Cloud

Posted on December 6, 2021

AWS Re:Invent Conference 2021

AWS’s annual conference took place last week in Las Vegas and several announcements that include new services and enhancements were made. Here is our pick of the Top 10 announcements of this year’s summit.

1. Cloud everywhere

More Local zones

Local Zone is an AWS Zone that reduces latency by bringing compute, storage, database, and select services closer to end users in places with high population or industry centers.

There are currently 310 points of presence around the world and at least 30 new local zones coming online in 2022, to broaden the reach of the Cloud.

AWS Cloud WAN

Allows customers to build, monitor and manage global Wide Area Networks.

AWS announced its preview release, companies with offices around the world can now select regions and build a software-defined WAN over AWS’s backbone.

2. Sustainability

Customer Carbon Footprint Tool

A dashboard that calculates carbon emissions and forecasts their change over time. Also reports how much of AWS energy consumption stems from renewable sources.

AWS Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar

Contains critical questions aimed at evaluating and improving the design, architecture, and implementation of workloads to reduce their energy consumption.

It also includes best practices across the areas of Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Operational Excellence.

Investments

AWS announced it will be investing in 18 new renewable-energy (wind and solar) projects in the USA and Europe.

3. AWS Private 5G

This managed service will let you build your own private cell network in a matter of days!

AWS provides and maintains all required hardware and software with no upfront or per-device costs. End users pay only for the network capacity and throughput they request.

4. Sage maker

SageMaker Canvas

Provides business analysts with a visual machine learning (ML) capability that generates accurate business predictions without having to write code or having ML expertise.

SageMaker Ground Truth Plus

A new turn-key service that uses an expert workforce to deliver high-quality training datasets fast and without having to build and manage labeling applications on your own. Reduces costs by up to 40 percent.

Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference

A new SageMaker Studio capability (in Preview) that automates load testing and optimizes model performance across machine learning (ML) instances. It makes deploying machine learning models for inference easy, without having to configure or manage an underlying infrastructure.

5. New EC2 Instances powered by ARM Processors

Im4gn and Is4gen instances

Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors, these Storage-Optimized instances are designed to maximize the storage performance of I/O intensive workloads like SQL and NoSQL databases. They offer up to 30 TB of NVMe storage using AWS Nitro SSD devices that are custom-built by AWS.

EC2 X2gd instances

Powered Graviton2 processors that deliver up to 55 percent better price/performance for memory-intensive workloads than current-generation x86-based X1 instances.

EC2 G5g Instances

Powered by Graviton2 Processors and NVIDIA T4G Tensor Core GPUs. The general availability of Amazon EC2 G5g instances extends Graviton2 price-performance benefits to GPU-based workloads including graphics applications and machine learning inference.

Trn1 (Preview)

The first instance to use the Trainium chip announced last year. Promises higher performance for compute-intensive ML training use cases, with up to 800 Gbps of network bandwidth capacity.

C7G

A new EC2 instance powered by Graviton3. Will operate 25% faster on average for compute workloads and even better for specialized cryptographic or ML workloads.

Graviton3 processors

ARM-based and optimized for workloads that include high-performance compute, batch processing, media encoding, scientific modeling, ad serving, and distributed analytics. They should boast 25% better performance and 60% less power usage and will power the new Amazon EC2 C7g Instances.

6. EC2 Apple M1 Mac instances

These instances’ availability allows you to access machines built on top of the Apple-designed M1 SOC. Performance up to 60% better compared to the prior generation.

Great for Mac developers who want to re-architect apps to natively support Macs with Apple silicon.

They are charged per hour of reservation of the dedicated host, not for the time the instances run, and there is a minimum charge of 24 hours for reserving a dedicated host.

7. Karpenter: K8s autoscaler

A new open-source project helps simplify Kubernetes infrastructure. It improves application availability and cluster efficiency. It launches right-sized compute resources in response to changing application loads helpling developers move away from manual cluster right-sizing.

8. Greengrass integrated with SSM

Greengrass was launched last year and now its edge devices can be managed securely by using AWS Systems Manager. This makes managing servers IoT at scale even easier using the same tooling.

9. Amplify Studio: low-code development

This service helps you visually build feature-rich applications in a shorter time using a visual interface that does not require much knowledge of how to write code. It will allow developers to set up a backend, create UI components, and connect them together.

10. Serverless and on-demand analytics options

These options are now available for AWS Redshift, EMR, MSK, and Kinesis in preview.

Run analytics in the cloud with high performance at any scale with no need to set up and manage clusters. Fire them up and the services scale up when you’re busy and scale down when you’re not. Of course, in a pay-as-you-go fashion only when used.