6 December 2021

AWS re:Invent 2021 recap by a DevTools Hero

With another amazing re:Invent edition behind us, It’s time for a little recap. This edition was also my first as an AWS Hero. Looking back, I must say AWS knows how to please its community members. This year AWS even gave us our own special AWS Hero Lounge! Kudos AWS for the overall support and pampering. It was crazy.

Before I start my recap, I want to say that even with all the nasty Covid-19 restrictions, I really enjoyed this year re:Invent. Personally, I find it hard to ‘virtually’ attend conferences. Being at a conference in person, feeling the vibes and atmosphere, is kind of a must for me.

So here’s my first piece of advice: if you feel comfortable with it, I would strongly recommend attending re:Invent in person. All the great sessions are just a tiny part of the conference’s value. What makes attending re:Invent stand out for me are all the AWS experts hanging around. The technical knowledge and expertise of all the people you can talk to at the conference are mind-blowing. It’s agreat place to pick some brains 😜

Content wise

Before jumping into the list of the newly announced stuff I like the most. I must stress that such a list is very personal and heavily influenced by someone’s background. Having a Developer background myself and a strong interest in DevOps and Security is reflected in my list. On top of that, the list also matches the services I primarily work with daily.

With all that said, here we go.

Application Integration

Containers / Compute / Serverless

Database

Developer Tools

Management & Governance

Security

  • AWS Shield Advanced introduces automatic application-layer DDoS mitigation. AWS Shield Advanced now automatically protects web applications by blocking application layer (Layer 7) DDoS events with no manual intervention needed by you or the AWS Shield Response Team (SRT)
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces Network Access Analyzer to help you easily identify unintended network access. Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer is a new feature that enables you to identify unintended network access to your resources on AWS. Using Network Access Analyzer, you can verify whether network access for your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources meets your security and compliance guidelines
  • AWS announces the new Amazon Inspector for continual vulnerability management. In a nutshell the new Inspector provides:
    • Continual, automated assessment scans — replaces periodic, manual scanning.
    • Automated resource discovery — once enabled, the new Amazon Inspector automatically discovers all running Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon ECR repositories.
    • New support for container-based workloads — workloads are now assessed on both EC2 and container infrastructure.
    • Integration with AWS Organizations — allowing security and compliance teams to enable and take advantage of Amazon Inspector across all accounts in an organization.
    • Removal of the stand-alone Amazon Inspector scanning agent — assessment scanning now uses the widely deployed AWS Systems Manager agent, eliminating the need for a separate agent installation.
    • Improved risk scoring — a highly contextualized risk score is now generated for each finding making it easier to identify the most critical vulnerabilities to address as a priority.
    • Integration with Amazon EventBridge — integrate with event management and workflow systems such as Splunk and Jira. And, you can trigger automated remediation.
    • Integration with AWS Security Hub

Storage

Yeah, I’m sure I missed at least a few announces 😉

Enjoy an until next time!

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