AWS re:Invent 2024 Recap

As AWS re:Invent 2024 comes to a close, we here at AWS re:Post Live want to share with you, our favorite community of developers here on re:Post, some of the highlights of the conference that have us looking forward to diving deep in 2025.

Stephen Heverin's Thoughts

Hey there re:Post community. We’ve had an exciting week here at re:Invent. As one of the hosts of weekly AWS re:Post Live on Twitch, we’ve been doing daily recaps here of some of the most exciting launches. We haven’t had a chance to cover everything on the show.

Along with my other hosts, Anup and Jay, we sat down this morning over coffee to review the launches to see what we hadn’t had time to talk about on air that stood out to us.

Two that we didn’t get to cover this week for me that I am excited to dive into are, AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) Schema Conversion with generative AI and Amazon Q Developer automated code reviews and release management.

Even though I’m not a database developer, I always seemed to get tasked with helping to do database migrations. I can’t tell you how often I’ve had to struggle to figure out getting data from one scheme to another. There are always different challenges, especially moving between different database schemas that you have to account for and you can spend hours trying to track down why something is mapping or working as expected. I can’t wait to get home and start working on this new feature.

I’ve loved seeing and using the development in Amazon Q Developer and this latest update automating code reviews and release management is exciting. I’ve handled code reviews in the past, and while there is some automation and checks you can apply, there was always a manual aspect and things can be missed. I can’t wait to have this start digging in and reviewing my code. Next to that are helping to create unit tests for me. This has always been a weakness for me, and something I often push off. As a consequence, I don’t have the full coverage that I should with unit tests. Another feature I’m excited to start using with my coding when I get home from re:Invent.

All of the help that Q Developer provides me today has saved me hours and hours of time and I know it will continue to help me save more time while improving the quality of what I write.

Jay Busch's Thoughts

For me, I’m excited about the recent partner announcements we’ve made. Both announcements around Oracle and VMWare solutions will offer even more choice to our customers who leverage their partner solutions. With Amazon Elastic VMWare Service, we’re now providing customers the ability to run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) directly within their VPC. Extended VMWare to AWS allows customers the ability to leverage the scale, resilience, and performance of AWS together with familiar VCF software and tools. Amazon EVS simplifies deployment of a ready-to-use VCF environment. Customers will also benefit from the choice of self-managed or managed VMWare options for control and customization of their architecture with the added benefit of leveraging AWS native and managed services to drive business agility, innovation, and transformation.

To read more about Amazon Elastic VMware Service click here.

The next announcement is from Oracle. The new Oracle Database@AWS offering is a game-changer for our global Oracle customer base. In preview today is the ability to run and operate Oracle infrastructure on AWS. Customers operating Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) or Oracle Exadata Database workloads will now have an option to leverage AWS alongside their other critical assets. With Oracle Database@AWS, customers can modernize their critical applications and create innovative, intelligent solutions by leveraging a low-latency network connection between Oracle databases and various AWS services. This offering ensures that customers can preserve the full features, architecture, performance, and availability of their Oracle databases, identical to what they experience in on-premises environments. The new service provides a seamless and unified experience for customers, streamlining purchasing, management, operations, and collaborative support between Oracle and AWS. Additionally, customers can utilize their existing AWS commitments and Oracle license benefits, including the Bring Your Own License (BYOL) program and discount initiatives like Oracle Support Rewards, making the transition to the cloud both efficient and cost-effective.

To dive deeper into Oracle Database@AWS click here.

Anup Sividas's Thoughts

I have been a fan of Distributed Databases from a long time since its a hard engineering challenge. I’m super excited and pumped about Aurora DSQL which allows customers build true active-active multi region databases with low latency and strong consistency. Customers from a lot of industry verticals are going to embrace this innovation. With DSQL, we have re-engineering the transaction engine and as an engineer at heart, my eyes pops up when I see all these cool hard to solve engineering solutions. Same feeling goes for DynamoDB Global Tables with multi region consistency as well. We now have a true active-active strong consistency offering for both NoSQL and Relational space.

From generative AI perspective, I’m pumped about the state of the art Amazon Nova models. I have already started experimenting both Nova Canvas which generates high quality images from text and Amazon Reels, which generates high quality videos from text and images, both looks really promising. We are numerous announcements around Bedrock as well that I’m super excited about and cant wait to help customers with. Features like Model Distillation, Prompt Caching, Multi Agent interaction tops my list.

Lastly on the data and SageMaker side, I’m sure SageMaker Lakehouse and SageMaker unified studio will provide a seamless end to end data, analytics and AI platform for our customers and will avoid a lot of data movement and duplication.

Cant wait to take these new features for a spin soon. You can read more of my thoughts on re:Invent in a couple of other articles I have published here and here.

One Last Thing Before We Go

We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to you, the re:Post community. This last year of producing shows on Twitch for you based off of your thoughtful questions and intriguing articles has been an absolute privilege. We all had a great time at re:Invent and are so grateful we had to opportunity to representing you, the re:Post community. As you start to dig in, let us know in the comments what re:Invent launches excite you, check out the AWS News Blog for a list of all of the big announcements from re:Invent 2024, and keep coming to re:Post to ask your questions, check out the new articles that dive deep into all the new features, and help others in the community grow in their cloud journey.

We look forward to seeing you in 2025 with re:Post Live on Twitch. Check out our Community Page for upcoming shows and be sure to tag your questions with "AWS re:Post Live" to get them featured on our show. Until we meet again, take care and Happy building!