AWS re:Invent 2020 digest — Part 2

Curated list of my favorite AWS updates from re:Invent 2020

reInvent 2020 is coming to an end. A lot ofnew launches have happened since I published Part 1of this series. Because digesting all the different updates takes time and a lot of coffee, I thought I’d help you out a little.

Following is a curated list of things that I found most important; matters related to architecture, scalability, reliability, performance, resiliency, devops, and security — anything that caught my eye, and I hope will satisfy yours.

AWS Fault Injection Simulator (coming in 2021)

AWS Fault Injection Simulator is a fully managed chaos engineering service that makes it easier for teams to discover an application’s weaknesses at scale in order to improve performance, observability, and resiliency. Chaos engineering is the process of stressing an application in testing or production environments by creating disruptive events, such as server outages or API throttling, observing how the system responds, and implementing improvements. Chaos engineering helps teams create the real-world conditions needed to uncover the hidden issues, monitoring blind spots, and performance bottlenecks that are difficult to find in distributed systems.

As you can imagine, this is my favorite launch and it looks like I am not the only one thinking like that :)

Go watch Laura Thomson, Sr. Product Mgr for AWS FIS, launching the service live on twitch!

https://medium.com/media/2e8f5a5d424f73adb2479662523ad904/href

You can also check my reInvent session here.

To learn more about chaos engineering, check my collection of articles.

AWS Lambda now supports self-managed Apache Kafka as an event source

If you love event-driven architecture, this one is for you! AWS Lambda lets customers build applications that can be triggered by messages in an Apache Kafka cluster hosted on any infrastructure. It is now easier than ever to build Kafka consumer applications with Lambda without needing to worry about provisioning or managing servers.

AWS announces Amazon Managed Service for Grafana and Prometheus in Preview

Amazon Managed Service for Grafana is a fully managed and secure data visualization service that lets customers instantly query, correlate, and visualize operational metrics, logs, and traces for their applications from multiple data sources. Developed in partnership with Grafana Labs, Amazon Managed Service for Grafana manages the provisioning, setup, scaling, and maintenance of Grafana servers, eliminating the need for customers to do this themselves.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) is a fully managed Prometheus**-compatible monitoring service that makes it easy to monitor containerized applications at scale by automatically scaling the ingestion, storage, and querying of operational metrics.

** The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Prometheus project is a popular open source and alerting monitoring solution optimized for container environments.

Customers can now use the open source Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) to monitor the performance of containerized workloads on AWS or on-premises, without having to manage the underlying infrastructure for scalability, availability, and security.

AWS Global Accelerator launches custom routing

AWS Global Accelerator released custom routing accelerator, a new type of accelerator that lets you use your own application logic to route user traffic to a specific Amazon EC2 destination.

With a custom routing accelerator, you can route multiple users to a specific EC2 destination in a single or multiple AWS Regions by directing them to a unique port on your accelerator. This feature makes it easier to integrate Global Accelerator with your application logic, such as matchmaking servers or session border controllers (network devices that protect and regulate IP traffic flows for real-time communication workflows).

With custom routing accelerators, you can now leverage AWS Global Accelerator as the single point of entry for your application while deterministically sending your user traffic to specific EC2 destinations in any AWS Region.

And customers are already embracing this feature to build multiplayer game architectures!

Other noticeable launches

-Adrian