Part 1. My re:Invent Adventure: Top Serverless Announcements
I'm a back-end software engineer with a passion for AWS Serverless and LEGO bricks! I mentor women in tech, providing guidance and support in their career journeys.
Introduction
Hej everyone! I am Victoria — a software engineer based in London. If you are reading this article, you are probably curious about re:Invent 2024— and this is the right place to learn more about it!
Excited? Let’s go!
What is re:Invent?
re:Invent is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) annual conference, designed for cloud enthusiasts, developers, architects, and IT professionals. It’s one of the biggest tech events in the world, packed with sessions, workshops, and networking opportunities.
It’s been around 3 years since I started following re:Invent online. This year, for the first time, I attended re:Invent in person. I was lucky to receive All Builders Welcome grant from Amazon Web Services, which covered a ticket to the conference and all travel expenses.
Top Serverless Announcements
Aurora DSQL
Source: Introducing Amazon Aurora DSQL | Amazon Web Services
Screenshot from Dr. Werner Vogels’ keynote
Amazon Aurora DSQL is a serverless distributed SQL database with virtually unlimited scale, the highest availability, and zero infrastructure management. Sounds exciting, right?
Aurora DSQL offers the fastest distributed SQL reads and writes and makes it effortless for you to scale to meet any workload demand without database sharding or instance upgrades. With its active-active distributed architecture, Aurora DSQL ensures strong data consistency designed for 99.99% single-Region and 99.999% multi-Region availability.
The best part — it’s serverless, and this fact eliminates the operational burden of patching, upgrades, and maintenance downtime.
These are very serious promises, so I would encourage you to watch Dr. Werner Vogels' Keynote or see this article to learn how it works under the hood.
Amazon DynamoDB global tables support multi-region strong consistency
Source: Amazon DynamoDB global tables previews multi-Region strong consistency — AWS
Screenshot from Dr. Werner Vogels’ keynote
Similar to Aurora DSQL, Amazon DynamoDB global tables now support multi-region strong consistency. This feature ensures that your application can always access the latest version of data from any region within a global table, eliminating the challenges of managing consistency across multiple regions. This update is particularly beneficial for developers creating global applications with strict consistency requirements, such as financial transaction processing and inventory management.
Amazon S3 Metadata
Source: Announcing Amazon S3 Metadata (Preview) — Easiest and fastest way to manage your metadata — AWS
Amazon S3 Metadata is the easiest and fastest way to instantly discover and understand your S3 data with automated, easily queried metadata that updates in near real-time.
Object metadata can include:
system-defined details (size and the source of the object)
custom metadata (your tags for annotating object information, for example — transaction ID, content rating and so on)
Amazon S3 Tables
Oh, this one is super exciting too! Amazon S3 Tables are fully managed Apache Iceberg tables optimised for analytics workloads. So far, it seems the easiest way to store tabular data (e.g. Parquet files) at scale.
S3 Tables are specifically optimised for analytics workloads, resulting in up to 3x faster query throughput and up to 10x higher transactions per second compared to self-managed tables.
If you use Amazon Data Firehose, Athena, Redshift, EMR, or QuickSight to query tabular data in S3, there’s an opportunity to move your data to S3 Tables to increase performance.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed the serverless highlights that I found the most exciting! Of course, there is so much more to explore — check out the What’s New With AWS? page to dive deeper.
There is something absolutely magical in being present in a room where a top cloud giant releases its new features. Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will share more about my personal re:Invent experience, the grant I received and of course more photos from Vegas!
Screenshot from Dr. Werner Vogels’ keynote
To conclude, I will quote Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels — now go build! 🚀
