AWS re:Invent23
Here we go! Just like last year, we are so so lucky to participate in one of the most tremendous events in the tech world (don’t worry, it’s not as intimidating as it may seem 😊). Every year at the begining, I ask myself, “Why? Why are you still going to this event? You could follow everything quietly from the couch with a cup of tea.” Because it is stressfull, exhausting. But to be honest, it’s definitely not the same thing. Theses days are contributing to developing our expertise and insights.
From the very first moment, there’s this energy that permeates the event, and you have to experience it from the inside to truly feel it. Even when we receive our precious pass (the badge without which we can’t enter any conference), it’s exhilarating and, of course, a bit stressful with all the people gathered around. This year, 60,000 people attended this event. I’m just 1 of these lucky folks!
At LeParisien I was fortunate to go with Amine, Said and Zakaria this year.
Okay let’s begin what I learned this time :
We had a plethora of announcements. I won’t enumerate here every announcement you can find on various websites. Instead, I’ll focus on what personally excited me the most.
Productivity
Amazon Q
Amazon Q is the new GI Assistant designed for businesses to gain productivity. Currently in public preview so free, this tool will be available for purchase starting at $20 annually per user.
It is designed to assist/recommend us in our usage of cloud computing services and comes with 17 years of training. Basically, what I understand is that I can ask any questions about how we are going to implement our services or if we encounter issues. It just provides us with an idea of the solution, and it’s up to me to execute it or not!
- It could assist us in selecting the appropriate EC2 instances.
- It has the capability to connect to various external tools (such as Atlassian, Slack), and the integrations could aid in automatically creating tickets in a specific Jira Board, for instance, and sending notifications (eliminating the need to develop them, hopefully?).
- It can generate code through CodeWhisperer and debug if there is an issue.
- So basically, it’s a sort of ChatGPT, except you can use it in your AWS console. Does it sound exciting to test it?
So for me it is the feature to test ASAP !
Billing
As you may know from my previous articles since 2020, I’ve been deeply immersed in AWS cost matters and have actively worked on cost optimizations.
This year, we have the Cost Optimization Hub — a new feature that enables us to aggregate a set of cost data (especially beneficial in multi-region, multi-account configurations). This eliminates the need for constantly switching between different contexts. Additionally, we can easily pinpoint if a resource is underutilized and determine how to resize or change the instance type. Finally, we can assess whether it’s advantageous to leverage Saving Plans and Reserved Instances. Essentially, it encapsulates all the tasks I usually engage in either with my AWS account manager or independently.
On the same subject optimisation : they annonced Gravition 4 and Trainium2 the next generation of its custom-designed chips. At LeParisien we use already Gravition in order to optimize our workloads in some cases. These chips are engineered to deliver significant improvements in performance and energy efficiency across a broad spectrum of workloads. It aligns perfectly with our vision of green IT.
Graviton4 is optimized for cloud computing workloads, while Trainium2 is designed for training in machine learning.
Sécurity
AWS Backup
At Le Parisien, we strengthen our security by addressing various points: not only within our application but also by comprehensively covering all other aspects.
AWS backup has a new feature which allows to test the backup procedures, it seems that all the services are not yet covered, but as usual with AWS they will be comming soon! So currently we have the main services : DynamoDB, EC2, RDS and S3.
Amazon Inspector
We can now scan software vulnerabilities in container images during the build process from our CI/CD
Focus on Werner’s Keynote
I couldn’t help myself : I have to talk about Werner Vogels the CTO & VP of Amazon. He’s still the figure ! This year again he offered us a short and funny video about the main message he wanted to share with us : Cloud migration, and on what we should focus on this year via Frugal Architect. So I’m going to right an article focused on that and also an article specifically on GenAI. Stay tuned !
