Amazon re:Invent was held last week in Las Vegas. We saw a lot of exciting announcements, some expected and some more surprising. Amazon has the major launches detailed here:

https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/

For our campus usage, I’m most excited about these:

• Fargate – makes containers easier than ever before.
• ECS for Kubernetes – allows container management with Kubernetes, which may be how you’re already doing it.
• Hibernation for Spot Instances – don’t lose your work if you get outbid.
• New Spot Pricing Model – smooths out spot market pricing to avoid sudden surprises.
• Aurora Serverless – auto-scale database capacity, even down to zero (with a quick scale-up when you need it again)
• DynamoDB Backups – I can get rid of the scripts I wrote to back up DynamoDB; they don’t work as well as the new service.
• Comprehend – process spoken language.
• Translate – translate between spoken languages.
• SageMaker – machine learning made easy.
• Inter-Region VPC Peering – we’re evaluating how we can make the UOFI Active Directory available in regions outside us-east-2.
• PrivateLink – access private services without advanced VPC configuration.
• GuardDuty – use AWS’ behind-the-scenes machine learning to alert on unexpected behavior within your account.