We're approaching the end of AWS re:Invent 2024, and we've seen impressive releases. Here are the top 10 announcements I find most impactful for this year’s AWS re:Invent!
ℹ️ TL;DR: here’s the summary as a nice infographic ✨
10) Iceberg Tables on S3 Buckets
S3 buckets now support queryable metadata (Iceberg tables) functionality, allowing for a live queryable view of object creations, updates, and deletions using tools like Athena. Check pricing before usage, as the cost increase is non-trivial.
9) CloudFront VPC Origins
Perhaps long overdue, VPC Origins is a new feature for CloudFront that allows you to keep your resources within private subnets by dropping an ENI in your subnet that it will use to access origins at no extra cost.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-cloudfront-vpc-origins/
8) 94% improvement in Amazon EventBridge
One of the joys of the cloud is the continuous improvement from consuming managed services. The EventBridge team announced an up to 94% improvement in response time for event delivery without any action required or price changes.
7) Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments support storage volume shrink
RDS now supports live volume shrink using blue/green deployments. This allows for a volume reduction after space is cleared (for example, dropped large tables that are no longer needed) without incurring downtime.
6) Amazon S3 now supports the enforcement of conditional write operations
S3 conditional writes provide strongly consistent, mutex-style functionality to S3. This solves the issue of write-after-read use cases with parallel workloads without additional external services.
5) Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 supports scaling to zero capacity
Aurora Serverless v2 now supports scale to zero, with resume time typically being ~15 seconds. This provides a nice reduction in cost for low-usage databases such as those in your dev or UAT environments. A significant cost management feature for SMBs.
4) Amazon DynamoDB global tables preview multi-Region strong consistency
Strongly consistent multi-region DynamoDB is now an option within Global Tables. This option does come with a latency hit and sits alongside the traditional eventual consistency model (i.e., the last writer wins).
3) Announcing Amazon Aurora DSQL
Aurora DSQL is a new, highly scalable, and multi-region SQL database. I liken it to CosmosDB or Spanner. Although exciting, note the sharp compatibility edges before jumping in.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-aurora-dsql-preview/
2) Securely share AWS resources across VPC and account boundaries
Resource Gateways expose a single resource (IP, DNS, or ARN) to VPC Lattice and Step Functions, including TCP resources like databases, with gateways being free to create. This provides a new, cost-competitive alternative to VPCEs and TGWs.
1) AWS Organizations Resource Control Policies (RCPs)
RCPs is my favorite release of the year. The power it provides in protecting resources within an organization is extreme and solves entire classes of security issues, such as the cross-service confused deputy problem.
https://onecloudplease.com/blog/resource-control-policies-closing-the-data-perimeter-gap
This list was originally posted on X by Ian McKay: