136. 20 Amazing New AWS Features

AWS Bites

In this pre-re:Invent 2024 episode, Luciano and Eoin discuss some of their favorite recent AWS announcements, including improvements to AWS Step Functions, Lambda runtime updates, DynamoDB price reductions, ALB header injection, Cognito enhancements, VPC public access blocking, and more. They share their thoughts on the implications of these new capabilities and look forward to seeing what else is announced at the conference. Overall, it's an exciting time for AWS developers with many new features to explore. Very important: no focus on GenAI in this episode :)

AWS Bites is brought to you, as always, by fourTheorem! Sometimes, AWS is overwhelming and you might need someone to provide clear guidance in the fog of cloud offerings. That someone is fourTheorem. Check them out at ⁠fourtheorem.com⁠

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• The repo containing the code of the AWS Bites website: https://github.com/awsbites/aws-bites-site
• Orama Search: https://orama.com/
• JSONata in AWS Step Functions: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/simplifying-developer-experience-with-variables-and-jsonata-in-aws-step-functions/
• EC2 Auto Scaling improvements: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-ec2-auto-scaling-highly-responsive-scaling-policies/
• Node.js 22 is available for Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/node-js-22-runtime-now-available-in-aws-lambda/
• Python 3.13 runtime: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/python-3-13-runtime-now-available-in-aws-lambda/
• Aurora Serverless V2 now scales to 0: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-aurora-serverless-v2-scaling-zero-capacity/
• Episode 95 covering Mountpoint for S3: https://awsbites.com/95-mounting-s3-as-a-filesystem/
• One Zone caching for Mountpoint for S3: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/mountpoint-amazon-s3-high-performance-shared-cache/
• Appending to S3 objects: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/directory-buckets-objects-append.html
• 1 million S3 Buckets per account: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-s3-up-1-million-buckets-per-aws-account/
• DynamoDB cost reduction: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/new-amazon-dynamodb-lowers-pricing-for-on-demand-throughput-and-global-tables/
• ALB Headers: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/aws-application-load-balancer-header-modification-enhanced-traffic-control-security/
• Cognito Managed Login: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/improve-your-app-authentication-workflow-with-new-amazon-cognito-features/
• Cognito Passwordless Authentication: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/improve-your-app-authentication-workflow-with-new-amazon-cognito-features/
• VPC Block Public Access: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/vpc-block-public-access/
• Episode 88 where we talk about VPC Lattice: https://awsbites.com/88-what-is-vpc-lattice/
• Direct integration between Lattice and ECS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/streamline-container-application-networking-with-native-amazon-ecs-support-in-amazon-vpc-lattice/
• Resource Control Policies: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-resource-control-policies-rcps-a-new-authorization-policy/
• Episode 23 about EventBridge: https://awsbites.com/23-what-s-the-big-deal-with-eventbridge/
• EventBridge latency improvements: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-eventbridge-improvement-latency-event-buses/
• AppSync web sockets: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mobile/announcing-aws-appsync-events-serverless-websocket-apis/

Do you have any AWS questions you would like us to address?

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