AWS reInvent 2020 Announcements And Updates

Digital transformation of businesses has evolved numbers over the years, especially since the global pandemic. The pandemic situation had urged countless business entities in various ways to shift towards digital platforms to continue functioning despite the circumstances. Such a shift had plenty of implications on AWS. The most crucial question today is not about how you can migrate your business functions to the cloud? Instead, it has become how to manage once your business is fully functional with the cloud? 

Every year at AWS reInvent, they had made sure to introduce and announce various tools that helped every business on a global scale to move towards cloud technology. The cloud is not just the center of innovation anymore, and it has become a necessary eco-system causing a digital revolution. On the same note, given the pandemic situation, AWS focused on addressing the innovation across multiple computing platforms in their AWS reInvent 2020 conference. The announcements were endless. More importantly, AWS has reduced operating costs and improved performance rates for almost every product there without having to blow your budget. AWS reInvent 2020 has tipped the scales far ahead towards an improved digital transformation.

In this blog, you will learn about how we helped multiple organizations, as a technology partner, make the most of AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server, and CloudFront. What’s more, in this blog you will find out what we are excited about the plans we have regarding our AWS services based on the updates provided straight-out of AWS reInvent 2020 announcements. Migrating to serverless is a smart choice. Your existing or new development projects might very well benefit from what we have in store.

If you are a newbie to the concept of AWS reInvent, we understand that it might feel overwhelming to phase over every update that AWS releases for their products. Before jumping into the details, we’ll throw some light on what the event is all about.

AWS reInvent is a yearly week-long event, where various key speakers from multiple technical backgrounds share information on the impact of the new AWS updates and its improvements from the older versions. . They deliver more than thousand sessions on technical updates and new functionalities that are spread out across three levels- introductory, advanced, and expert.

This year marks the ninth edition of the annual AWS reInvent, which kickstarted on November 30th, 2020. During his keynote, Andy Jassy, CEO at AWS, took pride in announcing that despite the drop-down in the YoY rate in 2020to 29%, AWS has had a reasonable run rate in performance, generating $46 billion revenue. He stated that the revenue growth of AWS is expected to increase by another $10 billion in the next 12 months, which would increase the income generated to $50 billion. He also states that AWS is expected to show a trend of rising in $10 billion every 12 months. He indicated that “the rate of growth in AWS continues to accelerate” and “AWS is now the fifth-largest IT enterprise in the world.” Concerning his statement, he mentions how adopting relentless innovation helped them to create a universe of possibilities.

Our Path to the Future with AWS reInvent 2020 Announcements 

AWS has always played a significant role in Simform’s journey to transform digital software services through a value-added chain of extended development teams over the years.  Be it integrating on-premises data, taking preventive actions, driving new analytical improvements, or boosting operational efficiency, AWS has helped us refine cloud computing for clients like Redbull, TransTMS, SwiftShopper, FIH, FoodTruck Spaces, and more. 

The new announcements must reshape our dynamic business environment, reduce development turnaround time, and facilitate implementations of AWS services. We look forward to building compelling business applications, useful tools, and governance of serverless storage with improved content delivery, encrypted safety of databases, and more.

Concept: What is it? 

AWS Lambda is a serverless cloud-computing platform that runs programmed codes for application events independent of a server, increasing your capacity to scale flexibly. In fact, all it takes is sending a range of few requests per day to extend the capacity of the application. You can also send thousands of requests per second and cater to the requirement of your application at ease. Among its other striking attributes, Lambda runs event codes on a high-performance computing infrastructure with zero administration requirements. 

Simform’s experience with AWS Lambda 

We have extended the usage of various AWS resources like S3 buckets and DynamoDB with Lambda that allowed us to write and add customized logic to the computing cloud data. As a matter of fact, we collaborated with FreeWire to develop an EV charging platform, now used by Walmart, Uber, Volvo, Linkedin, and BellEnergy, that was powered by AWS Lambda.

So, what did we do with AWS Lambda? 

• Built micro-services that communicated seamlessly between mobile and web apps.
• Created scalable cloud containers with consistent configurations.
• Handled large volumes of data by combining the database architectures of SQL and NoSQL. 
• Hosted Amazon RDS, DynamoDB via AWS Lambda to conveniently store and pull-back non-relational data. 
• Delivered rich content with reduced latency by using Lambda with Amazon CloudFront to create faster communication between the origin server and the viewer. 
• Developed automated systems that requires zero maintenance for functions like security patch deployment, code monitoring, code logging, storage capacity provisioning, and server maintenance.

