AWS re:Invent 2021: What to Expect? Predictions from the Fortum Tech Community
The annual AWS event (or as AWS would call it — learning conference), aka re:Invent is almost knocking at the door. This AWS re:Invent edition marks its 10-year anniversary and it’s a return to a Las Vegas in-person format after a two-year gap.
Traditionally, AWS has been using this yearly event as a platform for releasing new services and major updates. The bar is always very high, and we expect this year won’t be any different! Like millions of AWS experts around the globe, the Fortum Tech community is also eagerly waiting for the event.
Here are some of the AWS re:Invent predictions and wishes from a few of our Fortum technology experts.
Sunil Mohanty, Cloud & DevOps Architect
More services in DevOps space
One area where AWS has been lagging with respect to its biggest competitor i.e., Microsoft Azure, is in the DevOps space. After Microsoft acquired GitHub, the feature parity gap in the AWS DevOps offering has been more visible and it’s now clearly lagging. I would expect several announcements in this domain area.
On the CI/CD portfolio offering, CodeBuild is a service that has recently seen many good features and updates, and I am a big fan of it! Yet, I wish AWS would improve the AWS CodePipeline service to the same extent. Making it easier to setup and use, in a similar manner to its competitor Github Actions.
On a similar note, I would not be surprised if AWS announces a project management service, to compete with Atlassian Jira, Github Projects and Microsoft Azure DevOps Projects.
On-Premises and Hybrid Cloud
AWS has tacitly acknowledged that on-premises infrastructure isn’t going anywhere. At the same time, there is a good demand for multi-cloud services. So, I expect there will be lots of announcements related to the AWS Outposts service, and new products and features with hybrid offerings.
Dhaval Vithalani, DevSecOps Technical Lead
Enhancements in AWS Data & Analytics
Several AWS competitors, such as other public cloud and independent SaaS providers, are spearheading the data and analytics space in terms of advanced services and innovation. Last year, data companies like Snowflake, were able to capture market share by solving big and complex problems with cloud data warehousing solutions that are incredibly scalable, faster and cloud vendor agnostic. These solutions are also paving the way when it comes to data security and access management across organizations. Moreover, a big portion of data scientists and analysts in the enterprise world are today inclining towards technologies such as Azure Data Lake and Power BI for their data processing, analytics and business intelligence needs.
In this AWS re:Invent, I expect that AWS will bring several improvements in terms of scalability and compute decoupling (in AWS RedShift), and new services and features that would bring improvements and feature parity in the data domain.
Future is Crypto & Blockchain
Amazon Managed Blockchain is a service that will be under the attention of a lot of Cloud Evangelist and business leaders. Personally, I am expecting in this AWS re:Invent the announcement of power optimized AWS GPU instances and the ability to launch virtual machines behind ASIC Hardware. This would have a big impact in helping thousands of blockchain and crypto enthusiasts to build their environments for the development of dApps (Distributed Apps).
New services in security aspect of DevOps.
Last year AWS introduced a static code review tool, Amazon Code Guru Reviewer and Profiler, for SAST matching in line with capabilities of specialized tools such as SonarQube. This year I expect more AWS services and features that would cover other areas of software security such as DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing), IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing), RAST (Rapid Application Security Testing) and SCA (Software Composition Analysis).
Bruno Amaro Almeida, Head of Technology & Architecture
Making life even easier for serverless cloud-native engineering teams
Nowadays it is quite common to find software engineering teams that are cloud-native and fully using AWS managed services. However, I still see teams spending a tremendous amount of effort in building integrations across different managed services and producing custom logic to handle high availability and fault tolerance.
I expect to see AWS announcing several products and features that would provide built-in integrations between their offering and third-party partner services, global and multi-region high availability out of the box, and chaos engineering methods to enable more resilient architecture and drop unnecessary toil created by teams.
Welcoming complexity and niche use cases from Enterprise
AWS made a big U-turn in the past years by welcoming hybrid and multi cloud scenarios and architectures with services such as AWS Outposts and ECS (Elastic Container Service) & EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) Anywhere.
In the enterprise world, it is still common to find certain workloads that organizations choose not to migrate to any public cloud due to certain constraints such as monolithic solutions, niche use cases, or complex architectures.
In this AWS re:Invent edition I suspect we will see a few announcements that might seem odd for cloud native engineering teams. Judging by the newly announced AWS RDS (Relational Database Service) Custom — for managing complex self-hosted Oracle databases — these new features will be targeted to a few selected big enterprises and will give them an important nudge towards cloud and managing complexity.
Forward looking and innovative features
It would not be AWS re:Invent without a few announcements with innovative products and features that cause a stir and push the boundaries of what public cloud looks like today.
With the recent unveiling of the new AWS Center for Quantum Computing, I think we might see some interesting ideas and concepts being featured at re:Invent that will incentivize people to use and leverage AWS Braket in their solutions.
On the same note, with Web 3.0 and dApps (Distributed Apps) recent popularity, I would expect to see some announcements related to that development area and expanding the Amazon Managed Blockchain service offering.
Along with other AWS Partner Ambassadors and Community Builders, I will be live in the AWS Community Online panel discussion on December 2nd for a coverage of all the new features and announcements. Join us!
As always, we are looking forward to the surprises this AWS Re:Invent 2021 will bring us!
