In its tenth year, the AWS re:Invent conference didn’t disappoint. The largest conference of the year, with thousands of attendees (50,000+) attending hundreds of sessions, meetings, and networking events, there was something for everyone. As an AWS ISV Partner focused on accelerating cloud migrations and optimizing cloud resilience strategies, the Cutover team came, saw, and conquered re:Invent. We’ve summarized below some significant updates that we think will have a big impact on enterprise organizations.
Spoiler: AWS posts recordings of the breakout sessions by category here (no login or fee required). If you’re looking to migrate to the cloud or enhance your cloud resilience strategy, but don’t want to scroll through hundreds of sessions on YouTube, read our recap below and check out some of the sessions we recommend.
AWS showed that it’s still committed to launching and enhancing its products and services with a focus on low cost, high performance, sustainability, and security. Here’s a quick recap on some key updates shared at AWS re:Invent:
1. Major updates to AWS Application Migration Services (MGN)
For companies starting or undergoing a cloud migration, this is for you. AWS announced three exciting enhancements to MGN to further help companies of all sizes save time, reduce manual tasks, and increase productivity when rehosting workloads to AWS cloud.
- Migration Servers Grouping – Group migration servers into “applications,” a group of servers that function together as a single application, and manage the migration stage in “waves,” a plan of migrations including grouping servers and applications.
- Launch Template update – Modify the general settings and default launch template, and then use this template to generate the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance launch template of subsequently installed source servers.
- Post-Launch Template update – Configure custom modernization actions for the post-launch template. You can associate any AWS Systems Manager documents and their parameters with a post-launch custom action.
Recommended sessions:
- How to migrate, modernize, and grow using the AWS MAP (ENT213)
- Everybody wins: Real-world business value for CIOs & CFOs with cloud (ENT219)
- Building and scaling a modernization strategy (ENT214)
2. Zero trust and building better security
Zero trust can be defined as a framework that encompasses architecture, network, network access, and more. The countless definitions and debates about zero trust have led to enterprises adopting it at a slower rate. The re:Invent 2022 session, Zero Trust: Enough talk, let’s build better security (SEC405), overviews AWS’ perspective and approach to zero trust.
AWS defines zero trust as:
‘A conceptual security model and associated set of mechanisms that focus on providing security controls around digital assets that do not solely or fundamentally depend on traditional network control or network perimeters.’
They also shared three guiding principles of zero trust, coining ‘focus on use cases’ as the most important. Whether machine-to-machine, human-to-application or digital transformation, AWS shares that it’s important to focus on the problem you’re solving and work towards it with the goal of zero trust security. This will help you continually build better security.
AWS is incorporating zero trust principles in various ways - through AWS Services, AWS APIs, and how AWS Services interact with each other. AWS is using the same identity-centric mechanisms to authenticate and authorize services with one another as customers use. In short, AWS is incorporating architectures to bring the tenets of zero trust to life. If you want to learn more, watch the recorded session here.
3. New API streamlines mortgage loan data processing
In one of many product announcements, AWS showcased the new API in Amazon Textract to enable companies to classify and extract mortgage loan data. The new API was created in response to requests from major lenders in the industry to help them process applications faster and reduce errors, which improves the end-customer experience and lowers operating costs.
4. A continued commitment to sustainability
In 2019, AWS made a climate pledge to be net carbon zero by 2040. Since then, AWS has been focusing on making its own infrastructure and footprint more sustainable. Did you know that AWS can run the same infrastructure you’re managing at an 88% lower carbon footprint? This is based on the energy f-gen chip sets like GRAVITON2 and GRAVITON3, AWS’ higher utilization for operations, and its commitment to renewable energy sourcing.
5. Increased security for AWS Marketplace
For customers purchasing products and services from AWS Marketplace, AWS announced a new level of security protection. The AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights helps ensure third-party software continuously meets your industry standards by compiling security and compliance information, such as data privacy and residency, application security, and access control, in one consolidated dashboard.
This is just a quick summary of some exciting announcements from AWS re:Invent 2022. If you want to learn more, visit AWS re:Invent 2022 website or contact Cutover.