AWS Lambda reInvent 2020 Announcements: What’s Coming?

• Increased memory limit 3x times up to 10 GB for every Lambda function. 
• Improved accessibility to 6vCPUs for the execution environment by allocating CPU resources based on the limit of memory configuration. 
• Reduced turnaround time to execute multi-threading and multi-processing. 
• Highly-improved support for Advanced Vector Instruction sets such as Advanced Vector Extension 2 (AVX2). 
• Insignificant hike in prices for 5 GB of memory and 1 GB of memory with 1 million invocations. 
• Increased memory function performance by 5x to 7.6x times. 
• Usage of PyTorch along with AVX2 provides Lambda with the ability to create simultaneous processing for ETL jobs, modeling, genomics, media processing, gaming, High-performance computing (HPC), and machine learning.

How is Simform Going to Expand AWS Lambda Services in 2021? 

We can now help you optimize functionalities with AWS Lambda Power Tuning to boost memory power and increase performance economically without compromising on our data-driven approach. 

You can expect increased floating-point operation per clock cycle that runs on highly parallelizable operations simultaneously via AVX2 and AWS Lambda. 

We guarantee that the cost is nearly the same for a Lambda function executed at 2.4s with 128 MB memory power and a Lambda function performed at 300ms with 1 GB Memory power. Unbelievable, isn’t it? Check out this graph: 

How Simform Can Help you?  

• Auto-vectorizing applications  
• Computer vision-based applications with advanced image parallelization method
• AVX2 compatible applications
• Complex computation of intensive serverless workloads using Intel enabled Math Kernel Libraries (MKL), AVX2, Node, and Python 

Concept: What is it? 

Amazon DynamoDB is an AWS based database system that supports key-valued cloud functions and an influx of data structure. In technical terms, it is a NoSQL-based database platform that manages the performance of data without any administrative overload. It also encourages seamless cluster scalability, memory caching, software patching, and restore events for stored data. Some of the notable features of DynamoDB include storing schema items in database tables that are inconsistent, streaming data with the live-updated version and incremental backups, and creating timestamps for expired data. 

Simform’s experience with Amazon DynamoDB

Simform has successfully developed one-click solutions such as dashboards, backend data management for CRM-based businesses as well as small and large-scale enterprises using Amazon DynamoDB. For instance, we designed a scalable and flexible database architecture for Swift Shopper. It wanted to break the traditional database architecture into effective, small micro-services so that each function in their retail application would be independent of each other. 

So, what did we do with Amazon DynamoDB? 

• Designed database tables that automatically synced POS and inventory data. 
• Built flexible APIs that do not consume large volumes of data storage. 
• Integrated enormous amounts of product data with frictionless performance. 
• Developed cloud-based data warehousing to batch complex data in real-time. 
• Handled multi-stage ETL jobs for improved scalability. 
• Supported Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (ACID) transactions for database builts. 
• Provided on-demand data backups by creating Point-in-Time recovery to protect stored data.

Amazon DynamoDB reInvent 2020 Announcements: What’s Coming? 

• Build analytical workloads for Amazon DynamoDB through AWS Lambda at no additional cost. 
• Improved streamlining and consolidation of business and analytical logic by combining DynamoDB with Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics or Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink. 
• No additional charge for selecting the length of tumbling windows. 
• Introduction of checkpoint features that prioritize data duplication and data processing failures. 
• Create multiple data stores by using SQL to combine DynamoDB and AWS Glue Elastic Views. 
• View every item-level change in the database at any point of time by using Amazon Kinesis Data streams with DynamoDB.
• AWS Pricing Calculator now supports DynamoDB.

How is Simform Going to Expand Amazon DynamoDB Services in 2021? 

With all the new AWS reInvent 2020 updates, we are laying plans to create next-level serverless platform possibilities that can handle a spike in loads and on-demand auto-scaling features. If you have an existing DynamoDB-based database limited to a particular region/country, we are now equipped to convert them to global tables with reduced latency and improved creation of data replicas. Moving forward, we will use SQL to process structured data from relational databases by using a query language called PartiQL. This will increase the global adoption of your application. 

How Simform Can Help You? 

• Customized encryption keys for your global tables.
• Amazon S3 with DynamoDB abilities to perform highly-scalable analytics. 
• Use CloudWatch to obtain actionable insights from your database performance. 
• Build next-gen Amazon EC2 R5 nodes and take advantage of AWS Nitro System using Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to retrieve data at speed ranging between milliseconds microseconds, memory ranging between 16 to 768 Gibibytes (GiB). 

Concept: What is it? 

