Here we are again…
I know AWS calls this “Day 1”, but for us this is actually Day 3 of AWS re:Invent 2015 🙂
As there’s really too much going on at AWS re:Invent to blog about everything, we’ll try to highlight the most import stuff of the day.
re:Invent keynote with Andy Jassy
A fully packed conference room with about 19000 AWS ninja’s and/or customers…. WOW!
Andy Jassy gave us an insight in the new AWS growth metrics: $7.3 billion in annual revenue which is way more than the $5.97 billion figure provided in Amazon’s most recent earnings statement. I guess we could say, things are going just fine at AWS :-).
For two hours Jassy was able to keep attention among attendees and made several product and other announcements.
We’ll highlight the new announcements in a moment, but allow us to say that we were a little bit disappointed that there was no announcement about the public availability of the long awaited Elastic File System (EFS). But hey, wait a minute … tomorrow there’s another Keynote presented by dr. Werner Vogels, I guess there will be more announcements to come.
For those of you want to watch the complete keynote; Check it out below!
New Services and Features Announcements
(product info taken from https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/)
Amazon QuickSight (Preview)
Amazon QuickSight is a very fast, cloud-powered business intelligence (BI) service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from your data. Amazon QuickSight uses a new, Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (“SPICE”) to perform advanced calculations and render visualizations rapidly. Amazon QuickSight integrates with AWS data services, enables organizations to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, and delivers fast and responsive query performance via SPICE’s query engine.
Amazon Kinesis Firehose
Amazon Kinesis Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into AWS. It can capture and automatically load streaming data into Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools and dashboards you’re already using today. It is a fully managed service that automatically scales to match the throughput of your data and requires no ongoing administration.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch on AWS. Elasticsearch is a popular open-source search and analytics engine for use cases such as log analytics, real-time application monitoring, and click stream analytics. With Amazon Elasticsearch Service, you get direct access to the Elasticsearch open-source API so that code and applications you’re already using with your existing Elasticsearch environments will work seamlessly.
Amazon Kinesis Streams Extended Retention
Amazon Kinesis, which we are now calling Amazon Kinesis Streams, stores incoming data for a period of 24 hours by default. Amazon Kinesis Streams can now retain your streaming data for up to 7 days. You can dynamically configure the data retention time period from the Amazon Kinesis console. For more information about extended data retention, visit Changing Data Retention Period. For extended data retention pricing, visit Amazon Kinesis Pricing.
AWS Database Migration Service (Preview)
AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS easily and securely. With AWS Database Migration Service, the source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from all widely used commercial and open-source databases. The service supports homogenous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle to Amazon Aurora or Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL. To help make heterogeneous migrations easier, the AWS Database Migration Service includes a Schema Conversion Tool that converts the source database schema and code, including views, stored procedures, and functions, to a format compatible with the target database. Any code that cannot be automatically converted gets clearly marked to help you identify where manual re-coding is required.
Amazon RDS for MariaDB
Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale MariaDB deployments in the cloud. With Amazon RDS, you can deploy scalable MariaDB databases in minutes with cost-efficient and resizable hardware capacity. Amazon RDS frees you up to focus on your application by managing time-consuming database administration tasks including backups, software patching, monitoring, scaling, and replication.
Amazon Aurora Now Available in AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region
Amazon Aurora is now available to customers in AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible relational database management system (RDBMS) that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL at a price point one tenth that of a commercial RDBMS while delivering similar performance and availability.
AWS Import/Export Snowball
AWS Import/Export Snowball (Snowball) is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS. Using Snowball addresses common challenges with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. Transferring data with Snowball is simple, fast, secure, and can be as little as one-fifth the cost of high-speed Internet.
AWS WAF
AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic to allow or block to your web application by defining customizable web security rules. You can use AWS WAF to create custom rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, and rules that are designed for your specific application. New rules can be deployed within minutes, letting you respond quickly to changing traffic patterns. Also, AWS WAF includes a full-featured API that you can use to automate the creation, deployment, and maintenance of web security rules.
Amazon Inspector (Preview)
Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed report with prioritized steps for remediation. To help you get started quickly, Amazon Inspector includes a knowledge base of hundreds of rules mapped to common security compliance standards (e.g. PCI DSS) and vulnerability definitions. Examples of built-in rules include checking for remote root login being enabled, or vulnerable software versions installed. These rules are regularly updated by AWS security researchers.
Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts (coming soon)
An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses. Dedicated Hosts gives you additional visibility and control over how instances are placed on a physical server, and you can continually use the same physical server over time. As a result, Dedicated Hosts enable you to use your existing server-bound software licenses and address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements.
AWS Config Rules (Preview)
AWS Config Rules is a new set of cloud governance capabilities that allow IT Administrators to define best practices for provisioning and configuring AWS resources and then continuously monitor compliance with those guidelines. AWS Config Rules lets you choose from a set of pre-built rules based on common AWS best practices or custom rules that you define. AWS Config Rules helps you ensure compliance through continuous monitoring and provides a new dashboard to track compliance status. Using Config Rules, an IT Administrator can quickly determine when and how a resource went out of compliance.
Amazon Web Services & Accenture: A Partnership in the Cloud
Amazon’s joint venture with Accenture, the world’s largest consulting firm now gives AWS the opportunity to compete with legacy heavyweights like IBM & HP. AWS and Accenture will invest heavily the following years, including training of 1500 (!) people in the first year.
To be honest, we are not really sure what to think of this alliance yet, but I guess time will tell ….
To learn more about this new partnership announcement, just download the brochure here
Pub Crawl
Do we really need to say more about this? 🙂
