Written by
Published on
December 12, 2023
Two weeks into December 2023, I just returned from AWS:Reinvent 2023. As I sit down and reflect on the event, I am consolidating some of the critical insights and takeaways from one of the biggest tech overload festivals in the world. This year, the focus has been on the new paradigm shift in the IT world called "Generative AI." Unsurprisingly, AWS has also announced its involvement in this Gen AI pool, considering they are a leading tech and product company.
Two critical Keynotes in this event: Adam, CEO of AWS, and Swami, VP of DB and Machine Learning, spoke about the plethora of services launched or moved from preview to Generally Available belonging to the Stack of Generative AI. There are takeaways in this realm for everyone in the IT industry, whether it's the support for new training models in the existing AWS bedrock service or the introduction of AWS's version of the support system called Amazon Q.
Essential features and new services are released yearly during the AWS keynote sessions. This year, there were several releases over four days for all the other aspects of the development cycle as well. These exciting announcements are game-changers for cloud-native development, and I can't wait to see them take off!
Amazon S3 Express One Zone
AWS S3 is one of the first services released by AWS quite a few years ago. It was time to bring it back to the focus by adding more features. Considering that there is a close link between the model training and the storage of the datasets,
AWS S3 Express One Zone is a high-performance, single-zone storage class offered by Amazon S3. It is designed to provide consistent, low-latency data access for the most latency-sensitive applications.
This cloud object storage class is the lowest-latency option available today, offering data access speeds up to 10 times faster than S3 Standard. Additionally, request costs are 50% lower than S3 Standard, making it a cost-effective choice for organizations that require fast and reliable data access.
Unified Billing and Cost Management
As an AWS partner, we frequently encountered customer questions about the costs of building new services or solutions and ongoing maintenance expenses. Fortunately, several SaaS platforms can extract data from AWS CUR buckets and provide detailed cost insights through visually appealing presentations.
This year, AWS ramped up the cost and billing management sections with more recommendations and providing insights into the services used. This proves a significant improvement in the current setup.
The platform now has a revamped home page, which provides customers with insights and recommendations to assist them in understanding their expenses, detecting issues, and saving money. In addition, the navigation has been made more intuitive, and better resources for getting started have been added. This new console experience simplifies determining where to concentrate, prioritizing what is most important, and taking action.
AWS Step Function — New Test States API
One of the most widely used services for event-driven solutions in the AWS world is AWS Step Functions. Many systems have a large amount of automation built into them, thanks to AWS Step Functions. AWS released and improved the service by announcing the new test states API.
With HTTPS endpoints, We can easily integrate SaaS applications into your workflows without needing custom code, so you can focus on business logic and deploy new features faster.
The new TestState API allows us to run a single state, verify that data manipulations work as expected, and inspect a task's raw requests and responses, making it easy to troubleshoot and fix errors as you build your workflow.
Announced as a preview during AWS re:Invent 2022, and set to be generally available by March 2023, Application Composer is a powerful visual builder designed to make it easier for developers to design, visualize, and iterate on application architecture.
The tool comes with an easy-to-use visual drag-and-drop interface that generates Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates in real-time, thus making the application development process even more seamless. This year, AWS launched the general availability of Application Composer in VS Code, which is available as part of the AWS Toolkit.
By visualizing changes in our template while staying in our Visual Studio Code IDE context, we can easily simplify and expedite the entire development cycle. This visualization of our application architecture will help you better comprehend the relationship between your application services and identify areas needing improvement.
Ideally, this should be separate from the AWS Reinvent takeaways, But the reason for mentioning this tool in the blog is to highlight the prowess of the AWS Builder tools in the development world. One exciting session in this reinvent was about the Model API-driven approach AWS took to ship out different SDK languages for the services.
I think this will revolutionize API-driven development, which is usually associated with AWS SDK development. Here is the documentation to learn more and integrate it into the development process.
Unified Console AWS myApplications
In IT microservice-based development, gathering and analyzing relevant metrics to optimize the application in the future is crucial. Many companies are developing their solutions to address this observability aspect of the end-to-end development cycle. Many SaaS providers exist nowadays to provide solutions out of the box to generate relevant data by utilizing the metrics scraped out of the applications.
One of the essential releases of this year is undoubtedly the single pane of glass to visualize all the telemetric data inside any application known as myApplications.
The application will automatically display in myApplications, and you can take action on your applications using the AWS Management Console, APIs, CLI, SDKs, or infrastructure as code solutions such as AWS CloudFormation and Terraform. Instead of creating custom solution constructs in the AWS Cloudwatch, we can use the myApplications dashboard to generate essential metrics to make application optimization decisions.
Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals (Preview) is a new capability that makes it easy to automatically instrument and operate applications on AWS.
We can track application performance against the most important business objectives without the heavy lifting of manual instrumentation, metrics computations, and correlating observed problems to root causes. With the additional services like Service lens and insights around the application, containers, and lambda, this addon can prove extremely beneficial to produce data in order to optimize the application development further
Apart from the above releases, there have been many releases across the whole landscape of cloud and generative AI.
This will be helpful for all the people planning to attend AWS re:Invent in the future. Please remember to pack your best walking shoes and keep space in the suitcase to bring as umpteen swags from the expo! Lastly, for all future attendees, here is a good template to prepare your case for attending AWS re:Invent.
