AWS has historically been highly centered around its developer community, consistently keeping their ears to the ground and staying tuned to what "the people" wanted. For the past year however, many of us in the AWS community have expressed concern over how much of the new services, announcements and presentations have been focused on or related to AI.
And look, we get it: The AI trend is a thing, and a business can only sell what customers are looking for, but it really started to feel like web developers, devops engineers and architects were being forgotten about and our favourite services becoming afterthoughts.
Nothing paints a clearer picture than this article, recapping re:Invent 2023 by highlighting:
- New capabilities for Amazon Bedrock
- Expanded choice of models in Amazon Bedrock
- New SageMaker capabilities
- Amazon Q
- Other serverless innovations
Note how innovations to Aurora, Redshift, S3 and ElastiCache where all bundled together and mentioned as a footnote. An accurate representation of the times.
The Turnaround
Heading into AWS re:Invent 2024, however, AWS seems to have gotten the message loud and clear. We're a week away from Re:Invent, but a huge list of amazing announcements and releases covering all kinds of services and areas have already been dropping over the last month.
Among these announcements, some of my personal highlights include:
- DynamoDB announcing huge price reductions to on-demand throughput (50%) and global tables (up to 67%)
- Cloudwatch adding context to observability data
- Powerful improvements to OpenSearch Ingestion
- A huge makeover to the coding experience in the Lambda Console
- Amazon Aurora Serverless actually becoming serverless
- Simple but impactful workflow improvements in areas like the management console and Step Functions
- Amazon Q Developer now provides natural language cost analysis (I never said AI was bad 😁).
And of course, like Ari Palo points out in this post, the Lambda team deserves major props for their recent commitment to keeping up more closely with runtimes, adding support for Node.js 22 a mere month after it's LTS release.
Conclusion
I might be biased by hope but it really feels like AWS got right back on track with this recent storm of announcements, and it validates the fact that we can continue to bet and rely on AWS as a community. Who knows, maybe this was the planned roadmap all along with last year being a premeditated temporary focus on AI, maybe not.
All I know is I'm relieved AWS is back to focusing its heavy guns on what they do best, and I know I'm not alone in this feeling.
If you've made it so far, thanks a ton for reading my first post, I hope you found some value!
If you want to stay tuned on a day to day basis on new AWS related posts and announcements, make sure to keep an eye on the AWS News Feed, an amazing site built by Luc van Donkersgoed that tracks all kinds of AWS related news.
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