5 Highlights from re:Invent

We take a walk through some of the key announcements from Amazon Web Services’ annual re:Invent developer conference, including Mac instances for Amazon EC2, the unveiling of DevOps Guru and exciting new container innovations.

The AWS re:Invent conference has moved online this year, running as a three week virtual event. There have been a flood of product announcements, far too many to report on individually, so here are five of the most significant:

• Mac instances on EC2 - perhaps one of the most eye catching announcements was the fact that AWS and Apple are now offering macOS as a desktop-as-a-service. This means that developers looking to build solutions for Apple’s ecosystem will now be able to do so through AWS. Built on Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances will allow customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time. And with support for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Safari, developers will be able to create new product and solutions for the entire Apple range. There will also be additional choice for developers as they can use Mac as their trusted platform, on-premises or in the cloud
• SageMaker - nine new capabilities have been revealed for this machine learning service, making it easier for developers to automate and scale all steps of the end-to-end machine learning workflow. The new capabilities include faster data preparation, a purpose-built repository for prepared data, workflow automation, distributed training capabilities to train large models up to twice as fast and model monitoring on edge devices
• DevOps Guru – a new machine learning-powered operations service that makes it easier for developers to improve application availability by automatically detecting operational issues and providing tailored recommendations and specific actions for remediation. Still in preview, DevOps Guru is designed to collect and analyse application metrics, logs, events and traces to enable it to recognise behaviours that deviate from normal operating patterns. Developers can use the remediation suggestions it provides to reduce the time to resolution when issues arise
• Aurora – developments for the Aurora relational database engine include the next version of Aurora Serverless, an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Aurora.  Aurora Serverless version 2, now in preview, provides the ability to scale database workloads to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity. Also in preview is Babelfish for Amazon Aurora, a new translation layer for Aurora that enables Aurora to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can run directly on Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes required
• New container capabilities – a range of new container innovations aimed at helping customers to develop, deploy and scale modern applications have been announced: 
• Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) Public enables developers to store, manage, share and deploy container images for anyone. You can host both your private and public container images on ECR Public. This also means you no longer need to operate your own container repositories. These images are geo-replicated for reliable availability across the world  
• AWS Proton helps you automate and manage infrastructure provisioning and code deployments for serverless and container-based applications. AWS Proton enables infrastructure teams to define standard templates centrally and make them available for developers in their organisation. This allows infrastructure teams to manage and update infrastructure without impacting developer productivity
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) allow customers to run Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS in their own data centres.