Insights, News & Events

Pre re:invent: AWS’ Announcements prior to re:Invent

Pre re:Invent announcements.

re:Invent is here again! As usual, there has been a lot of activity already from AWS in the build-up.

The theme leading up to re:Invent has largely been focussed around improving the developer experience – from enabling developers to deploy easier and faster, to providing even more in-depth observability solutions.

We’ll begin with some noteworthy tooling updates, before moving on to observability updates further down the page.

Tooling Updates:

AWS AppConfig

AWS AppConfig is a feature of AWS Systems Manager. It enables users to quickly rollout application configuration changes, independent of code, across any size application hosted on EC2 instances, containers, and serverless applications and functions.

AWS AppConfig includes automated safety controls to monitor the deployment of the configuration changes, and to roll back to the previous configuration if issues occur.

Check out the full release blog post here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/safe-deployment-of-application-configuration-settings-with-aws-appconfig/

AWS Amplify

AWS Amplify is the fastest way to build mobile and web apps that scale. Through AWS Amplify you can create, configure, and implement scalable mobile and web apps powered by AWS.

You can also make use of the Amplify Framework, which provides a set of UI components, a set of libraries, and a command-line interface to build a mobile backend and integrate with your various apps.

Check out AWS Amplify here: https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/

And read the AWS Amplify release blog here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mobile/pre-reinvent-2019-aws-amplify-launches/

AWS Code Services

AWS CodeCommit enables enforcing approval rule workflows for pull requests. This means that you can now block merging pull requests until specified rules are met. For example, a specific user could need a number of approvals before code is merged.

AWS CodeBuild adds support for test reporting. This gives you an effective and consistent view of your test executions in CodeBuild. You can now view detailed results, trends, and history for tests executed on AWS CodeBuild for any framework that supports the JUnit XML or Cucumber JSON test format.

Read more about the AWS CodeBuild update here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/aws-codebuild-adds-support-for-test-reporting/

CLI Improvements

AWS SAM CLI—a simpler deployment experience. Improvements to the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) mean that users can deploy serverless applications with less manual setup, fewer repeated steps, and shorter CLI commands.

Read about the AWS SAM CLI update here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/a-simpler-deployment-experience-with-aws-sam-cli/

Amazon ECS CLI v2—a new open-source command-line tool that focusses on delivering an end-to-end experience for developing and deploying applications on Amazon ECS. AWS worked with customers to get feedback on v1, so this update is looking spot on.

Read about Amazon ECS CLI v2 here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/announcing-the-amazon-ecs-cli-v2/

Observability Updates:

CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens has been announced—a new fully managed observability solution to help with visualising and analysing the health, performance, and availability of highly-distributed applications, including those with dependencies on serverless and container-based technologies, all in one place.

CloudWatch ServiceLens consolidates a large amount of data in a single place using a service map. You can isolate endpoints and resources that are experiencing issues, and with analysis of various metrics, logs, and application traces, reduce the Mean Time to Resolution.

Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/visualize-and-monitor-highly-distributed-applications-with-amazon-cloudwatch-servicelens/

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to monitor application endpoints more easily. CloudWatch now collects canary traffic which can continually verify your customer experience even when you don’t have any customer traffic on your applications, enabling you to discover issues before your customers do.

Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/introducing-amazon-cloudwatch-synthetics-preview/

Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights analyses time-series data to provide a view of the top contributors influencing system performance. Contributor Insights helps you understand who or what is impacting your system and application performance by pinpointing outliers, finding the heaviest traffic patterns, and ranking the top system processes.

Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-cloudwatch-now-includes-contributor-insights-preview/

AWS X-Ray trace maps

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyse and debug production and distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture.

AWS X-Ray trace maps enables users to visually map the end to end path of a single request. Users can now use trace maps to quickly understand the path and order of services invoked in a single request and determine the upstream and downstream calls for individual services. Users can also visually identify where the error originated and how it affected other services in the call.

Learn more about AWS X-Ray trace maps here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/aws-x-ray-offers-improved-trace-analysis-and-identification-of-service-disruption/

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That’s it for the pre re:Invent releases.

We’re keeping a very close eye on everything that is announced during re:Invent and will be publishing more posts outlining everything that will be useful to both us and our customers.