Top 10 Announcements at Re-Invent 2016

Keeping up with the tradition at Re-invent, AWS made a series of announcements at Re-Invent, 2016. The spate of announcements sometimes overwhelm the audience. So we list below and explain the most significant announcements for our customers.

We have categorized them into New Services, New Features and Price Reductions

New Services

1. AWS Shield

AWS Shield is a managed DDoS protection service that protects your web applications aon AWS from DDoS attacks. There are two tiers of Shield available: Standard and Advanced.

AWS Shield Standard is available to all AWS customers at no additional cost, and protects your applications from the most common, frequently occurring DDoS attacks. For higher levels of protection against attacks targeting your web applications running on Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53 resources, you can subscribe to AWS Shield Advanced.

For more information, read here.

2. Amazon Athena (Interactive SQL Queries for Data in Amazon S3)

Athena is a new query service that makes it easy to analyze large amounts of data stored in Amazon S3 using Standard SQL. You don’t have to manage any infrastructure as it is a serverless service. Simply point Athena at some data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), identify your fields, run your queries, and get results in seconds.

The benefits

• You can start your queries instantly. Anyone with SQL skills can quickly analyze large-scale data sets.
• You pay only for the queries that you run.
• Built on Presto. So Athena is open and powerful.
• Really fast as Athena conducts queries in parallel, so results come back in seconds.

For more information, read here.

3. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS)

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS SMS allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations.

For more information, read here.

4. Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available

Fast & Easy to Use Business Analytics for Big Data
Amazon QuickSight is generally available allowing customers to unlock more value from data. It is very fast, easy to use, cloud-powered business analytics at 1/10th the cost of traditional on-premises solutions. You can log in, point to a data and start visualizing your data in minutes.

QuickSight allows you to work with data from different AWS locations including S3, Amazon RedShift and Amazon RDS.

For more information, read here.

NEW FEATURES

5. AWS WAF is now available on the Application Load Balancer (ALB)

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is available on the Application Load Balancer (ALB). You can now use AWS WAF directly on ALB (both internal and external) in a VPC to protect your websites and web services. With this launch customers can now use AWS WAF on both Amazon CloudFront and ALB. WAF is a web application firewall service that lets you monitor web requests and protect your web applications from malicious requests. Use AWS WAF to block or allow requests based on conditions that you specify, such as the IP addresses.

For more information, read here

6. Amazon SES Now Provides Fine-Grained Email Sending Metrics

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now enables to track your bounce, complaint, sent, and rejected email metrics with fine-grained granularity. Earlier, Amazon SES provided email sending metrics at an AWS account level. Now, you can access your metrics based on characteristics you define.

For more information, read here

7. Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) support for EC2 instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

EC2 instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now offer native support for the IPv6 protocol. IPv6 can be enabled for existing and new VPCs through the AWS management console, API/SDK and CLI. Customers can use IPv6 on EC2 instances to access Internet resources as well as on-premise applications using Direct Connect. This enables numerous use cases such as hosting public services and meeting IPv6 compliance requirements.

For more information, read here

8. New Cost Allocation Tag features include on-demand refresh, AWS-generated tags and more

Tags can be used to categorize and track your AWS costs, but depend upon you being diligent about applying tags to your resources and making sure that they are enabled for cost allocation.
This feature automatically marks your resources with the new resource created by the tag. This tag includes information related to the resource creator depending on the authentication mechanism used, such as Account ID and IAM role. Even though the resource created by tag is specific to the billing & cost management console, it functions exactly like the user-defined cost allocation tags within the detailed billing report, cost & usage report, cost explorer, and budgets products.

For more information, read here

PRICE REDUCTIONS

9. Price reductions for Amazon EC2 C4, M4 & T2 instances are now effective

The price reductions for Amazon EC2 C4, M4 & T2 instances across all AWS regions, announced on November 14th, 2016, are now effective.

For more information, read here

10. AWS Storage Gateway price reductions

Effective December 1, 2016, AWS is updating pricing for AWS Storage Gateway, making it more cost-effective to adopt cloud storage for on-premises applications.
There will be 3 changes to pricing: storage prices for volume and virtual tapes will be reduced; the monthly gateway fee will be replaced with pricing based on the amount of data you write to AWS; and virtual tape retrieval will be simplified, moving from rate-based fees to per GB pricing.

For more information, read here