AWS re:Invent 2021: Key Takeaways

AWS re:Invent concluded last week. The annual AWS event for the cloud computing community took place in Las Vegas. It was the first re:Invent, with new CEO Adam Selipsky delivering the main keynote. There were many exciting updates for businesses and cloud aficionados as the cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) turned the dial of re:Invent 2021. The event is done for the current year, but it has a lot of updates to put the spotlight on. Let's see some highlighting ones from Storage, Compute, Containers, DevOps, and security points of view.

AWS re:Invent 2021 key takeaways

Graviton3:
AWS announced new instances for EC2 in the shape of C7g, powered by the latest Graviton3 processor. Graviton3 is the most powerful CPU ever launched by AWS, aimed at what AWS labels compute-intensive workloads.
Launch of New Local Zones:
AWS announced a vast expansion to its global cloud network to maintain its supremacy in the technology arms race. With 30 new AWS Local Zones in major cities across the globe, Dr. Werner Vogels, chief technology officer and vice president of Amazon, revealed the new zones during his keynote. These new zones will benefit businesses worldwide by choosing AWS services and solutions.
Amazon Redshift Serverless:
To change how data is analyzed and managed, Amazon introduced Amazon Redshift, where SQL can analyze structured and semi-structured data. Amazon has now revealed Amazon Redshift Serverless that performs analytics at a very high speed at any scale. Customers won't need to manage clusters and all this with the pay-as-you-go model.
Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand:
Amazon launched a new capacity mode for Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand that eliminated capacity provisioning and management for streaming workloads. Kinesis Data Streams, a fully managed, serverless service, is used for the real-time processing of streamed data at a massive scale. It can take any amount of data from sources and scale up and down as required.
AWS Data Exchange for APIs:
Amazon announced the general availability of AWS DataExchange for APIs. This new capability allows users to find, subscribe to, and use third-party APIs with consistent access using AWS SDKs and compatible AWS-native authentication and governance. This new update makes it easy for developers and IT administrators to integrate and secure access to multiple third-party APIs.
Sustainability Pillar for AWS Well-Architected Framework:
The newly introduced Sustainability Pillar helps organizations learn, measure, and improve their workloads with the help of environmental best practices for cloud computing. Like the other pillars, Sustainability Pillar contains questions that aim to evaluate the design, architecture, and implementation to reduce energy consumption and improve efficiency. The pillar acts as a tool to track your progress toward policies and best practices. Moreover, the pillar helps developers and cloud architects surface the trade-offs, and best practices, highlight patterns, and avoid anti-patterns. The pillar helps organizations better understand the state of their workloads.
AWS Well-Architected Custom Lenses:
AWS announced the general availability of AWS Well-Architected Custom Lenses. The AWS Well-Architected Framework allows you to implement your own best practices. This will complement the existing model based on your industry, operational plans, and internal processes. With the help of Custom Lenses, you can get a consolidated view and a consistent approach to measure and improve AWS workloads without relying on external spreadsheets or third-party systems.
AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere:
AWS introduced AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere, which is a set of capabilities that allows AWS customers to find, subscribe to, and deploy third-party Kubernetes applications from AWS Marketplace on any Kubernetes cluster in any environment. This launch is beneficial for customers running containerized workloads. Moreover, you can deploy third-party Kubernetes applications to on-premises environments using Amazon EKS Anywhere.
Karpenter:
AWS also announced Karpenter, an open-source, flexible, high-performance Kubernetes cluster autoscaler built with AWS. Karpenter will improve your application availability and cluster efficiency by rapidly launching the right-sized computer resources to meet changing application load. Moreover, it will also provide just-in-time computer resources that meet your application's needs and optimize a cluster's computer resource footprint to minimize costs and improve performance.
Construct Hub and AWS Cloud Development Kit Version 2:
AWS announced the availability of the Construct Hub and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) version 2. AWS CDK, an open-source framework, simplifies working with cloud resources using familiar programming languages such as TypeScript, Java, C#, Python, and Go. Developers can create and configure cloud resources within their applications using reusable constructs in their choice of language. You can also write custom constructs, which can later be shared across teams and the organization.
Amazon S3 Event Notifications with Amazon EventBridge:
AWS announced a new "directly wired" model that is faster, more reliable, and more developer-friendly than ever. It makes it easier to use EventBridge to build applications that quickly and efficiently react to the changes in S3 objects. Now you can process events without the need to make additional copies of your objects or write specialized, single-purpose code to process events.
Pull Through Cache Repositories for Amazon Elastic Container Registry:
AWS announced pull-through cache repository support in Amazon Elastic Container Registry. The launch applies to publicly accessible registries that do not require authentication. Pull through cache repositories provide developers with improved performance, security, and availability of Amazon Elastic Container Registry for container images that are sourced from public registries.
Region Deny and Guardrails for AWS Control Tower:
AWS announced that users can now use AWS Control Tower to deploy data residency preventive and detective controls, referred to as guardrails. These guardrails will restrict access to AWS APIs through service control policies (SCPs) built and managed by AWS Control Tower to prevent provisioning resources in unwanted AWS Regions. Moreover, it will restrict content to be created or transferred outside of selected Regions at the infrastructure level. Here, content can be software, data, audio, text, video, or images hosted on AWS for processing or storage.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a lot in the box for everyone this year that would ease organizational operations. With a fantastic speaker list rounding out the keynotes, the event gave a comforting and warm feel to the industry returning to normal.