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On The Cloud Pod this week, the team finds out whose re:Invent 2021 crystal ball was most accurate. Also Graviton3 is announced, and Adam Selipsky gives his first re:Invent keynote.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

🚨 Amazon’s re:Invent 2021 featured a ton of new updates, including AWS CloudWatch Evidently, AWS Private 5G, and a new AWS Sustainability Pillar.
🚨 Justin’s prediction pick — Graviton 3 — was announced on Day Two of re:Invent, along with serverless options for data analytics, and a free machine learning (ML) database for existing AWS customers.
🚨 Amazon CEO Adam Selipsky missed the mark at his re:Invent debut, announcing fewer new releases than expected to a low-energy crowd.

Top Quotes

💡 “This is Adam’s [Selipsky] first keynote as CEO of AWS… I do feel it was a missed opportunity. Number one, he didn’t drive out a ton of announcements, which everyone expected. There was a miss across the entire audience — people were expecting something they didn’t get. And then number two, OK, maybe you’re not the best public speaker: maybe you should go with a different model.”

💡 “In the keynote, the message was really clear: They’re trying to democratize access to machine learning, they’re trying to give this access to more than just the elite data scientists and programmers. And that made me think that if you expand that out to no-code in general, that’s a really powerful thing”

AWS: re:Invent 2021 feat. a Mechanical Cat

Amazon highlights its top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2021 and gives details of new releases and updates across the platform.

Pre:Invent: Because Every Good re:Invent needs a Warmup

👩‍🏫 In support of its mission to educate 29 million people by 2025, AWS expands access to its free cloud skills training to empower learners to pursue careers in technology.
⚠️ AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is now generally available to provide fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications for its enterprise customers. This scalable solution enables customers to use AWS as an elastic recovery site rather than relying on an on-premise disaster recovery infrastructure.
🐦 AWS Control Tower users can now created nested organizational units within the platform. Huzzah!
📊 AWS Audit Manager users can now simplify their audit preparations with the new dashboard feature that enables them to instantly track the progress of audit assessments relative to common control domains.
⛔ AWS Identity and Access Management users can now (finally) efficiently troubleshoot access denied errors in AWS with a new policy type responsible for deny permissions, and access denied error messages.
🎱 Amazon Cognito has a new console experience for user pools which makes it easier for users to add sign-in and sign-up functionality to their applications.
🌊 AWS Glue DataBrew now has native console integration with Amazon AppFlow, allowing users to connect to data from Salesforce, Slack and other SaaS applications, as well as AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift.
🆔 AWS Glue DataBrew helps users protect personally identifying information (PII) in just a few clicks with detection and data masking.
❄️ In other Glue DataBrew news, customers can create datasets by writing custom SQL statements to retrieve data from Amazon Redshift and Snowflake.
✅ With GlueDatabase, users can create their own data quality rules to check for duplicate values in certain columns, validate one column does not match another, or define many more custom checks and conditions.
🔍 New ML capabilities for Amazon CloudWatch help users detect anomalies based on metric math expressions.
🏗️ With Amazon Athena console support, users can better manage and visualize their AWS Step Functions workflows to build data processing pipelines, automate admin and alerting tasks, and more.
🧑‍💻 AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) 3.0 is here to help enterprises design and execute comprehensive plans for digital transformation.
💪 Introducing Amazon EC2 R6i Instances. Powered by the latest generation Intel Xeon scalable processors, these offer better memory and higher price-performance than predecessors.
💥 Amazon Linux 2022 is now in preview — just in time to mess up Justin’s Linux 2 instances.
📈 With the new AWS Graviton2 support for Fargate, customers can get up to 40% better price-performance for their serverless containers.
🆓 Savings alert! With the AWS free tier data transfer expansion, users can now enjoy 100GB from Regions and 1TB from Amazon CloudFront free every month — up from 1GB from Regions and 50GB from CloudFront.
🤲 AWS releases Enterprise On-Ramp, a new support plan for enterprise customers that are just starting on their cloud journeys.
☁️ AWS Proton users can now more easily manage their templates with Terraform and Git Repositories.
⚛️ AWS Proton now supports Terraform Open Source, allowing customers to provision infrastructure through Git-based workflows.

