‍Introduction

Amazon is presenting the AWS re:Invent between November 30 and December 18 and in the first two weeks, they already made some huge announcements for the community. And for us, serverless professionals, some of them can change a lot the way we deal with our solutions from cost perspective to performance as well. In this article we are going to passthrough 10 of the coolest announcements they did (until now).

AWS Lambda – Functions with Up to 10 GB of Memory and 6 vCPUs

You can now allocate up to 10 GB of memory (300% of increment compared to the previous 3GB limit) and this is a game changer when you consider the Duration x Memory Allocation formula. Also Lambda now accept memory increment with a 1MB granularity (versus the old 64MB).

Click here to get more informations and an amazing analysis made by Danilo Poccia.

AWS Lambda – Billing granularity was changed from 100ms down to 1ms

This change should impact already in the next billing cycle for companies using Lambda to run their business code. Considering that before we had the value rounded up to the nearest 100 ms increment per invoke, it has the power to impact up to 99% in the Lambda costs at the end of the month cycle. This change will be effective starting December 2020 billing cycle.

Click here to get more information from AWS website.

AWS Lambda – Support for container images as a packaging format

You can now package images of up to 10GB using familiar container development tools (such as Docker CLI) to locally build, test, push the image to Amazon ECR and them deploy it through Lambda service.

Click here to get more information from AWS website. And if you are already using Serverless Framework v2.15.0, click here to learn how to make of containers images with it.

Aurora Serverless V2

Aurora Serverless v2 instances auto-scale in milliseconds based on application load, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity. It's just available in preview at this time for the MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora.

Click here to get more information from AWS website. And if you want to get a deep view inside Aurora Serverless you should check this amazing post from Jeremy Daly blog, that drills down the entire service.

AWS Lambda - Support for Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2)

"AVX2 allows CPU to perform a higher number of integer and floating-point operations per clock cycle, thus speeding up CPU intensive workloads with parallelizable operations, allowing customers to process data faster, improve throughput, schedule data-intensive jobs, and deliver performant end-user experiences."Source: AWS Website

Click here to get more information from AWS website.

AWS Step Functions - New Synchronous Express Workflows

"Synchronous Express Workflows allow developers to quickly receive the workflow response without needing to poll additional services or build a custom solution. This is useful for high-volume microservice orchestration and fast compute tasks that communicate via HTTPS."Source: AWS Website

Click here to get more information from AWS website.

Cognito - Use existing Cognito User Pools & Identity Pools for your Amplify project

Now you can use an already existing Amazon Cognito user pools and identity pools in your new Amplify projects, making it easier to build new applications and solutions for an existing user base.

Click here to get more information from AWS website.

SQL-compatible query language added to DynamoDB

You can now use PartiQL (a SQL-compatible query language) with DynamoDB giving you a way to query, insert, update, and delete table data in Amazon DynamoDB with the power of the most used query language in the world.

Click here to get more information from AWS website.

FIFO topics are implemented over AWS SNS

First-In-First-Out (FIFO) topics are used with SQS FIFO queues for implementations that requires a strict message ordering (with exactly once processing) and message deduplication. This can help, per example, with flight companies systems that needs to respect the customer buys orders while managing the airplane seats available.

Click here to get more information from AWS website.

Step Functions now also supports Amazon EKS service integration

You can now build workflows with steps that launch tasks in EKS and wait for the response. This allows you to have a mixed Serverless and Kubernetes cloud native applications and workflows.

Click here to get more information from AWS website.

(BONUS) - Amazon S3 Replication Adds Support for Multiple Destination Buckets

You can now have your files from a S3 bucket replicated to multiple buckets, through the same account or a different one. This is amazing for companies that want a High Availability applications or a willing to apply Disaster Recovery scenarios.

Click here to get more informations and an amazing tutorial made by Marcia Villalba.

Conclusion

We still have 1 week until the end of AWS re:Invent we already got some amazing new features over the best cloud provider of the world. We are very excited waiting for the new announcements over the next week. Enjoy the content and stay tuned for new announcements.