05 Dec 2022

Pierre Renard
Cloud technologies addict. Pierre enjoys making awesome cloud-based solutions.

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Top 10 news

It’s the end of the year and like Santa, AWS comes fully-loaded with new services and features to Las Vegas at re:Invent.

As usual, we are here to discover and discuss about cloud-based solutions and technologies that could help our customers to achieve their journey in the cloud. Here is my top 10 of annoucements for this year.

Table of Contents

10

Amazon Inspector Now Scans AWS Lambda Functions for Vulnerabilities

Until now, customers who wanted to analyze their mixed workloads (including EC2 instances, container images, and Lambda functions) against common vulnerabilities needed to use AWS and third-party tools.

Check the complete annoucement here; Amazon Inspector Now Scans AWS Lambda Functions for Vulnerabilities.

9

AWS Machine Learning University

AWS Machine Learning University is now providing a free educator enablement program. This program provides faculty at community colleges, minority-serving institutions (MSIs), and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) with the skills and resources to teach data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) concepts to build a diverse pipeline for in-demand jobs of today and tomorrow.

Please visit the AWS Machine Learning University to discovers all available courses.

8

Step Functions Distributed Map

The new distributed map state can launch up to ten thousand parallel workflows to process data.

Check out Step Functions Distributed Map – A Serverless Solution for Large-Scale Parallel Data Processing for more info.

7

Amazon Athena for Apache Spark

With this feature, we can run Apache Spark workloads, use Jupyter Notebook as the interface to perform data processing on Athena, and programmatically interact with Spark applications using Athena APIs.

More info at New — Amazon Athena for Apache Spark

6

Amazon Security Lake

Amazon Security Lake is a service that automatically centralizes an organization’s security data from cloud and on-premises sources into a data lake stored in your account.

Amazon Security Lake automates the central management of security data, normalizing from integrated AWS services and third-party services and managing the lifecycle of data with customizable retention and also automates storage tiering.

For more information about its key features, please check out this article Preview: Amazon Security Lake – A Purpose-Built Customer-Owned Data Lake Service

5

AWS KMS External Key Store (XKS)

This new feature allows you to store AWS KMS customer managed keys on a hardware security module (HSM) that you operate on premises.

More info at Announcing AWS KMS External Key Store (XKS)

4

Simplify Networking for Service-to-Service Communication with VPC Lattice

With VPC Lattice, you can define policies for traffic management, network access, and monitoring so you can connect applications in a simple and consistent way across AWS compute services (instances, containers, and serverless functions).

For more information about this service, please refer to the AWS blog post Introducing VPC Lattice – Simplify Networking for Service-to-Service Communication (Preview).

3

Boost Lambda Functions with Lambda SnapStart

If you are familiar with the AWS Lambda service, you must know the cold start. The “cold start” is the first request that a new Lambda worker handles. This request takes longer because the underlying container must be initialized and setup to be ready to process the code.

Enabling Lambda SnapStart for Java functions can make them start up to 10x faster, at no extra cost.

In this blog post Accelerate Your Lambda Functions with Lambda SnapStart, we can see that the cold start has been reduced from 6 secondes to 100 millisecondes. Definitely a game changer expectially for Java applications on AWS Lambda!

2

AWS Application Composer

If you are like me a big fan of Serverless architecture, you will be amazed by AWS Application Composer.

AWS Application Composer helps developers simplify and accelerate architecting, configuring, and building serverless applications. You can drag, drop, and connect AWS services into an application architecture by canvas. It also helps you focus on building by maintaining infrastructure as code definitions for each service.

For more information, please visit AWS Application Composer.

1

Amazon CodeCatalyst

Amazon CodeCatalyst is a software development service to quickly build and deliver applications on AWS. CodeCatalyst provides dev teams with an integrated project experience that brings together the tools needed to plan, code, build, test, and deploy applications on AWS. Software teams spend significant time and resources on collaborating effectively and setting up tools, development and deployment environments, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) automation.

The big advantage of this new service is the capability to spin up a new cloud-based development environment on-demand. It currently supports Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, Goland, PyCharm and Cloud9. Check Amazon CodeCatalyst for more information!

Conclusion

To get the latest innovations, you can check the official AWS release page What’s New with AWS? and the AWS News Blog.