Highlights of AWS re:Invent 2017: Compute Updates and New Services

AWS re:Invent 2017 concluded in Las Vegas with over 40,000 attendees, marking a record‑high for Amazon’s stock and reaffirming AWS’s leadership in the cloud market amid growing competition from Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

Compute

Amazon ECS for Kubernetes (EKS) (Preview)

EKS provides a fully managed Kubernetes service on AWS, allowing users to launch clusters without handling availability or scaling concerns, though its availability in the China region remains uncertain.

AWS Fargate

Fargate enables running containers without managing underlying infrastructure, embodying AWS’s strategy of offering fine‑grained compute resources as a service.

New EC2 Instance Types

M5 – next‑generation general‑purpose instances built on the lightweight Nitro hypervisor for better hardware utilization.

H1 – storage‑optimized instances designed for high‑IO workloads and big‑data processing.

Bare Metal – physical servers offered directly to avoid resource contention with other tenants.

T2 Unlimited – an upgraded version of the T2 burstable‑performance family.

For deeper insight, see Brendan Gregg’s session on how Netflix tunes EC2 instances for performance.

Hibernation for Spot Instances

Spot Instances now support EBS‑backed hibernation, preserving memory state to the root EBS volume during pause periods.

Other Announcements

Amazon Time Sync Service provides region‑wide time synchronization via satellites and atomic clocks, supporting NTP for multi‑region deployments.

AWS Serverless Application Repository (Preview) offers a marketplace for Lambda applications, reflecting the growing popularity of serverless architectures.

Sessions

Netflix sessions attracted long queues and overflow rooms, covering topics such as EC2 flow logs, Amazon’s development and deployment practices, the evolution of serverless architectures, and a recap of EC2 features.

Reference links:

[1] https://amazonaws-china.com/cn/blogs/aws/aws-fargate/

[2] http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtualization-2017.html

[3] https://amazonaws-china.com/cn/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/introducing-amazon-ec2-h1-instances-the-latest-generation-of-storage-optimized-instances-for-high-performance-big-data-workloads/

[4] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/spot-interruptions.html#interruption-behavior

[5] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-at-aws-re-invent-2017-79384f525367

Further engineer insights will be shared in the coming days; stay tuned.