A Summary of the Thursday Keynote by Werner Vogels
The Keynote by Andy Jassy yesterday was packed with updates and announcements. I was most excited by the new Amazon AI and IoT services.
But the most notable omission from yesterday was updates to the Lambda platform itself. So I had great expectations for the announcements today.
Werner Vogels did not disappoint. We saw a range of great announcements for developers on AWS.
 did not disappoint.](/static/medium/4800-1*JK9SjBVJVhac2lFhwsSaFg.png)
Werner Vogels did not disappoint.
Managing and operating servers is still a problem many people face. AWS announced a couple of interesting updates to assist with this problem.
[OpsWorks and Chef](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/) — Fully managed Chef Server
Availability: Now
**Ec2 Systems Manager **— Automate OS management on Ec2
Understand system configuration
Automatically manage operating systems
Availability: Now
AWS continues to improve their sweet of tools for developers. The addition of CodeBuild completes Dev / Build / Test / Deploy pipeline services by AWS.
[CodeBuild](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-codebuild-fully-managed-build-service/) — Managed build service
Pay by the minute for builds
Build using docker containers
Run unit tests
Integrates with CodePipeline
Get started — https://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/
Availability: Now
Monitoring applications is critical for any software deployed to AWS. AWS is encouraging users to develop distributed systems with Lambda. But until now, monitoring distributed systems remained a difficult problem. Two new services by AWS helps fill this gap.
Amazon X-Ray — Insight into Application and Service Execution
Track executions across multiple AWS Services
Debug distributed applications
Visualise the performance of your components through graphs
Availability: Preview
AWS Personal Health Dashboard — Heath dashboard of the AWS services you use
Get notified when there are operational issues with AWS services
Automatically respond to AWS system events through lambda
Availability: Now
Amazon often tells customers Security is the first thing you need to think about. The addition of Amazon Sheild will help developers improve their security posture on AWS.
[Amazon Shield](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-shield-protect-your-applications-from-ddos-attacks/) — DDoS protection
Protect agains various types of DDoS attacks Volumetric, State-exhaustion by default
Combine with WAF to protect against Application Layer
Pay for Shield Advanced to protect against sophisticated attacks
Shield Advanced allows you to work with AWS DDoS protection team for advanced support
Availability: Now
Yesterday we say a focus on intelligent services with Amazon AI. Today we saw a continuation of that with Amazon Pinpoint.
Amazon Pinpoint — Targeted notifications for Mobile Users
Understand user behaviour
Target and notify users
Track and monitor engagement
Get started — https://aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/
Availability: Now
AWS excels at developing solutions for undifferentiated heavy lifting. Extract Transform Load (ETL) and Batch processing can be difficult to develop. But the implementation of your ETL and Batch processing solution is not what gives you a competitive advantage. Amazon Glue and AWS Batch will allow developers to focus on creating big data and compute jobs that provide value.
**Amazon Glue **— Fully-managed data catalog and ETL service
Integrates with S3, RDS, Redshift & any JDBC database
Build transformations jobs through a console
Schedule and run transformation jobs
Trigger ETL jobs on changes
Get started — https://aws.amazon.com/glue/
Availability: Coming Soon
[AWS Batch](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-batch-run-batch-computing-jobs-on-aws/) — Managed Batch Compute service
Run batch jobs on the spot market
Automatically scale compute up and down based on jobs
Able to specify priority jobs
Availability: Preview
The Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is the container management solution. Today we saw a great initiative with an open source project that will fill some of the gaps in ECS.
[Blox](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/blox-new-open-source-scheduler-for-amazon-ec2-container-service/) — Container management and orchestration
A group of open source projects
Netflix will be a contributor using experience from titus
Get started — https://blox.github.io/
Availability: Some now, more projects to come
It’s no secret that I am a big fan of Serverless. I was hoping AWS would continue to invest in and improve AWS Lambda.
C# Runtime on AWS Lambda — a new runtime for C#
Using .NET Core 1.0
Upload the compiled DLL’s to AWS Lambda
Availability: Now
Lambda@Edge — Execute Lambda functions at CloudFront Edge locations
Add request processing logic to CloudFront
Cannot call external web services
Cannot call AWS services
Must complete in 50ms and use less than 128Mb of Memory
Availability: Preview
[AWS Step Functions](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-step-functions-build-distributed-applications-using-visual-workflows/) — Coordinate components of a distributed application
A fully managed state machine for lambda functions
Visualise application workflows
Sequential steps, Parallel steps, Branching steps
Availability: Now
There was a clear focus on Serverless by AWS at today’s keynote. I’m heading to the Serverless mini-conference today and hope to see more Serverless announcements.
If you’re at AWS Re:Invent come and say hi at the re:Play party tonight. If you want to read more on Serverless don’t forget to follow me on Twitter or Medium.
Thanks to Daniel Parker for the photos