Recap of Major Announcements re:Invent 2021

AWS re:Invent 2021 ended last Friday on December 3rd. Here’s our recap of some major releases announced during this year’s event.

With Apple’s new Mac’s powered by M1 ARM-based processors taking the world by storm, it’s great to see AWS adding compute instances to support application development on these systems. As the highest valued tech company in the world, Apple products are used on a global scale, and AWS recognized the value of this market by announcing EC2 Mac instances during last year’s re:Invent conference.
This year, they went one step further by introducing EC2 M1 Mac Instances . With these instances, developers can use machines that are integrated with Apple’s M1 technology, thus allowing them to design applications with native support for all new Apple products, from Apple Watches to Macbooks.

In similar fashion, 5G networks have been the topic of much discussion in recent years, with coverage steadily expanding across the globe. Despite this, as it currently stands 5G is extremely unreliable, with service providers lacking the infrastructure to support coverage in many areas even in major cities.
Recognizing this deficit, AWS has announced the preview of AWS Private 5G , a service aimed at helping companies “set up and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities in days instead of months”. Through this service, users will be able to list out their specifications on the AWS platform, and the hardware required to meet their requirements will be purchased, delivered to them, set up and maintained.

With the modern world relying so heavily on technology, the importance of resources to educate about tech-related fields has grown exponentially. Even within the broad range of these fields that exist, some have emerged as being especially valuable, and one such field is Artificial Intelligence. Understanding this, AWS has made it their mission to “make machine learning (ML) more accessible”, and they’ve certainly met this mark through their announcement of Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab.
This highly anticipated service provides users with the ability to learn about and experiment with Machine Learning for free without needing so much as an AWS account. Users are able to create projects with CPU/GPU and storage access, and the customized environment of their choice is fully integrated with Github and comes equipped with a Python package. Through the announcement of the public preview of this software, AWS has effectively provided educational resources to cloud beginners and experts alike.

During both our coverage of Kubecon 2021 and our explanation of containers and Kubernetes, we saw the sizeable impact Google had in 2014 made when they open-sourced Kubernetes. Today, Kubernetes stands as one of the most widely used platforms for managing containerized applications, and its integration in AWS has only made this process easier.
To further simplify and optimize the deployment of Kubernetes clusters, AWS announced Karpenter, “an open-source, flexible, high-performance Kubernetes cluster autoscaler built with AWS”. This software will allow for even easier management of Kubernetes clusters by automatically allocating the resources needed to match your specific workload. Thus, users will no longer need to manage the compute capabilities of their Kubernetes clusters, and can instead rely on this platform to handle it for them.

Stay tuned for more posts on events and announcements from re:Invent 2021!