Top 10 Most Exciting re:Invent 2019 Announcements

AWS re:Invent is an amazing event, but not everyone can go all the way to Las Vegas for an entire workweek. That’s why we’re counting down the top 10 most exciting re:Invent 2019 announcements. You’re welcome.

10) UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch

This service may be called “UltraWarm,” but it’s super cool.

UltraWarm is a powerful new warm storage layer added to Elastisearch. Normally, warm layers don’t work too well, but UltraWarm is different. Unlike alternatives, it breaks down the information and moves infrequently-accessed data to S3. As a result, you can save up to 90% on storage costs.

9) Amazon Kendra

Need a new internal search engine? There’s no need to keep searching.

Amazon Kendra is a super exciting enterprise search service. Many alternative enterprise search engines only use keywords to find results.

However, Kendra builds an index directly from unstructured data. Then, it uses NLP technology to determine the content of each page and deliver relevant results.

If Kendra still doesn’t list the most relevant results first, you can tweak it from a console until everything works well. It’s about time Amazon made some search engine progress.

8) AQUA for Amazon Redshift

This service is dripping with potential.

AQUA, or Advanced Query Accelerator, is a brand new cache that amps up query performance. Instead of moving the storage to compute, AQUA brings compute to storage.

As a result, query performance is 10x better than any other cloud warehouse in its price range. That’s a great boost, especially with the new Redshift update.

7) S3 Access Points

A nice, healthy S3 upgrade is always nice. And boy, is this a big upgrade for apps with shared S3 data!

S3 Access Points make data access much simpler. Each S3 bucket can have hundreds of individual access points with unique paths and permissions. That means developers don’t need to hassle with layering as much. Instead, each app connected to one bucket can have its own policy.

6) Amazon Code Guru

No matter how much you QA, your app will have bugs. But Amazon Code Guru hopes to catch what developers miss. In fact, the audience was so excited about its announcement that Andy had to stop mid-sentence for applause.

Amazon CodeGuru streamlines code review and QA with machine learning trained on Amazon’s codebase. It automatically tests your code line-by-line against Amazon’s best practices, then tells you how to improve it. The most impressive benefit is cost-saving: CodeGuru finds the most expensive line of code and tells you how to make it cheaper. And it’s not just a little change; take a look at Amazon’s results.

Just like most of the Amazon services, CodeGuru promises to save you money. What’s not to love?

5) C5n in Super Computing

Amazon is revolutionizing supercomputing in an unexpected way: changing up the network.

Thanks to the nifty nitro controller in the C5n instances announced last year, Amazon can fit 5000 instances in only 5% of the placement group network. A few years ago, so many instances would not have fit in the entire network, let alone 5%. As AWS VP of Global Infrastructure Peter DeSantis said, you can fit more small fish in a bigger pond.

As a result, AWS supercomputing is becoming much more elastic. Besides, look at that paint job!

4) Amazon SageMaker Updates

SageMaker got so many new features, it’s hard to do it justice without its own post.

On its own, SageMaker Studio, the first fully-integrated machine learning environment, would easily make this list, but that’s far from all. SageMaker Notebooks and Experiments take the mystery out of editing your models while SageMaker Debugger and Model Monitor keep it on-scope.

Perhaps the most earth-shaking addition is SageMaker AutoML, which trains multiple models at once, automatically adjust parameters, and ranks the best models on a leaderboard. SageMaker puts so many machine learning tools in one package that it’s hard to deny its historic impact.

3) Amazon Builder’s Library

Let’s take a break from services because Amazon Builder’s Library is going to be huge.

The Amazon Builder’s Library includes a collection of articles that take you behind the scenes of AWS. While you can’t build new apps with it, you can learn about all the fun technical magic that keeps your existing projects alive. It’s a great resource that we’re super excited about. You can subscribe to the Builder’s Library email list to learn more or start reading its content now.

2) Amazon Fargate for Amazon EKS

Fargate, the AWS serverless compute engine, is awesome. However, it’s only been available for ECS–until now.

We wouldn’t be doing re:Invent 2019 justice if we didn’t list Fargate for EKS this high on the list. Of all the announcements in the Tuesday keynote, Fargate for EKS received by far the most applause. And who can blame the audience? Just look at that comparison.

As shown in the graph, Fargate covers your provisioning and decreases latency–and now it’s available on EKS. That’s super exciting!

1) AWS WaveLength

What’s not to love about 5G?

Put simply, AWS WaveLength brings 5g capabilities to edge compute and storage cases. It provides single-digit millisecond latency by connecting devices straight to servers in Wavelength Zones. That way, you can cut out all the extra network hops.

Wavelength is the most exciting announcement to come out of re:Invent 2019 because it lets systems take full advantage of 5G. As developers, we find that to be exhilarating. After all, the potential of 5G technology is near limitless–especially relative to the jump from 2G to 4G. Verizon, which is partnering with AWS to make WaveLength happen, did a great job describing the “eight currencies” of 5G performance. Check out their article.

A lot happened at re:Invent 2019–way too much to cover in a single article. Make sure you check out all the announcements and keynote speeches on the re:Invent 2019 page to get all the juicy details.

Do you want to start leveraging these awesome services? Or did we forget to include something on this list? Drop us a line and let us know what you think.