Re:Invent Day 1: No More Secrets

🕵️‍♀️ With Secrets Detector, Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer users can automatically detect secrets in source code or configuration files, such as passwords, API keys, SSH keys, and access tokens.
🔭 To provide more accurate AWS resources recommendations, Amazon is extending the enhanced infrastructure metrics look-back period to three months for AWS Compute Optimizer.
📊 Along with providing AWS resource recommendations, the AWS Compute Optimizer can now provide resource efficiency metrics to help assess efficiency.
☁️ AWS announces its new EC2 G5g instances, which extend Graviton2 price-performance benefits to GPU-based workloads, including graphics applications and ML inference.
🤑 New Amazon EC2 M6 instances are powered by third generation AMD EPYC processors, and offer an improved price-performance versus the previous generation M5a instances.
🧪 AWS releases CloudWatch Evidently, a capability that helps developers introduce experiments and feature management in their application code. The team remains confused as to why this is a CloudWatch feature.
💸 AWS releases real-user monitoring for CloudWatch with the insane price tag of $1.00 for every 100,000 events collected. We expect to see pricing changes in the future.
🖼️ Developers can now source their images with pull through cache repositories for Amazon Elastic Container Registry, offering improved performance and security.
🔥 After the dumpster fire that was the 2015 Amazon Inspector launch, AWS has finally released a new and improved version that features automated vulnerability management for cloud workloads.
🔎 The new AWS Data Exchange for APIs lets you find, subscribe to, and use third-party APIs with AWS SDKs, as well as consistent AWS-native authentication and governance.
🌐 With the AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere, users can find and buy containers to run their kubernetes clusters in any environment.
🪚 AWS Karpenter offers users an open-source high-performance kubernetes cluster autoscaler that can run on any code cluster to rapidly deploy kubernetes nodes and scale efficiently.
🎛️ Terraform users can finally throw away their homemade pipelines and use the new AWS Control Tower Account Factory to provision and customize their AWS accounts using a deployment pipeline.
📚 Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive is a new storage tier for the long-term retention of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots of EBS volumes.
🌉 Customers can now configure S3 Event Notifications to directly deliver to EventBridge, allowing for advanced filtering, multiple destinations, and more rapid invocation.
🧪 Amazon Athena ACID Transactions is now in preview: It allows users to add write, delete, update, and time travel operations to Athena’s SQL data manipulation language.
💻 Also in preview is a new AWS Chatbot feature, which gives users the ability to manage AWS resources and remediate issues in AWS workloads by running AWS CLI commands from Slack.

Re:Invent Day 2: Announcing Graviton3 and Private 5G, a Poem

3️⃣ Day two of re:Invent ushered in three new Amazon EC2 Instances powered by AWS-designed chips. These instances include a training instance as well as Graviton3 (which won Justin a predictions point) and the new C7G instance.
📊 AWS now has serverless options for three analytics services including Amazon Redshift, MSK, and EMR. These new serverless options allow for increased automation and scaling capabilities across data analytics and workloads.
▶️ In addition to new serverless options, Amazon Kinesis is now available on-demand, letting users stream tier data at scale without managing capacity.
🚗 As part of the Amazon Automotive initiative, AWS releases IoT FleetWise to help make vehicles safer, better, and more autonomous by collecting and analyzing vehicle data.
🌐 AWS announces the launch of Private 5G, a service that provides customers with a private mobile network for their facilities without needing an FCC license.
☕ To help customers move away from mainframes, AWS announces its Mainframe Modernization service that refactors mainframe workloads to run on AWS, by transforming legacy applications into modern Java-based cloud services.
🚀 AWS Nitro SSD offers high performance storage for I/O-intensive applications, while also allowing these workloads to run faster with more predictable performance.
🆕 Amazon announces two new storage-optimized EC2 instances: Im4gn and Is4gen. Powered by AWS Graviton2, these instances are optimized to support high-speed access to large amounts of data.
📱 Amazon Connect, AWS’ ML-powered contact center service, now includes call summarization which automatically recaps important points from each customer call.
2️⃣ Amazon releases new AWS Outposts Servers in two form factors, giving users the choice of x86 or Arm/Graviton2 processors.
⌨️ Amazon SageMaker Canvas is a new ML capability that helps users create and analyze data models with low to no-code requirements.
📉 Amazon Redshift Serverless allows users to run analytics at scale without having to manage data warehouse infrastructure.
🚣 AWS adds new features to its Lake Formation, including governed tables, automatic compaction, and cell-level security.
✅ Amazon is calling for folks to join its preview of new EC2 C7g instances powered by Graviton3 processors.
💡 AWS has created a less-than-genius way to simplify access management for Amazon S3 data, by giving users the ability to turn off access control mechanisms within each bucket. What could possibly go wrong?
💻 AWS Backup now supports VMware and VMware Cloud (on AWS), providing a single, centrally managed policy to protect these environments.
🗄️ AWS announces FSx for OpenZFS, which will let you use a popular file system without worrying about hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, backups, etc. Justin has never been so excited about a file system announcement.
🧊 With Amazon S3 Glacier Storage Class, you can archive your rarely-accessed data that requires quick retrieval for much less than it would cost using S3 Standard classes.
☁️ Amazon Backup is now available in preview for Amazon S3, allowing users to centrally manage application backups, easily restore data, and improve backup compliance.
⛄ Offline tape migration using AWS Snowball Edge lets users migrate up to 80TB of data per device into the AWS cloud.
✨ AWS announces two new capabilities as a part of its enhanced Amazon S3 Integration for Amazon FSx for Lustre: Full synchronization of your file systems with Amazon S3, and the ability to synchronize file systems with multiple S3 buckets or prefixes
🔄 AWS users can now enable automatic updates to the contents of their S3 buckets as data is updated in an FSx for Lustre file system
💰 If you’re in the Asia Pacific, US West 1 or Brazil region, Amazon has announced an up to 31% price reduction in three S3 storage classes. No savings for anyone else.

