Hello, Cloud Gurus and welcome to AWS This Week.
It's week three of AWS re:Invent and AWS are continuing
to deliver the goods with so many announcements. Honestly,
I don't even know where to begin. Week three is supposed to be the final week,
but AWS might not be stopping there.
They've already announced they're going to kick off 2021 with some Amazon S3
sessions on January the 12th to 14th. There's just no stopping them.
This week, we look at all the new things Werner introduced in his keynote,
a bunch of things announced since his keynote, and that was only a few days ago,
some special guests will give the lowdown on serverless,
architecture and IOT leadership sessions,
and we'll announce our final Guru of the Week for the year.
It's AWS This Week with me, Nick Triantafillou.
First off the mark this week is the announcement of AWS CloudShell.
This is a browser-based shell manager in the AWS management console that gives
you immediate access to Amazon Linux 2 environments with the AWS command
line interface installed,
and pre-authenticated using the same credentials used to log into the console.
This makes it extremely fast to manage your resources via command line,
without having to set all this up yourself.
Common tools are also pre-installed and you can install anything else you need
using the provided route access.
This is really useful for anyone who uses the CLI to manage their resources or
someone who wants to learn how to use the AWS powerful command line tools.
There's no additional charge to use it.
And you're also able to upload and download files up to one gigabyte into your
home directory. The files persist between sessions too, which is really awesome.
Moving on, AWS just announced the preview of Amazon Location Service.
This is a fully managed service and it helps developers add location data to
applications without sacrificing data security and user privacy.
It provides maps, points of interest, geocoding,
geofences and tracking for applications,
and it uses high quality data from trusted global providers.
It's available now for preview in select regions, so be sure to check it out.
Next up,
AWS have announced AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is now generally available.
This is a free service that monitors your spending patterns in your AWS account
using machine learning.
It will detect anything out of the ordinary and it will provide a root cause
analysis as to why it happened.
It's there to make sure you don't accidentally run up a huge AWS bill and it
will help you with your cost controls. Very cool.
Also on the cost side of things,
AWS have announced that cost and usage reports are now available to member
or linked accounts in AWS Organizations.
This gives you specific costs and usage data just for the member accounts,
giving you account level insights for cost optimization,
and will save management account holders a lot of time as they no longer need to
generate their own cost reports. Also over the past few days,
AWS Systems Manager,
the service used to ease management of the AWS systems,
has introduced three huge new features.
The first is Systems Manager Application Manager,
which enables customers to manage their applications from a single console.
Next is a Change Manager feature, which simplifies the way you can request,
approve, implement, and report on operational changes to your applications,
configuration and infrastructure in AWS and on premises.
And finally is the Fleet Manager feature,
which helps you streamline and scale your remote server management process.
So three huge new features, Application, Change and Fleet manager,
available right now in all AWS regions where AWS Systems Manager is
offered. This week,
AWS also announced the first Japanese AWS Wavelength Zone,
available now in Tokyo.
AWS Wavelength is a service that embeds AWS compute and storage services
at the edge of communication services 5g networks,
allowing organizations to build ultra low latency applications,
which don't have to leave the telecommunications network.
This avoids latency that would normally result from having to use the internet.
We're getting close to the end of my announcements, I promise!
AWS have also announced a preview of Amazon Managed Service for Grafana,
which is a fully managed and secure data visualization service developed
together with Grafana Labs.
Amazon managed service for Grafana manages the provisioning, setup,
scaling and maintenance of Grafana servers, so you, the customer,
don't have to do it yourselves. Sounds pretty good to me.
And the final of my announcements for now is the introduction of AWS
IoT EduKit,
an easy way to learn to build IoT applications using AWS services
through a learning program.
There's a reference hardware kit you can purchase through Amazon and then use
their tutorials to learn all about IoT, and it looks really cool.
I'd love to give one of these a try. Okay,
now it's time to head on over to ACG Training Architects, Craig Arcuri,
Errol Hooper,
and John Hanna for a discussion of all the latest re:Invent updates on IoT,
architecture and serverless. Okay.
Thank you so much, Nick, for that introduction. How's it going guys?
Welcome back for another,
for another week to recap our final week of re:Invent Hey,
oh it's going great. We're in week three here and I'm,
I'm speaking on IoT and I got to thinking, three weeks long.
This is getting like the Olympic game,s and maybe we can hold the Olympic games
using IoT. Strap some sensors to our athletes.
Our fans could sign up and get the stats for the famous athletes.
