Last week Frederik and I went to AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, which is the largest annual conference of Amazon AWS. The conference is 5 days long with main highlight the keynotes of Andy Jassy (CEO of Amazon AWS) and Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com). During these two keynotes a lot of new services and features were announced. We are really looking forward to start using the following new services and features with our clients.

• Amazon Athena: Query S3 buckets and files with SQL like syntax. Really useful to query archived data.
• AWS Step Functions: Coordinate the Lambda functions of your application in a visual workflow.
• Amazon EC2 new instance type: There are a lot of new instance families announced. We now can use the C5, R4, F1, I3 and bigger sizes for the T2 family. These new instance types are an iteration on the previous ones with better hardware and some other small optimizations.
• Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs: Now you can add GPU cards to instances in the same way you can attach disks to instances with EBS. This makes it easier to do graphic computing with instances that fit your workload.
• Amazon Lightsail: You can now easily spin up a single instance without having to think about the networking aspect. This is Amazon AWS’ answer to Digital Ocean and others.
• AWS Batch: Run batch jobs on compute instances. You give your batch job as a Docker container with command and Amazon AWS takes care of the rest.
• Lambda@Edge: Run lambda functions on cloudfront. This can be handy to manipulate the behaviour of the requests before it reaches your compute instances.
• Blox – Open Source scheduler for Amazon ECS: Use third party schedulers on Amazon ECS to schedule your Docker containers.
• Amazon Aurora: Amazon Aurora is now PostgreSQL compatible as well.
• AWS CodeBuild: Build and test your code easily with this service. You can use every programming language you want and Amazon AWS provides build environments for Android, Java, Python, Ruby, Go, Node.js, and Docker.
• AWS X-Ray: Get better insights in your applications by including AWS X-Ray on your applications. This makes debugging easier. At this moment Node.js, Java, C# and AWS Lambda functions are supported.
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard: Get a personalized Amazon AWS health dashboard on what you have running in your AWS account.
• AWS Shield: DDOS protection on Cloudfront, ELB and Route53.

Another announcement not mentioned in the keynote is that VPC networks also support IPv6. Heads-up for anyone who wants to build his/her infrastructure fully IPv6 compatible.
Besides these new services and features there were a ton of other new announcements, you can find a complete list here.

There were a lot of breakout sessions and the great news is, everything is recorded and available on YouTube. A nice curated list can be found here. Thank you Steven Ringo for creating this. Certainly take a look at the deep dive videos of the AWS services.

The conference was the perfect opportunity to meet with AWS Solutions Architects, other AWS Partners and companies that are using AWS. We gained a good insight in what is hot in the AWS ecosystem and where to focus on as a company. We will invest even more time in staying up to date with all what AWS has to offer.

On wednesday 14th of December there will be a meetup where we discuss all new features that were announced at AWS re:Invent