So, this year was a handful!  I wanted my Year-in-Review blog to be a little different from the 2020-was-apocalyptic types that is when I decided to write about some wonderful updates related to Microservices that Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced this year. The AWS Cloud platform expands on a day-to-day basis. Here are the top 15 announcements, launches, and innovations that caught my eye in 2020.

Serverless:

1.  Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 has successfully furthered its global presence

This was news that many were all looking forward to this year. Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 is all set to help you with unpredictable workloads in eight more regions. Create an endpoint through the Amazon RDS Management Console, and allow Aurora Serverless to handle the rest, it’s that simple. Read more about it here.

2.  Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights (General Availability) available in standard AWS regions

This news has been handpicked for all those who want to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions.  Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights comes into the fore to provide better visibility. It offers a multi-function view that helps you understand how compute, memory allocation, and function duration change over time and in turn, optimize the utilization of the Lambda function. Read more about it here.

3.  Amazon API Gateway supports integration with Step Functions StartSyncExecution for HTTP APIs

This year also saw the AWS Team make investments to evolve the AWS API Gateway after evaluating customer feedback. The HTTP API for Amazon API includes features like the ability to route requests to private AWS Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), integrate with resources secured in an Amazon VPC, and allow customers to create HTTP APIs that route requests to the new AWS Step Functions Synchronous Express Workflows. Read more about it here.

4.  AWS Lambda supports 3x more memory and can access 6 vCPU cores for Lambda Functions

AWS Lambda customers can now provide Lambda functions with an upper limit of 10 GB of memory, 3x more as compared to the previous limit. Since Lambda allocates CPU power proportional to the amount of memory provided, customers now also have access to up to six vCPUs that enables them to compute intensive applications like machine learning, modeling, genomics, and high-performance computing (HPC) application perform faster. Read more about it here.

5.  AWS Lambda changes duration billing granularity

This is some news if you are looking for a substantial saving. Lambda functions have seen billing granularity reduce from 100ms to 1ms, which means customers save significantly. Pricing or billing granularity for Requests or Provisioned Concurrency will remain unchanged. This update will make services like data streaming and interactive web calling extremely cost-effective. Read more about it here.

6.  AWS Batch and AWS Fargate for Scheduling Serverless Batch

With AWS Batch support for AWS Fargate, customers now have been given the ability to run jobs on serverless computing resources fully managed from job submission to completion. If you are currently using AWS Fargate, AWS Batch provides you with a managed batch queue along with the ability to specify a priority, dependencies, and retries. Read more about it here.

Container Services:

7.  Amazon EKS that simplifies installation and management of Kubernetes cluster add-ons

Amazon EKS now lets you install, manage, and update common operational software for your cluster directly with the help of the EKS console, CLI, and API. Today, the EKS supports managing the installation of the Amazon VPC CNI networking plugin on clusters running Kubernetes version 1.18 and above. Amazon EKS Anywhere will be available in early 2021. Read more about it here.

8.  Amazon launches Amazon EKS Distro

For those in search of a managed service to run Kubernetes on AWS without actually installing, operating, or maintaining your Kubernetes control plane or nodes, you are in for a treat.  Amazon EKS Distro gives builds and code of open-source Kubernetes, CoreDNS, upstream CNI Core binaries, CSI Sidecar Containers, along with other newest security patches.

It reduces the overhead of tracking the complicated matrix of updates and security patches by letting customers subscribe to the Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) EKS Distro topic. Read more about it here.

9.  Amazon EKS that provides built-in logging support for AWS Fargate

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now enables you to forward container logs from pods running on AWS Fargate to AWS services for log storage and analytics, including Amazon Cloudwatch, Amazon Elasticsearch, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and Amazon Kinesis Streams. Read more about it here.

10.  Announcing the arrival of AWS Proton

AWS Proton is a new service specially designed to help organizations automate and manage infrastructure provisioning and code deployments for serverless and container-based applications. Platform teams can implement Proton to connect and coordinate with numerous tools required for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates.  Read more about it here.

11.  Amazon EKS that adds support for EC2 Spot Instances

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) supports creating and managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances with Amazon EKS managed node groups following Spot best practices. With this, you can take advantage of the substantial savings and scale the spot instances for interruptible workloads running in your Kubernetes cluster. Read more about it here.

12.  Announcing Amazon ECR Public and Amazon ECR Public Gallery

Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public (Amazon ECR Public) is a fully managed registry that makes it simple for a developer to share container software publicly worldwide. Amazon ECR Public Gallery is a website that allows anyone to browse for public container images, view developer-provided details, and pull commands. Everyone, including anonymous users and logged-in AWS customers, can easily pull artifacts from an extensive public registry using a single, global registry URL when building and running their applications. Read more about it here.

13.  Amazon EKS Console that Aids in Simplifying Cluster Management

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) enables you to view the Kubernetes API resources and applications running on your Amazon EKS cluster with the help of AWS Management Console. With the update, Amazon EKS allows Kubernetes cluster operators to get a consistent view into their clusters’ configuration, status, and supporting cloud infrastructure. Read more about it here.

Miscellaneous Announcements:

14.  ECS Deployment Circuit Breaker for EC2 & Fargate

Amazon ECS Deployment Circuit Breaker enables quick identification of failed deployments and aids the automatic rollback of unhealthy service deployments without needing manual intervention. So you don’t have to worry about the resources consumed for failing tasks or deployment delays.

What is even more exciting about this announcement is that you can enable the ECS deployment circuit breaker while creating or updating the ECS service as part of the deployment configuration. Read more about it here.

15.  Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL

So, they say, you don’t need schema rewrites or custom SQL to support SQL server requests anymore! Amazon Aurora’s Babelfish is a new translation layer for Aurora that allows it to comprehend queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications running on SQL Server can now run directly on Aurora PostgreSQL with minimal code changes. Some call it a great move, while others aggressive, read more about it here and decide for yourself.

I hope this list did show you how Microservices is going places with AWS.

Write to us to know about our Cloud technology services, or if you wish to know how a leading aviation hospitality company leveraged AWS for network automation and reduced their API management overheads using AWS API gateway.