DJ Garman drops the ball instead of the bass in AWS re:Invent keynote
But the 25 announcements in the last 10 minutes included a few well worth waiting for
AWS CEO Matt Garman's annual re:Invent keynote was the best kind of keynote, in that you could have slept in for nearly all of it and still been thrilled to pieces, provided you caught the last ten minutes. He concluded what was otherwise an AI-palooza chock full of boring guest speakers with an Andy Jassy style "twenty-five releases in ten minutes," complete with a basketball-style ten-minute shot clock counting down the time.
From where I sit, he either went too hard with this, or else failed to go hard enough, leaving him smack dab in the middle — a place nobody wishes to visit. I contend that he could have either taken one giant breath and hit all 25 releases in one go, or else he could have skipped the breath-hold training and instead rapped the releases like a 90s DJ. I'm disappointed that he chose neither path, but that's where my disappointment ends, because a few of those releases were incredible.
And now, my superlatives from that list of announcements.
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Best shitposting release
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By far, my favorite release to taunt others with is the fact that S3 now supports 50TB objects. This unlocks maybe four great use cases, but it also empowers thousands of absolutely terrible ones. My data warehouse is now a SQLite file, and if your infrastructure is anything other than "apply this everything.yml file via cron every five minutes" you're hopelessly over-engineered.
Most AWSiest Release
They launched Security Hub to general availability, which may sound hauntingly familiar. That's because they used to have a different service called "Security Hub," renamed it to Security Hub CSPM, and left customers wondering who moved the security cheese when they weren't looking. It's nice to see companies improve at their core competencies, and "confusing the piss out of customers with byzantine naming decisions" is definitely an AWS strong suit.
Most DIY release
Step Functions has been confusing folks for years, but now you can get Step Functions at home via Lambda Durable Functions. This enables you to use SDK primitives to do things like having your functions wait for events, checkpoint where they were, resume from those checkpoints, and other stuff that sounds dull but empowers you to build things in serverless architectures that we've been able to run on servers for at least forty years. If fanaticism around architectural purity is your jam, you're going to love this thing.
Most truth-in-naming release
The launch of X8aedz instances wins points for being honest and straightforward. These things offer up to 6TB of RAM, and when you see what they cost you're going to involuntarily say the instance name out loud. They're expensive, yes, but some folks absolutely must run two instances of Chrome or Slack at the same time.
Most I-do-not-get-it release
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AWS is very happy about the fact that hS3 Access Points for FSx NetApp ONTAP is now in general availability, but I can't remember being less certain about who a release was for — and I was in the room when they announced a service that lets you talk to satellites in space, for Pete's sake.
The reverse of this launch makes sense to me: customers want to be able to talk to S3 objects like they're files. They've wanted this forever, and it's often a poor idea.
However, this is the opposite. "We have a bunch of files, we're storing them in a service that's effectively 'AWS stuffed a NetApp into us-east-1' and being charged accordingly, but we'd really like to access those files like they're S3 objects" is something I haven't heard a customer say. I can't imagine a customer saying it, because storing them a second time in S3 natively is basically a rounding error to the budget given what ONTAP costs. I'm sure someone out there is thrilled about this, but I'd encourage them to come outside and admire the daylight with the rest of us.
Most awaited release
Six years. I've spent six years asking for database savings plans and now they're finally here. They offer discounting across nine AWS database services, including their serverless expressions – something that's never been discounted before. That link above is my deeper dive into this thing that's reportedly been the most customer-requested AWS enhancement for years, and I'm still giddy after a week. This is going to make everyone's lives easier, and while, yes, the math works out as a lower discount than RIs, historically I've seen RI coverage of databases at most customers to be dismal. This is more about psychology than math, and it's a huge win.
And then we were free
Twenty-five releases in ten minutes. Six years of waiting for database savings plans. One keynote worth catching the tail end of. I'll take those odds. ®