AWS Re: Invent has ended with amazing solution showcases, new features, and product announcements. Some of the new features highlights I wanted to are
AWS DSQL
AWS’s own distributed query engine will be an interesting thing to check out these following months of how this service will come out as it claims itself as a 99.999 highly available and resilient DSQL service.
Aurora DSQL is designed to be run in two configurations: a single-Region configuration that handles component failures or Availability Zone (AZ) disruptions without downtime, and a multi-Region configuration that handles multiple AZ failures while keeping you in complete control of where your data is processed and stored. Its unique disaggregated active-active architecture eliminates downtime due to failover or switchover, making it easy to design for high availability and business continuity.
Aurora DSQL offers single-Region clusters that are active-active across three AZs, minimizing replication lag and traditional database failover operations. In the event of hardware or infrastructure failures, it automatically routes requests to healthy infrastructure without manual intervention. Transactions in Aurora DSQL offer all the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability), even across multiple Regions, with minimal latency impact. It implements strong snapshot isolation, and provides strong data consistency for reads and writes to cluster endpoints.
You can read more about it here: Introducing Amazon Aurora DSQL | AWS Database Blog
AWS S3 Tables
I haven’t used data lakes myself until now, but I read about them. They’re also an exciting addition to the S3 suite. You can read about them in the post above. Or see official docs: Working with Amazon S3 Tables and table buckets - Amazon Simple Storage Service
AWS EKS Auto Mode
EKS Auto mode can, in my opinion, become a dream come true for some developers who know little about K8 management and infra. But for seasoned DevOps personnel and companies that are mature in using K8 clusters, it may or may not be a favorable prospect, and we will have to see in the coming months how it actually performs.
I have written about it in depth in my blog; you can find it here:
Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection
This might not sound interesting, but it can be a good soft addition to Guardduty’s capability. Earlier, it was very difficult to make sense of the alerts marked by this service as they could be invoked by a simple invocation of lambda, like if you had not done that in a very long time. Now, with this, it’s easier to check and respond to what events lead to the alert and take proactive action on that.
Now the overview widget now helps you view the number of attack sequences you have and consider the details of those attack sequences. Cloud environment findings often reveal multistage attacks, but these sophisticated attack sequences are low volume and account for a small fraction of the total number of findings. GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection introduces new attack sequence findings and improves actionability for existing detections in areas such as credential exfiltration, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration. This enhancement enables GuardDuty to offer composite detections that span multiple data sources, time periods, and resources within an account, providing you with a more comprehensive understanding of sophisticated cloud attacks.
Reviewing the ATT&CK tactics associated with the findings provides visibility into the specific tactics involved, whether it’s a single tactic or multiple. GuardDuty also offers security indicators that explain why the activity was flagged as suspicious and assigned a critical severity, including the high-risk APIs called and the tactics observed.
Diving deeper, you can view details about the actor responsible. The information includes how the user connected to and carried out these actions, including the network locations. This additional context helps you better understand the full scope and nature of the incident, which is crucial for investigation and response. You can follow prescriptive remediation recommendations based on AWS best practices, offering you actionable insights to swiftly address and resolve identified detections. These tailored recommendations help you improve your cloud security posture and ensure alignment with security guidelines.
Enhanced ECS Observability
This is a much-awaited feature for all of us ECS fans, providing us with more insights into our workloads and their performance metrics.
AWS X Anthropic ( a.k.a Claude)
The recent partnership between these firms is a game-changer, as happened between OpenAi and Azure. This marks AWS going full throttle on its AI pedal and we will be seeing much more interesting AI additions in anthropic as well as AWS
😅It looks like I can now use Cluade instead to debug my AWS issues on my own like why the hell ! cross account pass role is not allowed even with all the permissions?
Checkout
Follow more announcements made on reinvent