AWS December Announcement: An infrastructure guy should be memorized

We have watched many big announcements from AWS this year November and December. It was all part of the AWS Las Vegas Re-invent. You can watch many of the key notes and session from the Youtube easily. You can watch the keynotes from AWS as well.  

I have listed below some of the announcement that AWS made which I think we, infrastructure architects should be noted. It is not the complete list however; it covers only December month announcement as of 10^th Dec 2016.

• AWS Cost and Usage Report now contains public on-demand pricing and more – will be handy for us as it would help us to justify the decision to go by ‘Reserved Instance’.
• Announcing the AWS Canada (Central) Region – It is giving us one more option to convince customers who wanted to keep the data within in the region that extends the number of regions to 15 and 40 AZs.
• AWS WAF is now available on the Application Load Balancer (ALB), This was something expected from some time as we had to use cloudfront to use the WAF so far. It helps us reduce the cost as well.
• Amazon GameLift expands to 5 more regions across Europe, Asia-Pacific and South America For those who are interested in Games.
• Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Outbound Network Access You need to keep your instance in your VPC to utilize the feature.
• JIRA Service Desk Data Center which provides IT service management software with high availability and performance at scale on AWS. JIRA Service Desk is easy to use, simple to set up, and has everything you need for IT support and customer service.
• AWS Database Migration Service Officially Supports SSL for Oracle databases DMS now supports SSL enabled endpoints for Oracle database engines. This is an addition to our existing support for SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora, MySQL, and MariaDB. Coupled with the existing encryption offered by a VPN or AWS Direct Connect, customers can provide security for their data.
• AWS Config now integrates with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager – provide continuous monitoring and governance of software on your EC2 instances and on-premises systems. It records onfiguration changes to software on your EC2 instances as well as virtual machines (VMs) or servers in your on-premises environment. Through AWS Config integration with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, you gain visibility into Operating System configurations, system-level updates, installed applications, network configuration and more. AWS Config provides a history of OS and system-level configuration changes that you can use for assessing security risks, troubleshooting, tracking license usage, etc.  
• Introducing AWS Shield – AWS Shield Standard is available to all AWS customers at no additional cost, and protects your applications from the most common, frequently occurring DDoS attacks. However, the AWS shield advance version is available to subscribe if you are looking for protection against large and sophisticated attacks.
• Introduction of Amazon Glue – a fully managed ETL service that makes it easy to move data between your data stores. AWS Glue simplifies and automates the difficult and time consuming data discovery, conversion, mapping, and job scheduling tasks.
• IPv6 Support for EC2 instances in VPC – Customers can use IPv6 on EC2 instances to access Internet resources as well as on-premise applications using Direct Connect. This enables numerous use cases such as hosting public services and meeting IPv6 compliance requirements.
• Amazon EC2 Systems Manager – is a management service that helps you automatically collect software inventory, apply Windows OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems. These capabilities help you define and track system configurations, prevent drift, and maintain software compliance.