AWS re:Invent 2016 Product Announcements
Amazon’s annual re:Invent conference wrapped up this past week in Las Vegas.
There were quite a few exciting announcements across Analytics, App Services, Compute, Containers, Database, App Streaming, Dev Tools, Internet of Things, Storage, Mobile, Management Tools, Content Delivery, and Security.
Analytics
Amazon Athena – New Service
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage. You pay only for the queries you run.
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Amazon EMR – New Feature
You can now use Amazon S3 as a data store for Apache HBase on Amazon EMR. You can scale out or scale in compute nodes without impacting your underlying storage.
Amazon QuickSight – New Service
Amazon QuickSight is now generally available for all customers. QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy for you to build visualizations and perform ad-hoc analysis.
Amazon Redshift – New Features
Amazon Redshift announced four new features that improve data compression, connection management, and data loading.
AWS Glue – New Service
AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL service that makes it easy to understand your data sources, prepare the data, and load it reliably to data stores. It simplifies and automates data discovery, transformation, and job scheduling tasks.
Application Services
Amazon API Gateway – New Features
Amazon API Gateway now integrates with the AWS Marketplace to help API owners monetize their API and meter usage for their API products, without writing any code.
You can now add documentation to your methods and resources for your APIs built using Amazon API Gateway, making it easy for your API consumers to understand your API.
Custom authorizers on Amazon API Gateway can now return additional fields in their authorization response.
AWS Step Functions – New Service
AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows.
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Amazon Lex – New Service
Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text. With Lex, the same deep learning engine that powers Alexa is now available to any developer, enabling you to bring sophisticated, natural language chatbots to new and existing applications.
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Amazon Polly – New Service
Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. It supports 24 languages and 47 lifelike voices. Create apps that talk, enabling you to build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products.
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Amazon Rekognition – New Service
Amazon Rekognition is a service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications. With Rekognition, you can detect objects, scenes, and faces in images. You can also search and compare faces.
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MXNet – Deep Learning Framework of Choice at AWS
MXNet is an open source, fully featured, flexibly programmable and ultra-scalable deep learning framework supporting deep learning models including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long short-term memory networks (LSTMs). Running MXnet on AWS provides a highly scalable, flexible and fast model training experience for developers using deep learning on CPUs or GPUs, on clusters, servers, desktops, or mobile phones.
Compute
Amazon EC2 – New Feature
EC2 instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now offer native support for the IPv6 protocol. IPv6 can be enabled for existing and new VPCs through the AWS management console, API/SDK and CLI.
Amazon EC2 C5 – New Instance Type
Amazon EC2 C5 instances are the most powerful Compute Optimized instances, featuring the highest performing processors and the lowest price/compute performance in EC2.
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Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs – New Feature
Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs are the most cost effective and flexible way to add graphics acceleration to Amazon EC2 Instances.
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Amazon EC2 F1 – New Instance Type
Amazon EC2 F1 is a new compute instance with programmable hardware for application acceleration. With F1, you can directly access custom FPGA hardware on the instance in a few clicks.
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Amazon EC2 I3 – New Instance Type
I3 instances are the latest generation of Storage Optimized High I/O instances, featuring NVMe based SSDs for the most demanding I/O intensive relational, NoSQL, transactional, and analytics workloads.
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Amazon EC2 R4 – New Instance Type
Amazon EC2 R4 instances are the latest generation of Memory Optimized instances which are 20% more price performant than R3 instances.
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Amazon EC2 T2 – New Instance Type
You can now launch t2.xlarge and t2.2xlarge, the newest Amazon EC2 burstable-performance instances. The t2.xlarge features 16 GiB of memory and 4 vCPU, and the t2.2xlarge features 32 GiB of memory and 8 vCPU.
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Amazon Lightsail – New Service
Amazon Lightsail is the easiest way to launch and manage a virtual private server with AWS. Get everything you need to jumpstart your project – compute, storage, and networking – starting at $5/month.
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AWS Batch – New Service
AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS.
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AWS Lambda – New Features
You can now configure a dead letter queue (DLQ) on AWS Lambda to give you more control over message handling for all asynchronous invocations, including those delivered via AWS events (S3, SNS, IoT, etc).
You can now develop your AWS Lambda functions in C# using the .NET Core 1.0 runtime.
Lambda@Edge – New Feature
Lambda@Edge lets you run code at CloudFront edge locations without provisioning or managing servers. This allows developers to deliver a low latency user experience for customized web applications.
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Containers
Blox – Open Source scheduler for Amazon ECS
Blox is a collection of open source software that enables customers to build custom schedulers and integrate third-party schedulers on top of ECS.
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Database
Amazon Aurora – New Features
Amazon Aurora is now PostgreSQL compatible. You can get up to twice the performance of the typical PostgreSQL database and the features you love in Amazon Aurora.
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AWS has expanded its HIPAA compliance program to include Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.
AWS Schema Conversion Tool – New Feature
We are pleased to announce that the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) has added two more data warehouses as sources for schema conversion.
Desktop & App Streaming
Amazon AppStream 2.0 – New Service
Amazon AppStream 2.0 allows you to stream desktop apps securely from the AWS cloud directly to users on the device of their choice, eliminating the need to rewrite desktop apps for the cloud.
Amazon WorkSpaces – New Features
Amazon WorkSpaces Graphics bundles offer a virtual cloud desktop which includes a high-end GPU that supports engineering, design, and architectural applications.
You can now access your Amazon WorkSpaces through Chrome and Firefox web browsers, using a new feature called Amazon WorkSpaces Web Access.
