AWS re:Invent 2020 ran as an online event in December. The 2021 engineering impact of the announcements is now visible as services reach general availability and production adoption.
AWS Graviton2 processor adoption
AWS Graviton2-based instances (M6g, C6g, R6g families) reached broad availability in 2021. The Graviton2 ARM-based processor offers 40% better price/performance than equivalent x86 instance types. For workloads that have no x86-specific dependencies (most compiled languages, containerised workloads), Graviton2 provides an immediate cost reduction with no application changes. The Docker multi-arch build ecosystem matured to support arm64 images without code changes.
Amazon EMR on EKS
EMR on EKS allows Spark and Hive workloads to run on existing EKS clusters without separate EMR clusters. The operational benefit for organisations already running Kubernetes: unified infrastructure for both application and data workloads, cost sharing of Kubernetes node capacity, and Spark job submission via the EMR API without managing a separate Hadoop cluster. The pattern is increasingly viable for organisations that have centralised Kubernetes operations.
Amazon ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere
AWS announced ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere, allowing customers to run AWS container services on on-premises hardware and other clouds. The pattern is similar to Azure Arc: cloud management plane projected onto on-premises compute. For organisations with on-premises compute that cannot be moved to the cloud, Anywhere services provide cloud-managed container orchestration.
Lake Formation and data governance
AWS Lake Formation (GA in 2019, significantly improved in 2020-2021) provides column-level security and governed access to data lake resources in S3 and Glue. The data governance use case: a central data platform team manages access policies; data consumers get access to exactly the columns they are authorised for without S3 bucket policies that are all-or-nothing at the bucket or prefix level.