Now that the dust has settled on re:Invent 2020 — probably the most uniquely delivered AWS conference ever — we think it’s high time we get you a healthy recap of the top highlights from the three weeks.
After all, no one’s really asking people to pay attention to every technological detail over the course of 15 presentations and workshop days. That’s what we’re here for: to help busy people like you. And even if you haven’t been running around searching for knick-knacks and doodads in the busy time between the holidays, you probably have gotten a bit sidetracked by the people who are.
So let’s do it! Here are our re:Invent highlights as selected by the AWS Content Team at Cloud Academy.
Andy Jassy’s Keynote at re:Invent 2020
Our own AWS Content and Security Lead @Stuart_A_Scott gives a concise overview of what’s important from AWS CEO Andy Jassy’s opening keynote. Among the highlights:
- Amazon SageMaker Pipelines – The first purpose-built, easy-to-use CI/CD service for ML
- ECS Anywhere – Run ECS in your own data center
- Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 – Scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second
See ALL of Stuart’s keynote highlights here.
Stuart also created a brief course, AWS Glue Elastic View, where he dives deeper into the feature. You’ll learn about how it can easily combine and replicate source data across multiple different target data stores, while at the same time manifesting a virtual table of combined data which can then be accessed by your applications.
A big month for AWS Lambda at re:Invent
See what AWS has in store for its serverless powerhouse, Lambda, with insight from our AWS Sr. Content Developer @WilliamLMeadows. Among the highlights:
- Lambda duration billing to save costs
- Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights for deeper visibility
- Lambda support for container images as a packaging format
Get all of William’s details in his blog post on Lambda at re:Invent.
Where to focus your AWS security efforts
Stuart is back and takes a deep dive into the 10 places your security group should focus its resources, first highlighted by Stephen Schmidt at AWS re:Invent 2020.
Read Stuart’s breakdown and get best practices in his blog post.
Werner Vogels’s keynote highlights
AWS CTO Werner Vogel’s keynote is always a high point of the conference with compelling info presented in a fun way. Our AWS content team handpicked some of these top new services to share as highlights from this closing keynote:
- AWS CloudShell: A browser-based shell at no additional cost to interact with your AWS resources.
- AWS Fault Injection Simulator: A fully managed chaos engineering service that works at scale.
- Amazon Managed service for Grafana: A fully managed and scalable data visualization service that works with third parties.
- Amazon Managed service for Prometheus: A Prometheus-compatible monitoring service to help you easily monitor containerized applications. Works with the CNCF’s popular open-source project.
- AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry: Also built to work with a project from the CNCF, this is AWS’s own supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry application monitoring project.
New Amazon SageMaker Learning Path
During re:Invent 2020, our Content Team kept busy following all the developments, but also made time to create a new AWS Learning Path: Start Modelling Data with Amazon SageMaker. This will train you on the brand new services released during the event: Data Wrangler, Data Pipeline, and Feature Store. It was truly an exciting three weeks for the whole Cloud Academy team and we’re looking forward to putting out new courses and labs to help you stay on top of everything AWS.
