As we wrap up day 1 at AWS re:Invent 2023, here are some of the announcements that caught my eye.
Application Composer: A Game-Changer for Serverless Apps
Application Composer was released at re:Invent 2022 which provided an easy way to construct serverless apps on AWS and has been progressively improved throughout the year. Now Step Functions workflow studio is part of application composer itself which is a very welcome change and makes making serverless apps even better than ever.
Aurora Limitless: Scaling Relational Databases Seamlessly
In preview is Aurora Limitless – plugging a gap with Aurora Serverless to easily scale relational database workloads up and down as needed without any intervention which looks like a welcome addition!
Virtualisation for Sparc: Mainframe Modernisation Accelerated
Many enterprises have massive fleets of legacy Sun/Oracle Sparc systems – AWS has positioned virtualization for sparc as part of the mainframe modernisation suite of services. This will help accelerate many workloads being migrated to AWS that would have been stalled up until now due to legacy code and software that cannot run on anything else.
Security Hub Enhancements: Strengthening Security Posture
Security Hub has had a well-needed uplift on improving security findings with enriched data using tags, searching and filtering findings making it easier to find the risks that are important to you, as well as making it easier to mandate Security Hub within your AWS organisation via policy configuration. Find out more about new central configuration capabilities, and major dashboard enhancements.
Amazon RDS Welcomes DB2: Expanding Database Engine Options
RDS has added another database engine with DB2 – many enterprise customers use IBM software offerings, this addition is very welcome and also a good tool in the chest as part of a mainframe modernisation program.
SMB Share Connectivity for Windows Fargate Containers: A Cost-Effective Solution
AWS released a method of connecting to SMB shares from Windows Fargate containers on ECS. It’s common for IIS web apps to connect to shared filesystems, this is a great pattern to use instead of a whole EC2 for running these web apps for those sorts of reasons. Fargate is a much cheaper option for running these types of apps so this is a welcome pattern!
Control Tower Enhancements: Meeting Digital Sovereignty Requirements
And finally, some awesome additions to Control Tower with 65 new controls to help meet digital sovereignty requirements.
