If you have been following What’s new in AWS, you probably noticed there have been a lot of announcements during re:invent. Some of them got time to shine during the keynotes, some were released during the day, but we’ve noticed that there have been two planned released that were only mentioned in breakout sessions.
We’ve written them down for you here
CloudFormation Drift Detection
This first one was talked about in DEV317 – Deep Dive on AWS CloudFormation (video – slides).
Drift Detection is a CloudFormation feature that will be released (soon) in 2018 and will make it possible to view and detect changes made outside of CloudFormation to resources managed by CloudFormation.
This will make it possible to be confident that the changeset that CloudFormation wants to execute actually matches the changes that will occur. It will also help you to proactively investigate why there were changes outside of CloudFormation in the first place.
Service Discovery (for ECS)
The second announcements was a complete session: CON403 – Introducing Service Discovery for Amazon ECS (no slides/video yet).
Service Discovery consists of two parts, a new feature in Route53 and a new feature in ECS and will be released in Q1 2018 (the description if the talks even mentions January).
In Route53 there will be a new API to create Namespaces, define Services and register Instances (in this case instances means ECS tasks) under them. These services can be queried via DNS. R53 supports A records (returning up to 8 ips per query) and SRV records (for ip + port combinations).
ECS can use these APIs to register your tasks. It will even go a step further and not only use the Route53 Healthchecks, but also update Route53 on ECS events like service scaling and task health.
Both management and service registery APIs will be availble from Route 53, so you can also build your own integration for workloads outside of ECS
