Top Announcements of AWS re:Invent 2021

Welcome to AWS re:Invent! Below are some of the most noteworthy launches from our biggest event of the year. AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr and our team of AWS developer advocates from around the globe share their insights and offer helpful tips for getting started with some of their favorite new AWS releases.

With so much amazing building going on at AWS, we simply can’t cover it all here. Don’t miss the Previews section at the end of this post for brief overviews of additional noteworthy launches mentioned in the keynotes, and be sure to check out these additional resources, too, to learn more:

What’s New: All the top re:Invent and 2021 AWS announcements
The Official AWS Podcast: Keynote recaps each day and more
AWS OnAir: Livestreaming from the show floor

(This post was last updated: 12:43 p.m, PST, Dec. 2, 2021.)

Quick category links:

Analytics

Introducing Amazon Redshift Serverless – Run Analytics At Any Scale Without Having to Manage Data Warehouse Infrastructure
New capability makes it super easy to run analytics in the cloud with high performance at any scale. Just load your data and start querying with no need to set up and manage clusters.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand – Stream Data at Scale Without Managing Capacity
This new capacity mode eliminates the need for provisioning and managing the capacity for streaming data. Using Kinesis Data Streams On-demand automatically scales the capacity in response to varying data traffic.

AWS Lake Formation – General Availability of Cell-Level Security and Governed Tables with Automatic Compaction
AWS Lake Formation makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days instead of weeks or months; newly released features further simplify loading data, optimizing storage, and managing access to a data lake.

Announcing AWS Data Exchange for APIs: Find, Subscribe to, and Use Third-party APIs with Consistent Authentication
New capability simplifies the lives of developers and IT administrators who have to integrate and secure the access to multiple third-party APIs.

Application Integration

New – Use Amazon S3 Event Notifications with Amazon EventBridge
Today we are making it even easier for you to use EventBridge to build applications that react quickly and efficiently to changes in your S3 objects. This is a new, “directly wired” model that is faster, more reliable, and more developer-friendly than ever.

Architecture

New – Sustainability Pillar for AWS Well-Architected Framework
The Sustainability Pillar contains questions aimed at evaluating the design, architecture, and implementation of your workloads to reduce their energy consumption and improve their efficiency.

Announcing AWS Well-Architected Custom Lenses: Extend the Well-Architected Framework with Your Internal Best Practices
Custom Lenses provide a consolidated view and a consistent way to measure and improve your workloads on AWS without relying on external spreadsheets or third-party systems.

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning

New AWS Scholarship Program Helps Underrepresented and Underserved Students Prep for Careers in AI and ML
The AWS AI & ML Scholarship program is launching as part of the all-new AWS DeepRacer Student service and Student League.

Now in Preview – Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, a Free Service to Learn and Experiment with ML
We’re launching a free service that enables anyone to learn and experiment with ML without needing an AWS account, credit card, or cloud configuration knowledge.

Announcing Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender
This brand-new Amazon SageMaker Studio capability automates load testing and optimizes model performance across machine learning (ML) instances.

New – Introducing SageMaker Training Compiler
New capability automatically compiles your Python training code and generates GPU kernels specifically for your model. The result? The training code will use less memory and compute, and train faster.

New – Create and Manage EMR Clusters and Spark Jobs with Amazon SageMaker Studio
With the ability to connect to and manage EMR clusters from within SageMaker Studio, data scientists no longer have to leave their familiar environment to create, configure and provision the EMR clusters where they run their workloads.

Announcing Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus
Ground Truth Plus is a turn-key service that uses an expert workforce to deliver high-quality training datasets fast, and reduces costs by up to 40 percent.

New – Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS to Detect, Diagnose, and Resolve Amazon Aurora-Related Issues using ML
Now developers will have enough information to determine the exact cause for a database performance issue in Amazon Aurora, saving many hours of work trying to uncover and remediate the problems.

Announcing Amazon SageMaker Canvas – a Visual, No Code Machine Learning Capability for Business Analysts
Now business analysts can build machine learning models and generate accurate business predictions without writing code or requiring ML expertise.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer Introduces Secrets Detector to Identify Hardcoded Secrets and Secure Them with AWS Secrets Manager
The new automated tool helps developers detect secrets in source code or configuration files, such as passwords, API keys, SSH keys, and access tokens. Back to Top

AWS Marketplace

New – AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere Lets You Deploy Your Kubernetes Cluster in Any Environment
New set of capabilities allows customers to find, subscribe to, and deploy third-party Kubernetes applications from AWS Marketplace on any Kubernetes cluster in any environment. This makes the AWS Marketplace more useful for customers who run containerized workloads.

