For a top technologist habitual to keeping a sharp focus on the future, Amazon VP & CTO, Werner Vogels placed a vast array of his keynote at AWS re:Invent 2021 by looking back in time. The Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com Inc. made several references to his first re:Invent keynote in 2012 wherein he summarized a set of fundamental rules for the development community. These included, creating APIs with explicit and well-documented failure modes and avoiding leaking implementation information at any cost.
Irrespective of Vogels’ concern over the lessons of a decade ago, he proposed plenty of new announcements for the present times day during 2-hours of keynote speech. His remarks incorporated the offering of M1 Mac minis as part of EC2 and the announcement that 30 new AWS Local Zones could be expected online for the company’s extensive datacenter network. Also, Werner Vogels spent time on 2 specific areas during his presentation at the re:Invent conference. One was related to IAM (Identity & Access Management) and its greater emphasis in the function of application programming interface calls. Another key area which Vogels geared towards was the AWS’ space-based initiative. We hereby present a summary of Vogel’s biggest announcements below:
- Introduction of new Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances – The introduction of Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances have brought great flexibility, scalability and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. EC2 Mac instances are devoted Mac mini computers connected with Thunderbolt to the AWS Nitro System, letting the Mac mini appear and behave like another EC2 instance. The introduction of EC2 M1 Mac instances now allow users to access machines built around the Apple-designed M1 System on Chip (SoC). Mac developers re-architecting their apps to natively support Macs with Apple silicon, can now build and test their apps and reap all the benefits of AWS. Developers working for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV will also greatly benefit from faster builds. The new EC2 M1 Mac instances promise up to 60% better price performance and efficiency over the x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iPhone and Mac app build workloads.
- Introduction of AWS Cloud WAN – The AWS Cloud WAN is a Managed Wide Area Networking (WAN) service that makes it simpler for users to build, manage and monitor a global network that connects resources running across their cloud and on-premises environments. AWS offers customers with various powerful, yet simple services for Cloud networking. The Cloud WAN Service provides easy means to connect your data centers, branch offices and cloud resources into an integrated, centrally managed network, minimizing the overall operational cost and complexity involved with running a global network.
- Launch of 30 new AWS local zones in 2022 – AWS will launch over 30 new AWS Local Zones in major cities round the globe. Starting in 2022, these new AWS Local Zones will be made available in over 21 countries, that include Austria, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Chile, Canada, Czech Republic, Colombia, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Greece, Kenya, India, Norway, Netherlands, Philippines, Portugal, Poland, and South Africa, and join 16 Local Zones across the US, helping you to serve end-users round the globe with much lower latency. AWS’s local zones are a kind of infra deployment that places AWS computing, storage, database and other select services closer to users, industry and technology centers, typically where there is no AWS region availability.
- Introduction of AWS Amplify Studio – AWS Amplify Studio is a visual development environment that provides frontend developers new features to accelerate UI development with less coding, whilst incorporating Amplify’s powerful backend configuration and management capabilities. Developers can visually connect the UI components to app backend data, within Amplify Studio. In order to configure and manage backends, Amplify Admin UI’s existing capabilities will be part of Amplify Studio moving forward, offering a unified interface to allow developers build full-stack apps quicker. Amplify Studio can now be used by developers to set up a backend, build UI components and connect these two together, everything within Amplify Studio. Besides containing all of Admin UI’s existing backend creation and management capabilities, Amplify Studio simplifies set up and management of app backend infrastructure such as database tables, user authentication and file storage, without the need of any cloud expertise.
- General Availability Announcement of AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) v2 – Basically, the AWS CDK is an open-source framework that makes it easier to work with cloud resources using conventional programming languages such as C#, TypeScript, Java, Python and Go. The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) v2 is now generally available in a single package, making it easier for users to utilize the CDK and stay abreast with new versions as it evolves going forward. AWS CDK v2 amalgamates the AWS Construct Library into a single package called aws-cdk-lib, and eradicates the need of downloading individual packages for each AWS service utilized. Now, you only need to take a minimum dependency on this single package if you write your own CDK construct libraries, letting library consumers choose which exact AWS CDK version to use. As AWS CDK v2 includes only stable API’s that adhere to Semantic Versioning (semver), you can now confidently update to new minor versions. Also, according to Vogels, this newly available kit is sure to provide fixes to various issues encountered with version v1.
- General Availability Announcement of New Construct Hub – The New Construct Hub is a registry of open-source construct libraries for making the cloud development process simpler. These Constructs are reusable building blocks of the Cloud Development Kits (CDKs). The new Construct Hub lets developers to discover and share open –source CDK libraries such as CDK constructs for the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8), CDK for Terraform (CDKtf) and other construct-based tools.
- Launch of AWS re:Post: An amended Q&A Experience for the AWS Community – This is a new, question and answer (Q&A) service as part of the AWS Free Tier, led by the community of AWS employees, customers, partners. AWS re:Post is an AWS-managed Question & Answer service providing collaborative, expert-reviewed answers to the technical questions of users about AWS that substitutes the original AWS Forums. Now, community members can garner reputation points to augment their community expert status by delivering approved answers and reviewing answers from other users, aiding to continually expand public knowledge availability across all AWS services.
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