Everything you need to know about AWS re:invent 2016
Amazon Web Services conference re:Invent has closed the doors earlier this week. Among great speakers and discussions, there are some key tech highlights that need to be covered. Big promises, big data, big expectations — is this the future of Amazon? We hope.
Amazon Lightsail
Amazon is on the run for private hosting providers that offer VPS, by offering AWS based virtual private server at a price beginning with 5$ a month. Lightsail is told to be an easy tool for VPS administrators, that can be set-up within three clicks. The service supports LAMP stack, WordPress, Drupal and others, software integrations and environmental support. Lightsail is also user-friendly: customers could manage DNS, monitor the server and set up security all in management panel. The service comes in 5 sizes varying from 5$ a month (512MBs RAM, 1TB data transfer, 20GB SSD), to 80$ a month (8GB RAM, 80GB SSD, and 5TB data transfer).
Aurora supports PostgreSQL
The heavily requested PostgreSQL structured database support will come handy to developers and programmers. MySQL was cloned to create AWS relational database engine Aurora. Now, open source database PostgreSQL will be cloned and become a fully managed service in the AWS palette. Till now, the database could be used through Relational Database Service, or install the storage PostgreSQL infrastructure atop Aurora on their own.
Amazon Athena
S3 storage service can now be addressed by Athena — a simple and fast tool for for running queries stored on AWS, by simply using SQL with no additional infrastructure. Big data analysis will be much simpler with this interactive query tool, and is said to become the new Google’s public cloud “BigQuery” product. There’s a large competition for Athena, not only with Google products, but with Redshift data warehousing service as well, however the service has a competitive price, with only 5$ per TB. The data queried by Athena will be visualized in AWS’s QuickSight business intelligence (BI) service.
Amazon Lex
There just might be a revolution in machine learning, introduced by Amazon Lex — artificial intelligence tool able to understand natural language in a deep learning manner. Lex is the “engine” behind virtual assistant Alexa and smart speakers Echo. Lex is tested and trained on huge data basis, that create networks, usable for connecting new data onto the scheme. This tool will allow to create conversational applications of the future, operating on either text or audio. Lex will power ChatBots and data repositories.
AWS Shield Standard
AWS has launched DDoS mitigation service free of charge for its clients. This should keep the cloud applications and websites safe from 96% of network and transport DDoS attacks, including SYN/ACK floods, Reflection attacks, and HTTP slow reads. As we are just a month away from DDoS assault that has put down Twitter, Reddit or Netflix, this tool might come more than handy, to protect the web from such violation. AWS will provide also a paid version of the service — Shield Advanced, that provides improved detection and high-level visibility into the attacks.