Compute

Use New Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances to Build and Test Apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV
The availability (in preview) of EC2 M1 Mac instances lets you access machines built around the Apple-designed M1 System on Chip. If you are a Mac developer and re-architecting your apps to natively support Macs with Apple silicon, you may now build and test your apps and take advantage of all the benefits of AWS.

New Storage-Optimized Amazon EC2 Instances (Im4gn and Is4gen) Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors
Introducing the two newest families of storage-optimized instances, Im4gn and Is4gen, powered by Graviton2 processors. Both instances offer up to 30 TB of NVMe storage using AWS Nitro SSD devices that are custom-built by AWS.

New – AWS Outposts Servers in Two Form Factors
We are launching three AWS Outposts servers, all powered by AWS Nitro System and with your choice of x86 or Arm/Graviton2 processors.

Join the Preview – Amazon EC2 C7g Instances Powered by New AWS Graviton3 Processors
These instances are going to be a great match for your compute-intensive workloads: HPC, batch processing, electronic design automation (EDA), media encoding, scientific modeling, ad serving, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inferencing.

New – Amazon EC2 M6a Instances Powered By 3rd Gen AMD EPYC Processors
Amazon EC2 M6a instances feature the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, running at frequencies up to 3.6 GHz to offer up to 35 percent price performance versus the previous generation M5a instances.

Announcing Pull Through Cache Repositories for Amazon Elastic Container Registry
Pull through cache repositories offer developers the improved performance, security, and availability of Amazon Elastic Container Registry for container images that they source from public registries.

New – Amazon EC2 G5g Instances Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors and NVIDIA T4G Tensor Core GPUs
The general availability of Amazon EC2 G5g instances extends Graviton2 price-performance benefits to GPU-based workloads including graphics applications and machine learning inference.

Introducing Karpenter – An Open-Source High-Performance Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler
New open-source project helps improve your application availability and cluster efficiency by rapidly launching right-sized compute resources in response to changing application loads.

Database

New DynamoDB Table Class – Save Up To 60% in Your DynamoDB Costs
DynamoDB Standard-IA table class is designed for customers who want a cost-optimized solution for storing infrequently accessed data in DynamoDB without changing any application code.

New – Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server Is Generally Available
This launch supports applications that have dependencies on specific configurations and third-party applications that require customizations in corporate, e-commerce, and content management systems, such as Microsoft SharePoint.

Developer Tools

AWS re:Post – A Reimagined Q&A Experience for the AWS Community
AWS re:Post is an AWS-managed Q&A service offering crowd-sourced, expert-reviewed answers to your technical questions about AWS that replaces the original AWS Forums.

Announcing General Availability of Construct Hub and AWS Cloud Development Kit Version 2
The AWS CDK is an open-source framework that simplifies working with cloud resources using familiar programming languages: C#, TypeScript, Java, Python, and Go (in developer preview).

Internet of Things (IoT)

New – FreeRTOS Extended Maintenance Plan for Up to 10 Years
FreeRTOS Extended Maintenance Plan allows embedded developers to receive critical bug fixes and security patches on their chosen FreeRTOS LTS version for up to 10 years beyond the expiration of the initial LTS period.

New – Securely Manage Your AWS IoT Greengrass Edge Devices Using AWS Systems Manager
Until today, IT administrators have had to build or integrate custom tools to make sure edge devices can be managed alongside EC2 and on-prem instances, through a consistent set of policies. Today, we have integrated AWS IoT Greengrass and AWS Systems Manager to simplify this process.

Management Tools

New for AWS Control Tower – Region Deny and Guardrails to Help You Meet Data Residency Requirements
Preventive and detective controls will prevent provisioning resources in unwanted AWS Regions by restricting access to AWS APIs through service control policies (SCPs) built and managed by AWS Control Tower.

New – AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform
AFT is a new Terraform module maintained by the AWS Control Tower team that allows you to provision and customize AWS accounts through Terraform using a deployment pipeline.

New for AWS Compute Optimizer – Resource Efficiency Metrics to Estimate Savings Opportunities and Performance Risks
By applying the knowledge drawn from Amazon’s experience running diverse workloads in the cloud, AWS Compute Optimizer identifies workload patterns and recommends optimal AWS resources. Now, it also delivers resource efficiency metrics alongside its recommendations to help you assess how efficiently you are using AWS resources.

New for AWS Compute Optimizer – Enhanced Infrastructure Metrics to Extend the Look-Back Period to Three Months
AWS Compute Optimizer also now supports recommendation preferences where you can opt in or out of features that enhance resource-specific recommendations.

New – Real-User Monitoring for Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch helps you to build web applications that are highly scalable and highly available. The big challenge we are addressing today is monitoring those applications with the goal of understanding performance and providing an optimal experience for your end users.

New – Amazon CloudWatch Evidently – Experiments and Feature Management
This new Amazon CloudWatch capability makes it easy for developers to introduce experiments and feature management in their application code. CloudWatch Evidently may be used for two similar but distinct use-cases: implementing dark launches, also known as feature flags, and A/B testing.

