The 10th edition of re:Invent, the biggest annual AWS event, was held between 28 November and 2 December. With more than 20,000 in-person participants and several hundred thousand online, this was the perfect opportunity to learn all about new developments and other announcements for the year to come.

Digital responsibility and sovereignty

Like each year, AWS aimed to bolster its legitimacy through two key themes: digital responsibility and data sovereignty.
Carbon emissions reductions and the green IT approach both demand strong hardware performance. Every year, AWS announces new instances like C7gn, designed to replace C6gn to lower workload costs thanks to a new Graviton3 processor (more information is available here). Ambitions are high for this Arm architecture which aims to slash equipment electricity usage by 60%.
Another central message was that AWS is updating its famous Well-Architectured Framework (which describes key concepts, design principles and architectural best practices) by adding a sixth pillar, sustainability, along with a calculator for measuring the carbon footprints of cloud resources.
In terms of data sovereignty, AWS has adopted a similar strategy to those of its competitors Azure and Google by launching its Digital Sovereignty Pledge, a series of commitments to providing better control over data location, access and encryption. In parallel to these announcements, Atos made its partnership with AWS official at the event, suggesting that the French firm is planning a “trusted cloud” built on AWS technology. To be continued!

A combination of services for data utilisation

One of the biggest strengths of AWS lies in the many services it offers, which extend far beyond infrastructure and, for example, allow you to capitalise on your data and make different data elements communicate with one another. AI and IoT were honoured guests at the conference, with multiple new services revolving around data handling:
● AWS Clean Rooms are protected environments that allow several companies to collaborate and cross-analyse combined data without ever exposing their raw data
● The QuickSight BI reporting tool now features paginated reports and major improvements to QuickSight Q, an engine for users to query data in natural language
● AWS is launching Amazon DataZone, a data governance service enhanced by machine learning that was created to allow functional users to easily find, organise and share data sets without compromising on access controls.
AWS is in line with the latest trends amongst actors like Snowflake (a rising star on the data cloud scene), now with a better integration between Redshift transaction management, Aurora’s analytical queries (thanks to Amazon Aurora’s zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift) and Apache Spark functions.
AWS’s partnership with auto manufacturers Stellantis and Volkswagen led to its release of AWS IoT Fleetwise to simplify the collection of vehicle data. 
To continue developing these vertical services while absorbing the complexity attached to the significant disruptions in purchasing processes caused by COVID and the war in Ukraine, AWS has taken an interest in procurement issues and is launching a new application, AWS Supply Chain, designed to offer enhanced visibility of the different actors along the supply chain. It is still too soon to assess the results of this service, but its addition to the AWS catalogue is an interesting development.

Increasingly service-full no-code and serverless solutions are here to stay

Serverless services continue to deepen their roots in the IT ecosystem. With their ability to roll out services on the fly, without having to worry about service management or scalability, these solutions constitute major technology accelerators but also represent a substantial paradigm shift in terms of development.

To facilitate their adoption, AWS has come out with Application Composer, a no-code tool that greatly simplifies the creation of serverless websites. This service provides developers with a visual canvas and a drag-and-drop interface that lets them build an application’s architecture, connect resources to it and set up their functions. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? That’s the whole point. There are many developers who want to start designing serverless applications, but the barrier to entry was still too high, especially because of the relatively complex process of managing asynchronous systems. So, the team at AWS began working on Application Composer in order to lower that barrier.

TThis is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does provide some initial insight into a particular full event. Please don’t hesitate to contact our experts to discuss any of these new services, or if we’ve skipped over your favourites!