As expected, AWS CEO Andy Jassy’s keynote was full of pomp and announcements. They reinvented everything and think you should too. Let’s get into it.

First, AWS reinvented compute, but we still have three choices.
- VM instances with additional flavors but you still own management of them
- Containers infrastructure can be fully-managed for you or you can now run AWS’s platform in your datacenter
- Serverless (aka managed services) got a whole lot of fun attention

Andy discussed the development and deployment challenges that are exasperated by moving to smaller units of compute, and naturally answered the challenges with a new service: AWS Proton.

You can read more about Proton in Chase’s modern architecture feed but you can think of it as AWS’s take on Stackery’s end-to-end CI/CD workflow. It describes the infrastructure and application needs, pushes changes, and observes the results of testing as work is promoted through environments. It’s great to see AWS finally act on the missing environment abstraction for deploying changes through their infrastructure.

2021 holds a lot of promise, and I don't just mean a vaccine, AWS also announced the launch of ECS and EKS Anywhere. It’s not possible to overstate how important this release is for enterprises who want to consume many AWS services but can’t ship everything outside of their premise. API consistency means workflow consistency so you can expect more teams to adopt ECS or EKS as a container platform that just works, and ship workloads to exactly where they’re needed: datacenter or cloud.

You can certainly expect Stackery to support both as we go hands-on in 2021.

Oh BTW, Lambda billing is now at 1ms invocation measurements instead of 100ms! We see a lot of customer workloads that involve many, tiny functions. They’re going to save a lot of cash for those frequently invoked functions.

Container Image Support is such a big deal we wrote a whole post on it and support the functionality on day-zero.
Just so that we’re clear, this isn’t the ability to run any container as a function. It’s about the packaging. If you’ve invested more in container image release engineering than functions (and so many enterprises have), you can basically fold that workflow right into tools like Stackery to manage the filesystem for your functions just like your container services. It’s also a great way to run larger functions, up to 10GB with this system.

I’m also very excited about Aurora Serverless v2. With Stackery, you can literally drag a database onto the Design Canvas, connect it to compute, connect it to Secrets Manager, and deploy a fully-functional MySQL or Postgres cluster. It also auto-scales and just works, complete with credential management for both the root database user and IAM roles necessary for compute services to interact. I’m sure we’ll have more to say on v2 once we learn more about the big promises made here on scale and cost.

The keynote concluded with a cornucopia of new storage options on top of what’s already an intense amount of disk, plus a story about supersonic airliners coming back just in time for the world to binge-HARD on air travel. Caroll has more on where the Stackery team will be traveling late next year when it’s safe to do so.

P.S. AWS also announced a new ML-based service whose name you should be embarrassed to say out loud. It'll probably automate some handy stuff though so we'll take a look and never speak its name.

Okay! That’s one keynote down, three to go! See you soon.