AWS Showcases Latest Technology to ‘Reinvent’ the Cloud

by Sean Michael Kerner

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explained that the new Lambda service is an event-driven technology that doesn’t require users to first provision any cloud infrastructure. With Lambda, an event, such as an image upload, can trigger the creation of a thumbnail image.

The new Amazon EC2 Container Service is a new management service for the use and deployment of Docker containers. With the new service, container deployment can be scheduled and placed based on availability and resource requirements.

The new AWS CodeDeploy service is one of three new application lifecycle management tools announced at re:Invent. As its name implies, CodeDeploy is a deployment service for code delivery to Amazon cloud instances.

The CodePipeline service is an automated continuous build and test service for the delivery of new code.

At the core of all development efforts is the use of a source code version control service. Amazon is now putting version control into its cloud with CodeCommit, providing developers with hosted private Git repositories. Git is a popular open-source version control system originally developed by Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Databases are critical to the deployment of many applications. To that end, Amazon announced its new Aurora database, which is compatible with the widely deployed open-source MySQL database.

The AWS Key Management Service (KMS) provides cloud administrators with encryption and key management capabilities.

Keeping track of cloud application configuration and changes is important for both security and compliance reasons. To help make that process easier, Amazon announced its new AWS Config resource dependancy and auditing service.

The AWS Service Catalog is a new capability, which will allow a cloud administrator to create an approved listing of cloud services for use by an enterprise’s employees.