AWS re:Invent 2022 - wrap-up

Nasstar_700x350_AWS-reinvent-BLOG-3

This year, the largest and most comprehensive event in cloud computing, AWS re:Invent, returned to Las Vegas where the best and brightest from across the industry shared the latest insights and innovations.

This article is the conclusion of a series of blog posts covering this event, with insight and analysis from AWS Ambassador and AWS Technical Practical Lead, Jason Oliver.

Catch up

Observations

This year the conference heavily focused on data, analysis and machine learning (ML), and simulation. If history has taught us anything, these are the areas that AWS customers should be investing in now to protect and grow their businesses.

Opinion

Overall, I felt as the AWS platform matures, the rate of innovation stalls; this is no bad thing, just a consequence of AWS being the market leader. 

Announcements seemed evolutionary rather than revolutionary - no big-bang items to be seen here. AWS appear to be in a season of capturing the low-hanging fruit.

Analysis

Zero ETL

AWS and its Zero extract, transform, load (ETL) mission seem appealing for big data solutions.

Bear with me on my loose analogy, but if you consider ETL to be a fruit press; a mechanism to take a piece of fruit, filter it, and extract its purest juices into a liquid that can be consumed as a drink.

Fruit-Press

Historically this press would be working in the background to ensure a vessel always contained enough juice to drink.

In my metaphor, I believe AWS is invoking the press at the point of need to ensure you consume only the freshest fruit juice without wasting unnecessary ware (or compute resources).

Usually, I'd have reservations about the mechanism's ability to scale and cope with pressing enough juice for consumption. Still, with its infrastructure and capability, I am confident AWS can deliver on this throughout demand.

I anticipate there are still many configurations needed for this service; a data source and intent for consumption will need to be identified, etc. 

Also, due to the infrastructure needed at scale to enable feasible throughput of juice, sorry, data,this Zero ETL technology will likely be more expensive than former ETL solutions. Therefore, depending on the use case, you'll probably end up with a tiered approach to ETL.

I look forward to the inevitable expansion of this technology to more AWS services beyond RedShift and Apache Spark.

Democratisation

As the AWS platform matures and adoption and demand becomes more expansive, the lack of a skilled workforce is holding back the progress and growth of the business. Therefore, it is trying to democratise its complex platform to new audiences, whether via new training programs or tools and interfaces to the platform such as AWS Elastic BeansStalk, Amazon Lightsail, Amazon SageMaker Canvas and now AWS Application Composer.

Highlights

For me, the most exciting announcements of the conference were the following,

  • AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. To evaluate any needed improvement when this tool update is released.
  • Amazon Security Lake. If I can get my hands on the preview, this could feed nicely into a project I am currently leading.
  • Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. To evaluate and, if appropriate, replace existing services.
  • Container runtime threat detection for Amazon GuardDuty. Evaluate along with existing GuardDuty Malware Protection for EBS volumes, announced early in the year, intending to propose these native features as a standard offering for the practice.
  • Amazon DataZone. The ability to quickly locate and collaborate on disparate data sets.
  • ML-powered forecasting with Q. I'm keen to understand suitable use cases for this visualisation solution based on my favourite visualisation tool, Amazon Quicksight
  • AWS Clean Rooms. When available, I'd like to explore this service and how it can help companies and their partners securely analyse and collaborate on datasets without sharing or revealing the underlying data.
  • AWS Glue Data Quality. A new feature of AWS Glue helps to build confidence in your data to make data-driven decisions routinely.
  • AWS Step Functions Distributed Map. An exciting innovation that should help build simple big-data solutions at a reduced price.
  • Amazon EventBridge Pipes. As a fan of the Linux pipe system to create powerful scripts, I am keen to see how this new feature lives up to the hype. If it is even half as advertised, then it will have a place at the core of most AWS environments.
  • Amazon Redshift Multi-AZ.  This is a no-brainer for any existing instance of the popular data warehouse to enhance the availability of analytic applications with automated failover.
  • AWS GuardDuty RDS Protection. To bolster the security of any existing Amazon Aurora databases.
  • Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL. To bolster the security of any existing PostgreSQL databases.

I hope you have found my series of blogs covering AWS re:Invent 2022 helpful.

About Jason

Jason Oliver is an accomplished AWS ambassador, technical practice lead, principal Cloud architect and builder with over 25 years of transformational IT experience working with organisations of all sizes and complexity.

Jason is an SME in AWS, Azure, and security with strong domain knowledge in central government. He has extensive knowledge of cloud, the Internet and security technologies in addition to heterogeneous systems spanning Windows, Unix, virtualisation, application and systems management, networking, and automation.

He evangelises innovative technology, sustainability, best practices, concise operational processes, and quality documentation. 

Jason is also an author, digital music producer, and a black belt and instructor in Karate.