re:Invent was a blast: five days packed with announcements of new services and features. We have created a top 10 list for our re:Invent recap. Here is all you need to know about re:Invent 2019.

AWS made a prominent announcement on November 6th, 2019: AWS Savings Plans. It was never easier to get a discount on compute capacity by committing to a monthly consumption and paying upfront. This blog post introduced AWS Savings Plans and compares them to other options to reduce your AWS bill as well.

Andreas is reviewing the AWS Global Accelerator. AWS introduced Global Accelerator at re:Invent in 2018. A year after that, it is about time to review the service. AWS Global Accelerator makes use of Amazon’s worldwide infrastructure and is designed to improve the performance and reliability of your applications.

We love simplicity! Our blog runs on CloudFront and S3 which is maintenance free and does handle traffic spikes easily. We use the static website generator hexo to publish our content. Lambda@Edge handles redirects and generates optimized images on the fly. Instead of Google Analytics we are using Athena and QuickSight to get statistics about our blog and posts.

Not a week goes by without a frightening announcement that an organization has leaked confidential data from Amazon S3 accidentally. Most often, the root cause of a security breach is a misconfiguration of S3 access control. Andreas presents four rules to avoid S3 data leaks to Michael in this episode.

There are many options available when you are looking for ways to implement a deployment pipeline. You might have heard about Jenkins, CircleCi, BitBucket Pipelines, GitLab Pipelines, and many others. AWS, on the other hand, offers services for CI/CD itself: CodeBuild and CodePipeline.

AWS CodePipeline orchestrates deployment pipelines. Unfortunately, the learning curve is steep and the implementation is often complicated. Therefore, I recommend a more simple approach: use CodeBuild. In general, CodeBuild feels like CircleCI or GitLab Pipelines. However, CodePipeline offers tighter security controls and excellent integration into your AWS infrastructure.

It was never easier to scale your compute layer. EC2 Auto Scaling, Fargate, and Lambda enable horizontal scaling. But how do you scale your database? Use a NoSQL database like DynamoDB, one could say. But what if you don't want to miss all the advantages of an SQL database? You should check out Amazon Aurora Serverless, a cloud-native SQL database.

AWS Marketplace allows you to sell software to AWS customers. The customer can either run the software on its own (using AMIs and optional CloudFormation), or you can offer the software as a service (SaaS). You can also offer containers and machine learning algorithms in the AWS Marketplace.

In this episode, you will learn how to sell pay per use SaaS in the AWS Marketplace. I will show you the overall process and finish with code snippets to implement the process.

AWS released a new feature called EC2 Instance Connect. Unfortunately, the defaults are insecure. You likely can open an SSH connection to every EC2 instance in your AWS account now.

AWS releases a new service with a lot of marketing noise. You can’t resist, you want to use that new thing now. But soon you discover that the service is missing essential features. As a result, you stumble upon a show stopper and get frustrated. Why is that? AWS ships new services with a lot of limitations and rough edges. That’s a good strategy for AWS to get early feedback. But it’s painful for us, the customer.

Therefore, we start a little series where we review new AWS services to give you a more balanced view of the capabilities. We start with AWS Backup.

AWS Backup aims to become a centralized place for managing backups. If possible, AWS Backup uses existing features to create backups (e.g., RDS snapshots). Sometimes, AWS Backup is the only way to create a backup (e.g., EFS file systems).