Last week, all of us here at Cloudar eagerly followed everything that happened during re:Invent, the largest AWS conference. We sent our own delegation there to meet people and learn more about all the new announcements (and if you listen closely to AWS podcast #279, you might guess who of us met Jeff Bar)

Last year, we paid enough attention during the sessions to tell about announcements that were not covered during the keynotes or in the AWS blog. This year we are doing the same. Here are 3 announcements of things to come and a list of 15 announcements you might have missed, because they didn’t get any keynote or blog attention.

Client VPN

With thanks to Michael for the tip

During one of the breakout sessions, the presenter showed a slide announcing that client VPN will be available by the end of this year. This will be an AWS managed VPN that should work with every OpenVPN client and allow them to connect to VPCs. Increasing the ways to connect to VPCs is a great thing and it will allow us to stop managing yet another service ourselves.

Faster VPC cold starts in Lambda

With thanks to Will for the tip

Some day in 2019, AWS will announce they’ve changed the way your AWS Lambda functions connect to your VPC. Instead of using a local NAT per Function to connect it to an ENI in your VPC, it will be using a remote NAT that can be reused for different Functions. This should improve scaling with better cold start times and lower the latency over the connection. Although the list of reasons to run your Lambda Functions inside a VPC has gotten a little bit smaller with the Data API for Aurora Serverless, there will always be workloads that can benefit from this.

Version 2 of the AWS CLI

The developer blog already announced this in september, but thanks to the session DEV322, and a lot of hard work from the team building it, worth mentioning here. There are a lot of features coming, like  more consistent return codes and timestamps, a new installer for OSX and Linux, more and easier ways to configure credentials, wizards that make getting started with services easier (just like in the console), autocompletion for resource names, more high level commands (like the current s3 commands that translate cp/mv/ls to the right api commands), and more.

You can try it right now, by getting the beta version from GitHub.

Upgrade path to Control Tower

At Cloudar we’ve been implementing the Landing Zone Solution, both for our own accounts as for some of our customers. When AWS announced Control Tower, we were happy to learn that AWS is turning this into a service that will be usable by all their clients. At re:Invent, we were able to confirm that AWS will make it possible for current users of Landing Zone to migrate to Control Tower. This means you don’t have to wait on the release of Control Tower to work on your multi-account setup.

Other announcements you might have missed:

If you only followed the keynotes, and the AWS blog, you might have missed these announcements:

• AWS IoT Device Tester, Now Available
• Amazon FreeRTOS Adds New Features
• Introducing the AWS Amplify Console
• AWS IoT Greengrass Extends Functionality with Connectors to External Applications, Hardware Root of Trust Security, and Isolation Configurations
• AWS Announces Amazon S3 Object Lock in all AWS Regions
• Announcing AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Custom Key Store
• Amazon QuickSight adds support for dashboard embedding and APIs
• Amazon Translate Now Supports Customized Translations
• The AWS Developer Tools Improve Continuous Delivery Support for AWS Fargate and Amazon ECS
• Amazon EFS now Supports Access Across Accounts and VPCs
• Amazon EFS now Supports 1000 File Systems per Account
• Amazon Lightsail Now Supports Resource Tagging
• Amazon Lightsail Now Provides an Upgrade Path to EC2
• Introducing AWS App Mesh – Service Mesh for Microservices on AWS
• You can now share VPC Subnets with other accounts