AWS re:Invent 2018 Hits

4 min readDec 4, 2018

I’ve attended my first AWS re:Invent last week. This was a unique experience for me. I’ve never seen a conference at this scale — not sure if there are any tech events as big as 53k people. Also, this was my first time in Las Vegas. “Scale” has a new meaning for me 🙂

As a new AWS Community Hero, I enjoyed meeting most of my Twitter friends in person.

Another big thing for me was to watch the keynotes in special seats, courtesy of Ross and AWS for the community heroes!

Let’s talk about the hits now. Please keep in my that these are the most important announcements “for me”. It really depends on your interests and there is a lot of value to at least know what an AWS service does in general (I know it gets harder and harder but …).

Top 5 keywords of the conference

#Builders
#Databases
#MLforThePeople
#Security
#WorldDominationNotJustTheCloud

Top 5 announcements

Improved #Serverless DynamoDB with on-demand scalability and transactions
This is not just critical for the future of NoSQL in AWS but also very critical for the future of Serverless computing.
Reusable future is almost here: Lambda Layers and Nested applications with SAM using Serverless Repository
I know there is still a lot to do for a reusable future. Yet, this is a critical move towards reusing app logic and apps in a nano services Serverless world. The challenge though is to keep things simple, observable, and secure now.
Identify and implement improvements: AWS Security Hub and AWS Well Architected Tool
I will cheat again like the previous item and talk about two new things in one subtitle. Security is still a big concern for any company going cloud even though the cloud offers way more flexibility. AWS gets more and more complicated (150+ services and counting). Account management, key management, permissions, roles, more and more makes security hard. This tool called “Security hub”, even though it won’t solve all your security problems, offers an easy way to set up alerts and compliance across AWS accounts.
Architectures are getting more and more complicated like security. You don’t just use EC2 and get the most out of the cloud. When you actually start using the cloud, you are looking at something complex nowadays. You often don’t know what to choose or how to optimize for speed and cost. AWS Well Architected tool aims to help with this (and automate their own Solutions Architectures 🙂
13 new Machine Learning tools and improvements
One thing AWS tries to do is to make ML a commodity. Yet, ML still isn’t simple for many. Most of the time, we need specific functionality like creating a recommendation engine, personalization, or text extraction. New products like Amazon Forecast, Personalize, Textract, and Comprehend Medical are good examples for ready to use ML.
On-premise Amazon Web Services
I’m a cloud-native citizen. But one thing I learned talking with customers and tech leaders, who have experience working with big enterprises, is that the world is bigger than the public cloud. Most companies have still on-prem tools and databases which they can’t leave for many reasons. AWS now will be able to go to them instead of waiting for them to come. Future is coming to you as they say.

AWS re:Invent 2018 Hits

Top 5 keywords of the conference

Top 5 announcements

Top 5 most interesting and innovative tools

Recommended blog posts on the most important capabilities and tools from re:Invent 2018

Written by Serhat Can