Messaging

Machine Learning-Powered Amazon Connect, Now With Call Summarization
Amazon Connect adds a new capability that helps you improve customer experience and agent and supervisor productivity by automatically summarizing the important aspects of each customer call.

New – Enhanced Dead-letter Queue Management Experience for Amazon SQS Standard Queues
New functionality helps you focus on the important phase of your error handling workflow, which consists of identifying and resolving processing errors.

Migration & Transfer Services

Preview – AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces Helps to Incrementally Refactor Your Applications
A new capability of AWS Migration Hub lets you refactor existing applications into distributed applications, typically based on microservices.

Networking & Content Delivery

New – Site-to-Site Connectivity with AWS Direct Connect SiteLink
You no longer need to connect through the closest AWS Region and manage and configure an AWS Transit Gateway for site-to-site network connectivity.

Network Address Management and Auditing at Scale with Amazon VPC IP Address Manager
New feature provides an automated IP management workflow making it easier to organize, assign, monitor, and audit IP addresses in at-scale networks.

New – Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer
In contrast to manual checking of network configurations, which is error-prone and hard to scale, this tool lets you analyze your AWS networks of any size and complexity.

Robotics

Preview – AWS IoT RoboRunner for Building Robot Fleet Management Applications
AWS IoT RoboRunner is a new robotics service that makes it easier for enterprises to build and deploy applications that help fleets of robots work seamlessly together.

Security

AWS Shield Advanced Update – Automatic Application Layer DDoS Mitigation
New feature automatically creates, tests, and deploys AWS WAF rules to mitigate layer 7 DDoS events on behalf of customers.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer Introduces Secrets Detector to Identify Hardcoded Secrets and Secure Them with AWS Secrets Manager
The new Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer Secrets Detector is an automated tool that helps developers detect secrets in source code or configuration files, such as passwords, API keys, SSH keys, and access tokens.

Improved, Automated Vulnerability Management for Cloud Workloads with a New Amazon Inspector
Amazon Inspector is a service used by organizations of all sizes to automate security assessment and management at scale. This new launch enables frictionless deployment at scale, support for an expanded set of resource types needing assessment, and a critical need to detect and remediate at speed.

Storage

Enhanced Amazon S3 Integration for Amazon FSx for Lustre
New capabilities feature a full bi-directional synchronization of your file systems with Amazon S3 and the ability to synchronize your file systems with multiple S3 buckets or prefixes.

New – Offline Tape Migration Using AWS Snowball Edge
Now you can get rid of your large and expensive storage facility, send your tape robots out to pasture, and eliminate all of the time and effort involved in moving archived data to new formats and mediums every few years.

Preview – AWS Backup Adds Support for Amazon S3
New capability lets you centrally manage your applications backups, easily restore your data, and improves backup compliance.

Amazon S3 Glacier is the Best Place to Archive Your Data – Introducing the S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval Storage Class
This new archive storage class delivers the lowest cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires millisecond retrieval.

New – Simplify Access Management for Data Stored in Amazon S3
A new Amazon S3 Object Ownership setting lets you disable access control lists and the Amazon S3 console policy editor now reports security warnings, errors, and suggestions powered by IAM Access Analyzer.

New for AWS Backup – Support for VMware and VMware Cloud on AWS
This new capability lets you centralize and automate data protection of virtual machines running on VMware environments.

New – Amazon FSx for OpenZFS
This new addition to the FSx family lets you use a popular file system without having to deal with hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, backups, etc., all without having to develop the specialized expertise to set up and administer OpenZFS.

AWS Nitro SSD – High Performance Storage for your I/O-Intensive Applications
The second generation of AWS Nitro SSDs were designed to avoid latency spikes and deliver great I/O performance on real-world workloads.

New – Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots
It’s easy to create EBS Snapshots, and just as easy to delete them – sometimes too easy. In order to give you more control, we are launching a Recycle Bin that lets you set up rules to retain deleted snapshots so that you can recover them after an accidental deletion.

New – Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive
EBS is an easy-to-use high-performance block storage service for your Amazon EC2 instances. An EBS volume mounted to your EC2 instances lets you boot an operating system and store data for your most performance-demanding workloads.

Quantum Technologies

Introducing Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs – Set Up, Monitor, and Efficiently Run Hybrid Quantum-Classical Workloads
With the new Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs you can avoid extensive infrastructure and software management and confidently execute your algorithms quickly and predictably, with on-demand priority access to QPUs.

What’s New: re:Invent Previews

Here’s a sneek peek at a few more of the noteworthy launches that have been announced at re:Invent. Be sure to keep an eye on the AWS News Blog for updates in the future.

AWS News Blog