I’m in Las Vegas this week. So many new features and services were announce that it’s hard to keep up-to-date. That’s why I’d like to try something different to recap re:Invent this year. Instead of listing you all the announcements, I take a step back and look at the overall picture. I identified four main themes after filtering out all the marketing hype: you will not see me talking too much about voice interfaces, AI, AR, and VR.

It’s all about building blocks

AWS is committed to provide us building blocks, not one size fits all solutions. Look at the container space. Besides Amazon ECS that has been around for some years, AWS announced that they will manage Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) for us. ECS and EKS give you full control, you manage the EC2 instances that act as Docker hosts. Additionally, AWS Fargate is the new service to execute your Docker containers where you are not in charge of the clusters anymore. Now you have many options to run containers.

Data goes global and algorithms go local

AWS pushes relational databases to the next level and makes multi-region easier. RDS is the service to store your relational data. But compared to DynamoDB, RDS database engines do not scale very well. Aurora, a proprietary RDS engine built by AWS, is going to change this very soon. You can already add read replicas to scale reads, but Aurora will get multiple masters soon to scale writes. Besides that, DynamoDB offers replicating tables across regions. This allows you to have a single source of truth for your users in the US, Europe, and Asia.