re:Invent Highlights — Day Four
Thought re:Invent technically runs for another day, the fourth day is traditionally the final day in terms of large announcements — this certainly rings true for this year as well, with several significant announcements from Amazon and associates.
Amazon announced a massive expansion of their Alexa service that will be business-centric. The application, the full details of which is still to be hammered out, will in theory connect office products and enterprise devices to leverage Echo for greater productivity and increased workflow. While this is certainly promising, it does raise some serious concerns in terms of security — with much of the Alex traffic being ported from the device to cloud computing systems, a theoretical man in the middle attack could collect a lot of sensitive data if there were to be a breach of the service itself.
One of the most surprising announcements today was that of AWS Cloud9. Cloud9, a cloud-based IDE design to allow writing, running, and debugging of code in the cloud, is in actuality a rebranding and restructuring of the Cloud9 IDE service bought by AWS last year. While AWS could have simply repackaged and pushed the service out (and in fact, many figured this was what was going to happen when Cloud0 was purchased), they’ve gone full tilt with redesigning the service and integrating it as a core part of the AWS ecosystem.
The movement of the IDE industry into the cloud has long been touted as a major element of modern cloud evangelism. Being able to edit code and work within a consistent cloud-centric environment rather than porting code from local environment to local environment is certainly huge, and Cloud9 will likely only grow to be a larger part of the dev lifecycle within the industry.
AWS announced a large expansion of Lambda features, including Golang support, .NET Core 2.0 language support, an increase to 3GB memory, concurrency control, and API Gateway VPC integration. Expanding Lambda to support so many elements of complex modern systems is only a positive direction, and support for Go is certainly a framing construct for more modern languages on the Lambda service that points towards greater evolution and usability in the future.
It should be noted that, much to many security professional’s pleasure, a large focus of the keynote and general presentations today was that of encryption. One mantra summarized the discussion succinctly — “Dance like noone is watching. Encrypt like everyone is.” While many developers seem to believe that simple encapsulation or format structures (such as CWTs and JWTs) is enough, the simple fact is that data is valuable, becoming more valuable by the day, and can only be properly secured through stringent encryption.
An additional focus, as summarized by Ben Kehoe in his presentation, was on build/deploy testing and pipelining. Knowing where and what to test in the deploy lifecycle is vitally important, and seeing more heavy conversation on this topic while Lambda and AWS as a whole is integrating with more prototype-friendly languages like Golang is incredibly promising, and bodes well for developer experience in the future.
Ultimately, re:Invent has continued to show the future of the industry through its focus. At the start of each re:Invent, the range of topics inform what we expect to see in terms of announcements, and thereby what we expect to see as an industry moving forward. The movement into the cloud continues to march full-step, and it’s promising that, paired with this, a conversation focused on security and leveraging of languages to support all the cloud can deliver is at the forefront. Implementations of Cloud9 (and today’s lengthy explanations about its function) promise to deliver a future of effective, powerful, and secure cloud development, implementation, and application.
