AWS re:Invent 2014 Recap

AWS re:Invent 2014 concluded on Friday, November 14, 2014; here is a summary of an action-packed, fun-filled week!

New features and services

There were four new services and features announced at the Day 1 Keynote, two of which are available to all customers effective November 12, 2014. These include:

• Amazon RDS for Aurora (a service in preview), a MySQL-compatible relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
• AWS CodeDeploy, a service that automates code deployments to Amazon EC2 instances, thereby eliminating the need for error-prone manual operations.
• AWS Key Management Service, a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data, and uses Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect the security of your keys.
• AWS Config (a service in preview) is a managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance.

Additionally, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS Service Catalog are other new services that were preannounced on the first day. These will be available in early 2015.

There were more new features and services announced at the Day 2 Keynote. These include:

• Amazon EC2 Container Service (a service in preview), a high-performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run distributed applications on a managed cluster of EC2 instances.
• AWS Lambda (a service in preview), a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources for you, making it easy to build applications that respond quickly to new information.
• New Event Notifications for Amazon S3: With this feature, notification messages can be sent through either Amazon SNS or Amazon SQS, or delivered directly to AWS Lambda to trigger Lambda functions.

The AWS SDK for JavaScript supports all the new services and features as of version 2.0.27.

Breakout sessions

AWS re:Invent is a learning conference at its core, and there were over 200 sessions spread over three days, on a variety of topics ranging from application deployment and management and architecture, to education, gaming, and financial services.

I had the privilege of presenting one such session, “Building Cross-Platform Applications Using the AWS SDK for JavaScript.” The goal of this talk was to highlight the portability of the AWS SDK for JavaScript and how the SDK’s features support cross-platform application development. You can watch the talk, as well as refer to the slides posted.

There is a common set of differences involved in porting applications between platforms. The most important of these is the way you include the SDK itself in your application, and configure the SDK with credentials and other settings. Our developer guide describes many ways in which you can configure credentials for Node.js, and manage credentials and identity in the browser.

Other differences include working with web standards like CORS, and keeping your users notified of application state.

Separating the application’s business logic from presentation promotes code reuse, and allows you to easily port the application to multiple platforms by changing only the presentation layer.

To demonstrate this, I wrote an application in Node.js and ported it to a Google Chrome extension, as well as a Windows RT application. The source code for this application is available here.

There were many more fantastic presentations at re:Invent 2014, for which the videos, slides, and audio podcasts are available online.

See you again next year

We hope re:Invent 2014 presented an opportunity for you to learn from the many talks and workshops that happened over the course of a week. We will continue innovating on your behalf and will have more exciting stuff to show you, so stay tuned by subscribing to email updates on the latest AWS re:Invent announcements!