And as a bonus, the athletes,
we could program DeepRacer to ride along as they run.
That would be fantastic. But maybe that's reaching a little far,
but all in all, it's been a good three weeks. How's your.
Last week at re:Invent been going? Yeah.
Good. I'm definitely feeling the lack of, uh, the social interaction,
but my feet are still happy, so it's a trade off, but, um,
I'm still hoping to see,
see everyone next year and get to spend some time with people.
Without any further ado, I'll just jump right on in and talk about what, uh,
the serverless, session this week that I attended. Um,
so particularly this week's session about, uh,
serverless was really good. This year the theme was pretty much,
we keep hearing the serverless-first, really,
what I see here with this week is really AWS really representing
serverless and how we approach serverless.
With this particular session here that wrapped on Thursday was,
pretty much focusing on Lambda and how Lambda can be used
to really change the game within our architectures.
when AWS first approached Lambda,
it was kind of seen as that architecture, that tool that, you know,
we would go to, to do very quick things. Things like our automate our,
IT processes, things that we do repetitively, or maybe do some data,
some quick data processing,
or just generally use its compute for just a moment.
Within this particular session, really what,
what the conversation was about was just kind of taking those guardrails off of
Lambda and thinking of Lambda as a new way to approach our solutions
and architectures,
first through understanding that through serverless
we really have a large opportunity within our applications to decouple,
breaking down those silos within our applications
to these little small controllable chunks that we're able to deploy more
often and just kind of push our product out to market.
And kind of reinforces that fail fast approach that we,
we all like in IT. Two major services that I'd like to point out.
The first isn't so much a service as it is a feature,
but Lambda Extensions, which is our available through Preview,
allows us to easily integrate our Lambdas with our favorite monitoring,
observability, security, and governance tools.
But what that does is answers that question that we have with serverless. Yes,
I know that that my compute isn't directly attached to my messaging or
my persistence with data, and when it spins down,
it's like a black hole and I don't see it. But now with Lambda Extensions,
also made available not only through the console but via API,
you'll be able to have a lot more observability through those tools of what's
actually happening in your Lambda. So I thought that that was really cool.
Another one was AWS Proton.
And then we may have mentioned this in earlier weeks,
but I thought AWS Proton is AWS's is first fully
managed application deployment for containers and serverless.
So what you see is like,
pretty much a deployment on like to the nth degree, right?
A deployment tool for it to the nth degree for our serverless and container
options. And, really what we see here, like I said,
is just really the messaging push that this is a really great opportunity for us
to really embrace these architectures and,
and the serverless compute methods in our applications to go ahead and deliver
faster, um, faster and better than ever.
So really good session at compute for me. I really enjoyed that.
Yeah, and you mentioned something that's, that's always been really important,
and one of the advantages of the cloud, which is decoupling.
The more we can decouple our applications, the more flexible they are,
the more fault tolerant they are, the more durable they become.
And so I think that that's kind of been a theme this year in terms of what we're
seeing as new services and pushing further into that serverless space,
because it does enable more decoupling, you know,
and that was the first AWS service that was launched was SQS.
And the main purpose of that service was to be able to decouple cloud
applications. And so that, you know,
like that's always been a theme as new services come out.
And I think we're seeing a return to that in terms of the cycle of services.
So I got some time to sit down and really focus on the architecture session this
week.
It was largely a review of kind of how the solutions
architect role was born and how the architectures have grown,
and how AWS went from, you know,
like six services to over 150 now. And, and what that,
the implications of that are for when we're producing architectures and how
the solutions architect role is becoming more of a specialized role where
you're not going to have a solutions architect who does everything.
You'll have someone who specializes in compute and databases,
and maybe serverless solutions, and governance and so forth. And so, you know,
that that was definitely an interesting review and a piece of history that
supplies some context to the announcements from the session.
They've added a few lenses to the best practices utilities
that are there to check your architectures automatically.
So the new ones are a Software as a Service.
So we're looking at how we're providing software to outside customers in a
secure way and how we silo those customer accounts. And you know,
how to do that in the best way to avoid security issues, how to avoid coupling,
that's going to maybe cause a failure for one account.
And so it doesn't trickle over into the other accounts that are using the
software as a service. The other one is,
is just a technical foundation lens. So it's, are you,
are you using the services at the base level in a way that
makes sense, according to the best practices.
