Top 3 takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2020

Talk about going big—AWS re:Invent 2020 went virtual this year, proving just how exponentially things can scale when they happen in the cloud. Over 250k attendees, three weeks of events (that spilled over into several extra weeks!), and a slew of announcements that push AWS further on the horizon of leading cloud tech. 

Those announcements mean some amazing opportunities for Metal Toad to help our clients revolutionize their businesses in the rapidly changing cloud space. Here are our top three takeaways from the big event. 

1. There are more tools than ever—and they’re easier to use

Andy Jassy’s keynote was an exciting tour of the new products and features AWS released—for everything from machine learning to compute to databases. What that means for our clients is more of the good stuff—speed, more customization, data-driven insights—and less of the things that bog down innovation—complexity, cost, and dev time. Dig deeper with our recap of the keynote.

2. Chaos engineering creates calm—at scale

Warner Vogel’s keynote is always thrilling for frontline engineers, and one of the most exciting topics he covered was chaos engineering. This allows us to quickly improve application performance, resiliency, and stability—and leverage it at whatever scale works for a client’s particular business need. Get more details in this interview with engineering manager Nathan Wilkerson.

3. Lambda is now 99% faster—and cheaper

Lambda was already an ideal serverless approach for compute resources, allowing users to buy server time in 100 millisecond increments (instead of hours). AWS announced that they’re now billing in increments of just one millisecond! That means the cost for our clients to run software on Lambda can drop tremendously. This post by CEO Joaquin Lippincott runs the numbers. 

We’re already putting the latest AWS tools to work for clients, and we’re excited to see what else we’ll discover on the leading edge of cloud. If you’d like to see what the revelations from AWS re:Invent can do for you, we’d love to talk.