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a cloud-computing platform that provides rental opportunities for virtual systems that perform like a personal computer. Ever since its introduction, investment in hardware for businesses has reduced, saving a good amount of money. It also gives complete control over a variety of computing resources through AWS. EC2 is commonly used for handling changes in web requirements and forecasting traffic to manage popularity spikes.  What’s more, features like virtual instances, Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) among others free you from the hassle of configuring the CPU, memory, and storage. 

Simform’s experience with Amazon EC2? 

Amazon EC2 is one of the most preferred cloud-computing platforms our clients opt to address their scalability requirements.  Furthermore, we have built enterprise-level applications by hosting EC2 for organizations like Stubbs & Wootoons, Food Truck Spaces, and Mission Rabies to meet high volumes of user requests.

So, what did we do with Amazon EC2? 

• Automated distribution of incoming traffic through Elastic Load Balancing. 
• Reduced manual provisioning capacity of computing resources without influencing the auto-scaling capabilities. 
• Managed, scaled, and tuned Microsoft Windows Server needs with SQL. 
• Audited application updates by combining EC2 and AWS CloudTrail. 
• Leveraged run command and integrated it with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to update necessary virtual machines.
• Created low-latency based High-Performance Applications (HPC) and Elastic Fabric Adapter. 

Amazon EC2 reInvent 2020 Announcements: What’s Coming? 

• Instances of Amazon EC2 C6gn to be powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors that offer network bandwidth up to 100 Gbps. 
• 40% increase in price-performance over previous processors and improved bandwidth against Amazon EBS. 
• Reduced data ingestion and accelerated data transfer to and from Amazon S3.
• C6gn processors now support Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). 
• AWS Launch Wizard now reduces the overhead burden on installing SAP on EC2 instances. 
• Amazon Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports direct communication with AWS IoT Core and can run on EC2. 
• Access to high-resolution instance-level metrics for EC2 and Elastic Network Adapter (ENA). 

How is Simform Going to Expand Amazon EC2 in 2021? 

We are now upgrading our Amazon EC2 services to stay compatible with the newly launched D3 and D3en instances. This way, you get low-cost on-instance HDD storage with high computational power. Though we focus on EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server, the new instances have virtual processors ranging from 4 vCPUs to 32 vCPUs. In addition to this, you receive storage ranging between 6 TB and 336 TB with a bandwidth of 850 Mbps to 7000 Mbps. Compared to the previous D2 instances, the new D3 and D3en provide 30% increased computational power, 5% boosted memory for every vCPU and 2.5x improved performance. Don’t believe us? See what Ed Hunter from Netflix has to say about the new AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 instances: 

How Simform Can Help You?

• Leverage Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and Message Passing Interface (MPI) clusters to create next-gen x86 based EC2 instances. 
• Quicker turnaround time to create and deploy Microsoft Active Directory (AD) infrastructures by using the new AWS Launch Wizard. 
• Develop possibilities for building next-gen IoT and ML-based applications by combining Apache Kafka, VPC with EC2. 
• Combine using ENA or EFA with EC2 instances to obtain instant insights on web traffic drops. 

Concept: What is it? 

Amazon CloudFront is an advanced Content Delivery Network (CDN) system that operates in AWS’s web service. It speeds up distributing dynamic and static web content through a global data center network, also known as edge locations, which routes a user to a server-location, where latency is at the lowest, to ensure fast content delivery. It’s also widely used for accelerating live streaming videos, on-demand media in static, and dynamic websites. 

Simform’s experience with Amazon CloudFront? 

In 2018, the International Hockey Federation (FIH) wanted to revamp their web experience to create a powerful web presence for more than 3 million viewers. To achieve this, Simform employed Amazon CloudFront to create a visionary website with increased content engagement by hosting CMS requirements on a cloud platform. We successfully migrated their site from a legacy architecture to a cloud-based system with EC2 and CDN. EC2 was used to run their website, and CDN was used to serve a minimum of 100,000 site visitors per day. 

So, what did we do with Amazon CloudFront? 

• Leveraged ElastiCache with Amazon EC2 and CloudFront to create automated memory caching for the website’s content. 
• Integrated Elastic Load Balancing with CloudFront to balance the traffic and scale the application according to the traffic. 
• Stored videos using Amazon S3 and converted them to the formats required by CDN using Elastic Transcoder across devices. 
• Combined IAM with CloudFront to control and manage the content caching and behavior settings of the content distribution system. 

Amazon CloudFront reInvent 2020 Anncouncements: What’s Coming? 

