AWS re:Invent — Three new services we love
AWS re:Invent kicked off in Las Vegas yesterday morning with the annual keynote from Andy Jassy. As expected, Andy introduced a dizzying array of new products and services that add to AWS’ already extensive lineup.
Mesh is a power user of AWS, so we watched the Keynote with heavy anticipation. Each new AWS service opens up opportunities for us to build new products and deliver unique solutions to our customers.
While there are many impressive new services, the following are three that we are very excited about.
SageMaker
Machine Learning (ML) went mainstream in 2017. ML has been the buzziest of buzzwords over the past year, and for good reason. ML gives companies a new set of tools they can use to deliver innovative solutions to their customers. Mesh used several ML solutions for Staples during our work on the Easy Button.
While utilizing Machine Learning can be a competitive advantage for companies, there are relatively few developers who know how to work with the technologies. As a result, most companies have little to no ability to leverage many ML based solutions.
Amazon takes dead AIM at this problem with the aptly named, SageMaker. The service attempts to simplify the end-to-end process of developing, training, and deploying machine learning models.
SageMaker will allow more companies and developers to make use of Machine Learning technology and we are looking forward to taking it for a test drive!
Fargate
We are big proponents of Linux containers at Mesh. We deploy all of our services as Docker containers, and our hosting solution of choice is Elastic Container Service (ECS). Amazon Fargate is a new addition to the ECS family.
Fargate is a container management solution that allows developers to deploy containers without worrying about the individual compute instances that run the containers. We simply define the number of containers we want to deploy, and Fargate handles the process of provisioning the compute resources required to support the containers. The service also takes care of automatically scaling those compute resources.
Without Fargate, the process of provisioning an EC2 cluster to run containers with ECS is fairly complex. It involves setting up an Auto Scaling Group that is responsible for launching individual EC2 instances into an ECS service. Developers must also specify if and when the cluster should scale by adding instances.
Fargate eliminates the need for developers to setup this configuration and simplifies the process of deploying and operating a container cluster. This is a very welcome abstraction that should save developers significant time and headache.
Aurora Serverless
Amazon Aurora offers an enterprise grade, managed database that is fully MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible. It is an excellent choice for AWS customers in need an extremely performant, relational database in the cloud.
Today Amazon announced a significantly cheaper version of Amazon Aurora called Aurora Serverless. And while we are excited about this new service, we are more excited about what this means for the future of AWS pricing.
Amazon first introduced the concept of “Serverless Computing” with the launch of AWS Lambda in 2014. One of the major benefits of serverless is that pricing is predicated on actual use and not provisioned resources.
With respect to Aurora, the standard offering charges customers for the entire time that a database is provisioned, regardless of its usage. Serverless Aurora flips the pricing model on its head and only charges developers for the actual time a database is being used. This is ideal for applications with workloads that are highly variable, or application environments that are not constantly in use such as testing or development.
We think Aurora Serverless demonstrates a broader trend towards serverless style pricing in general at AWS. As the cloud computing wars continue over the next several years, we will see AWS bring serverless pricing semantics, IE pay for actual use, to more of their services.
Conclusion
AWS’ product offering continues to grow at an insane pace. Toward the end of the keynote, Jassy claimed that AWS will release an average of three new services per day in 2018. This opens up an insane number of possibilities for companies to leverage these services and deliver amazing solutions to their customers.
If you are interested in chatting about AWS or need help getting started with one of their services, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