Re:Invent Day 3: Rise of the Machine Learning

👷‍♂️ With Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server, users can automate setup, operation, and scaling of databases in the cloud.
🧑‍🎓 AWS partners with Intel and Udacity to launch a new scholarship program dedicated to helping underrepresented and underserved students prepare for careers in AI and ML.
👨‍🏫 Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab is now in preview. This is a free service to help customers learn and experiment with ML capabilities.
🤔 New to Amazon SageMaker is the Inference Recommender, which automates load testing and optimizes model performance across ML instances.
💨 Amazon SageMaker Training Compiler is a new capability that can accelerate training of deep learning (DL) models by up to 50%.
💥 New enhancements to Amazon SageMaker allow users to create and manage EMR clusters and Spark Jobs directly within the platform.
🗄️ If you have data that you access infrequently, the new DynamoDB table class can save you up to 60% in your DynamoDB costs.
🤓 With the new Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS, developers can harness the power of ML to detect, diagnose, and resolve Amazon Aurora-related issues within their databases.
🤖 With Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer (now in preview), developers can automatically design chatbots from conversation transcripts in hours rather than weeks.
🕵️‍♀️ ML-powered search service Amazon Kendra launches three new features: experience builder, search analytics dashboard, and custom document enrichment.
🌐 The new AWS Direct Connect SiteLink lets users create connections between their on-premises networks through the AWS global network backbone.
💀 Amazon SQS Standard Queues now has an enhanced dead-letter queue management experience that lets you inspect a sample of the unconsumed messages and move them back to the original queue with a click, and without writing, maintaining, and securing any custom code.
🗂️ AWS releases its new VPC IP Address Manager, which helps network administrators organize, assign, monitor, and audit IP addresses automatically and at scale — but the price tag is pretty high.
⚠️ Amazon is taking the manual work out of network configuration with its VPC Network Access Analyzer, giving users the ability to quickly identify unintended network access errors.
🎚️ Optimize scaling decisions for improved performance and resilience in Amazon CloudWatch with AWS Managed Microsoft AD.
🤝 With the new AWS Transit Gateway intra-region peering capability, users can establish peering connections between multiple Transit Gateways in the same AWS Region, for simplified cloud operations and network connectivity.

Re:Invent Day 4: Please Don’t Troll re:Post

🌐 With the new AWS Cloud WAN, enterprises can build, manage, and monitor a global network that connects cloud and on-prem environments.
❓ Introducing AWS re:Post, a new site where the AWS users can post questions and get answers from the broader AWS community.
♻️ Customers can now monitor and reduce their environmental impact by up to 80% with the help of the new Sustainability Pillar for AWS Well-Architected Framework.
🏗️ Construct Hub and AWS Cloud Development Kit Version 2 are now generally available, making it easier to define your cloud resources.
🍎 Build and test applications for iOS devices using the newly released Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances.
💻 AWS SDK is now in developer preview for both Kotlin and Swift. Users are now able to use these respective languages to build a wide variety of applications.
📦 AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) v2 is now generally available in a single package, making it easier to stay up-to-date with new versions.

Re:Invent Predictions Results

After some controversy regarding which keynote speeches should be included, Justin wins at re:Invent 2021 predictions, thanks to Graviton3.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ If winning predictions wasn’t enough, Justin snags the lightning round point during this marathon episode, making the scores Justin (17), Ryan (12), Jonathan (13), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

reinvent

145: The Cloud Pod Evidently Wants to Talk about re:Invent