announcements that are being delivered at AWS re:Invent 2017.
— Brent Clements, Sr. Cloud Consultant, 2nd Watch