So you point these lenses at your account and they will review all your settings
and give you some suggestions and, and let you, um,
have some insight into what you can improve. Or if you're, you know,
if you are doing these things correctly,
they've launched APIs for the well-architected tools,
which weren't there before. And so what this has done is,
not only can you export the data from these in a programmatic
way,
you can join data from your on-premise architecture to
these well architected tools and, and the lenses,
and use it to review your on-prem architecture in
conjunction with your cloud architecture, and how those are connecting.
Sounds good. Craig,
do you want to let us know how things have been going over in the IOT,
internet of things, world? You sound like you have it all planned out.
Oh, right. Yeah, absolutely.
And speaking of being nostalgic I had to wear some re:Invent
swag that I got last year.
So one of the announcements was the AWS IoT Greengrass
2.0. So 2.0, of course,
yeah there was already an IoT Greengrass.
It's a flexible edge platform that's going to allow you to build,
deploy and manage device software across your,
your devices out, out in the field.
So the key thing with 2.0 is the fact that
the edge runtime is now open source.
That's usually a game changer when, when these,
when these things go open source and I would imagine as we speak
there
are a bunch of developers out there on the, on the GitHub site,
you know, checking out some,
some of this code that's available. It is,
it's under an Apache 2.0 license. The next announcement,
and this is a tongue-tie, but I think I'll get it.
AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN.
And LoRaWAN is sort of an acronym for long way. No, I didn't get it.
Long range wide area network.
What this IoT Core does for companies,
I'm going to focus on food service, you know, restaurants,
convenience store, hotels.
So all of these places have refrigeration units
and all of these refrigeration units have temperature sensors.
So the IoT Core is going to allow
connection of the sensors directly to the AWS cloud.
And it's, it's sort of eliminating the middleman,
rather than having to build some sort of a server or service.
To get the, to get the data from the sensors to the AWS cloud,
this IoT Core kind of fills that role.
And it's really cool, the fact that it's kind of a win-win.
First of all,
to think about refrigerating food and food safety, just that,
that instant access to these refrigeration devices.
So it's going to protect customers. It's going to ensure that the, you know,
the food's not spoiled. And secondly,
the fact that the food is not going to be spoiled is going to save these
companies a great deal of money. So that's a pretty cool practical development.
And I always get a kick out of seeing the practical aspects of these things and
how they can be implemented. This is tongue-twisting,
AWS IoT Sitewise Edge.
This software goes out at the edge locations and it can
collect, process,
and visualize equipment data on premises,
even when it's not connected to the cloud.
And the cool thing about this is the fact that, again,
all of this is going on at the edge location,
data is being processed.
So when the data is finally sent to the AWS cloud, this is,
this is mature process data.
So obviously that, obviously that's a big bonus.
And additionally,
it's cutting down how much data you're sending across the wires, saving costs,
saving time, all kinds of things.
It's been great hanging out with you guys during this virtual re:Invent this
year. It's been fun.
Certainly look forward to seeing everybody in person next year, but hey,
we made the best of it. That's right. Oh yeah, we did. Alright,
that's it for us, back to you. We're out. Thanks so much. Okay,
thank you for that update, Craig Errol, and John.
Now it's time for our final Guru of the Week. This week,
the winner is Megan Gilbert,
a software developer at Case Consulting in Virginia, USA.
Congratulations, a t-shirt and sticker pack is on its way to you right now.
Speaking of swag, which is my favorite part of re:Invent.
If you haven't got the free re:Invent hoodie yet this year,
be sure to check out our resources linked below,
where AWS have made it even easier to claim one.
You just have to watch a few videos or attend a live demo in a virtual sponsor
room, or complete the cable detective game. Now,
one final thing before I go, I just have a few thank you's for the year.
Firstly, to Joe, Jamie, Steve, and Camilla, our video editors,
who at one point or another this year cut together this episode each week and
removed all of my mistakes. They add the shiny things and just, in general,
make me and all the other presenters look good.
So thank you for all your work this year. I'd like to thank my co-hosts,
Faye and Scott. You guys have done an awesome job this year, too.
And finally a huge,
big thank you to our show runner and manager of community content development,
Diane Leyman. She's the person who makes this show happen every week,
from script approval to correcting automatically generated subtitles that think
my surname is Trenta Filler.
She produces this amazing series with the highest of standards each week,
and it just wouldn't happen without her. So thank you, Diane. Alright,
that's a wrap. This was our last AWS This Week for the year.
Together with my other presenters, we'd like to thank you all for watching.
We will be back with more AWS news in 2021. Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus,
have a happy holidays, and we'll see you next year.