• CloudFront has expanded its edge locations to Asia’s Pacific geographic regions. 
• CDN now supports public key management providing the possibility for more flexibility in API access over the content via signed URLs or signed cookies. 
• Introduced Key Groups where public keys for IAM are created with customized permissions. 
• CloudFront now has a centralized caching layer called Origin shield, which reduces 57% of the origin’s traffic load. 
• Transport Layer Security (TSL) now supports v1.3, which encrypts the content and empowers secured communication between servers to share content at reduced latency.

Moving Forward to 2021: How is Simform Going to Expand Amazon CloudFront? 

We plan to use Origin Shield to fetch content and improve the computing power per request made with just-in-time data packaging. By combining such features with Lambda@Edge, we will create advanced serverless content logic with dynamic origin load balancing elements. Additionally, you will get access to Regional Edge Caches, Brotli compressed content, and TSLv1.3 improvements at reduced or no additional charges.  

How Simform Can Help You? 

• Configure Regional Edge Caches and Lambda@Edge with Origin Shield to reduce the cloud workload on multi-CDN processing, live streaming, image buffering, and more. 
• Usage of Brotli compression algorithms with CloudFront to create smaller file sizes of the content for faster delivery. 
• Leverage Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) Public with CloudFront to cache images quickly and share container software resources to improve faster content downloads from any region in the globe.

Apart from the four AWS technologies we used large, a couple more fantastic AWS products were introduced during AWS reInvent 2020. At Simform, we are also looking towards the possibilities of leveraging them in the future. 

Amazon DevOps Guru: A Machine Learning (ML) powered AWS service that focuses on improving the automation based operations for businesses looking for opportunities to tailor specific application functionalities with unique automated behavior. In other words, it also helps in providing automated functional recommendations for remediation. 

Amazon Monitron: One of the new machine learning services introduced by AWS focusing on industrial use cases via software development. Monitron focuses on providing end-to-end monitoring solutions for industrial purposes via gateways, sensors, and ML-powered codes. Other new releases on the same line of purpose include AWS Panorama SDK, Lookout for Vision, etc.  

Advanced Query Accelerator (AQUA): For businesses that love analytics, the new AQUA announcement from AWS might just be the next upgrade your application requires. AQUA focuses on leveraging ML to deliver 10x improved query performance for three analytical products: Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue Elastic Views, and Amazon QuickSight Q. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere: while ECS might not be a new product, the feature of making its container capabilities accessible from anywhere from through their data centers is new. It will help businesses develop, scale modern features in applications, and deploy them conveniently. 

AWS Proton: Automate containers necessary for developing next-gen serverless application development and deployment. It focuses on coordinating different AWS tools required for monitoring, updates, code deployments, and provisioning. CI/CD configurations for any application can be scaled up in performance using Proton. 

Amazon Aurora Serverless: while this might not be a new product, its latest version upgrade is a game-changer. The all-new Amazon Aurora Serverless V2 can scale up transactions from hundreds to thousands in a fraction of a second. It is one of the best addition to the database category. However, it is not officially available for unlimited usage, and right now, it is available only in preview. 

Babelfish for AuroraPostgreSQL: Have you heard of a translation layer for application codes? Babelfish preview introduced by AWS for AuroraPostgreSQL allows Aurora to easily translate Microsoft SQL codes in a format that it can understand. With this capability, businesses can now modify applications that run on SQL server without having to migrate without any risk. 

Amazon SageMaker: It is an entirely ML-focused tool that takes data science and ML to the next level. It offers an accelerated collaboration of all ML tools at one place in a comprehensive manner. It is also the first Integrated Development Environment (IDE) built for ML with 10x improved productivity. 

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP): Another preview-level introduction from AWS. Prometheus, you might already know, but with this new product addition, the cloud-native environment of Prometheus and its query language PromQL can be easily leveraged to monitor the operation workloads on an application. It works closely with Amazon EKS and ECS. 

Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG): Analyze, monitor, and even set metrics, logs with alarms with the ability to trace data across multiple sources using AMG. It is another next-level monitoring-centric tool introduced by AWS on a preview-basis. It focuses more on providing improved data visualizations. 

We have successfully built and deployed various innovative cloud-based projects for our clients as an AWS technology partner. From migrating from legacy systems to extending or executing cloud-based services, our team of AWS-certified developers extend your development capacity and work with you to explore the endless opportunities AWS offers.  With AWS reInvent 2020 announcements, we will be taking our AWS services to the next level with multiple cloud-to-cloud integrations, data engineering, and networking. It is never too late to be a part of our journey with AWS!