Amazon WorkSpaces now offers bundles that come with a Windows 10 desktop experience, powered by Windows Server 2016. Amazon WorkSpaces Windows 10 bundles provides you an easy way to move users to a modern operating system, while also simplifying licensing.
Developer Tools
AWS CodeBuild – New Service
AWS CodeBuild builds and tests code in the cloud. CodeBuild scales continuously, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You are charged by the minute for the compute resources you use. You can also use CodeBuild with other AWS services. For example, you can plug CodeBuild into AWS CodePipeline, which automates building and testing code in CodeBuild each time you commit a change to your source repository.
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AWS X-Ray – New Service
AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors.
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VMware on AWS Cloud – New Service
VMware Cloud on AWS makes it easy for customers to run VMware workloads on the AWS Cloud.
Internet of Things
AWS Greengrass – Software for Connected Devices
AWS Greengrass is software that lets you run local compute, messaging & data caching for connected devices. Run IoT applications seamlessly across the AWS Cloud and local devices using AWS Lambda.
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AWS IoT – New Features
The redesigned AWS IoT management console is easier to use. This includes connecting devices, diving into thing details, finding key resources, and testing with the MQTT client.
Announcing the AWS IoT Button Enterprise Program in limited preview. The program helps businesses expand existing applications or build new applications that connect to a simple IoT button device.
AWS has improved the developer experience. Available today for pre-order, the 2nd generation AWS IoT Button with 2X the battery life, and a new mobile app on iOS and Android for easy configuration.
Management Tools
Amazon CloudWatch – Price Reduction
AWS announced a CloudWatch Metrics price reduction from $0.50 per metric per month to $0.30 per metric per month, and a 40% reduction in New Volume-Based Pricing Tiers.
Amazon EC2 Systems Manager – New Service
Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is a management service that helps you automatically collect software inventory, apply Windows OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems. In addition, you can record and govern your instance’s software configuration with AWS Config.
AWS CloudFormation – New Feature
You can now provision and manage resources for AWS Lambda-based applications using AWS CloudFormation and the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM).
AWS CloudTrail – New Feature
AWS CloudTrail now supports Amazon S3 Data Events. You can now record all API actions on S3 Objects and receive detailed information such as the AWS account of the caller, IAM user role of the caller, time of the API call, IP address of the API, and other details.
AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate – New Service
AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate provides a fully managed Chef server and suite of automation tools for continuous deployment, automated testing for compliance, and a user interface for visibility into your nodes.
AWS Personal Health Dashboard – New Service
AWS Personal Health Dashboard gives you a personalized view of AWS service health. You’ll get alerts when services you are using are impacted, and guidance to help keep your AWS resources healthy.
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AWS Marketplace – New Feature
AWS Marketplace has announced that customers can now subscribe to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Application Programming Interface (API) products directly through AWS Marketplace with SaaS Subscriptions.
Messaging
Amazon SQS – New Feature
You can now use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for applications that require strict sequence using First-in, First-out (FIFO) queues. The price for Amazon SQS standard queues has been reduced by up to 20%.
Migration
AWS Snowmobile – New Service
AWS Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data.
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Mobile Services
Amazon Pinpoint – New Service
Amazon Pinpoint makes it easy to run targeted push notification campaigns to improve user engagement in mobile apps. You can use Pinpoint to define your target segments, run your campaign, and measure results.
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AWS Mobile Hub – New Features
AWS announced the SaaS Connectors feature for AWS Mobile Hub. SaaS Connectors make it easy to securely access data in 3rd party enterprise SaaS applications from your mobile apps.
AWS Mobile Hub now includes an integration with Amazon Lex, so you can build mobile apps that use speech and text, in addition to touch to your mobile app.
Amazon CloudFront – New Feature
CloudFront Regional Edge Caches improve performance for your viewers while lowering the load on your origin resources. There is no additional cost for using this feature.
Security, Identity & Compliance
AWS Artifact – New Service
AWS Artifact provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports to verify and demonstrate security and compliance of the cloud.
AWS Organizations – New Service
AWS Organizations allows you to create groups of AWS accounts that you can use to more easily manage security and automation settings.
AWS Shield – New Service
AWS Shield is a managed DDoS protection service that safeguards your web applications using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53.
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Storage
Amazon EFS – New Feature
Amazon EFS now allows access from on-premises servers. This simplifies migration of file data from on-premises into Amazon EFS file systems and enables support for cloud bursting workloads.
Amazon Glacier – New Feature
Amazon Glacier customers can now use Expedited retrievals to access data in 1 – 5 minutes for a flat rate of $0.03 per GB retrieved.
Amazon S3 – New Feature
Amazon announced new features to the growing portfolio of Amazon S3 Storage Management capabilities to help you better analyze and manage your storage.
Amazon S3 & Amazon Glacier – Price Reduction
AWS collapsed the number of Amazon S3 price tiers from six to three making it easier to understand your bill and project future costs. AWS also reduced Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier storage prices by more than 20% in most regions.
AWS Snowball – New Feature
AWS has expanded its HIPAA compliance program to include AWS Snowball allowing you to transfer large amounts of data, including Protected Health Information (PHI), into and out of AWS securely and cost-effectively.
AWS Snowball Edge – New Service
AWS Snowball Edge is a petabyte-scale data transfer service with on-board storage and compute.
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AWS Storage Gateway – New Feature
AWS Storage Gateway now provides a virtual on-premises file server, which enables you to store and retrieve Amazon S3 objects through standard file storage protocols.
