Top Highlights from AWS’ re:Invent 2020 Conference — Part 2
Tags: aws, announcements, communitybuilder, reinvent2020
Published: 2021-01-17 05:33:37

AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global cloud computing community. The event features keynote announcements, launches, sessions, and more.


![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/onx5mpj2cjjs8ncg0mxp.png)


My Background: Cloud , Big Data & DevOps Enthusiast | 5x AWS Certified | 3x Oracle Cloud Certified | 3x Azure Certified | Big Data Certified | AWS Community Builder.


The first part of our post was focused on announcements related Compute , Storage and Networking and IoT Services and many more.
[Top Highlights from AWS’ re:Invent 2020 Conference — Part 1](https://dev.to/aditmodi/top-highlights-from-aws-re-invent-2020-conference-part-1-44ec)


#Database


There were important new launches for databases, including the previews of **Babelfish for Aurora**, a translation layer for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL that enables Aurora to understand commands from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. Babelfish for Amazon Aurora is a new translation layer for Amazon Aurora that enables Aurora to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server.

By using Babelfish, your applications running on SQL Server can now run directly on Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes. Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don’t have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries.
And by the way, AWS is open-sourcing Babelfish in 2021. Until then, you can use Babelfish on Amazon Aurora in a preview to see how it works and to get a sense of whether this is the right approach for you.

**Aurora Serverless v2 is a new serverless relational database**, compatible with MySQL, and AWS Glue Elastic Views builds materialized views that combine and replicate data across multiple data stores.
**Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL** now integrates with AWS Lambda.
For those not knowing what Amazon Aurora is, it is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud.
Amazon Serverless Aurora is — as the name implies — the serverless version of Aurora. AWS is now releasing its version 2, with supports for the full breadth of Aurora features, including Global Database, Multi-AZ deployments, and read replicas.
Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, currently in preview, scales instantly from hundreds to hundreds-of-thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second. As Aurora Serverless scales, it adjusts its capacity in fine-grained increments to provide just the right amount of database resources that the application needs. There is no database capacity for you to manage; you pay only for the capacity your application consumes.

Different improvements and new features were introduced for Amazon Redshift, the data warehouse service, for example the ability to move clusters between availability zones, automatic table optimization and the previews of data sharing and support for native JSON data processing.

#Machine Learning


Many machine learning new features and products were discussed during the keynote of Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president for AI and machine learning at AWS, and were focused around SageMaker. The new Amazon SageMaker Feature Store is a fully-managed, purpose-built repository to store, update, retrieve, and share machine learning features.

***SageMaker Clarify, SageMaker Debugger, SageMaker Managed Data Parallelism and SageMaker Model Parallelism were other new services and features announced.***

**AWS Trainium**, a machine learning training chip designed by AWS and Habana Gaudi based EC2 built for machine learning were announced at the beginning of the conference, together with Amazon Monitron, an end-to-end system that detects abnormal behavior in industrial machinery, and AWS Panorama, a machine learning appliance and SDK.

Amazon Lookout for Metrics is one more addition in the anomaly detection space, adding a flexible service for time series analysis, together with Amazon Lookout for Equipment and Amazon Lookout for Vision.


#Analytics


***New — Amazon QuickSight Q Answers Natural-Language Questions About Business Data***
Today, we are happy to announce the preview of Amazon QuickSight Q, a Natural Language Query (NLQ) feature powered by machine learning (ML). With Q, business users can now use QuickSight to ask questions about their data using everyday language and receive accurate answers in seconds.


![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/elqtjpywuy2ud6i8sgis.jpg)


#Monitoring, Architecture and Coding


***A significant part of Werner Vogels’ keynote was dedicated to the importance of logging, monitoring and how to improve deployments.*** 
A few new services and improvements are now available: **CloudTrail** provides more granular control of data event logging, while **Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP)** and **Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG)** are now in preview.
**AWS Fault Injection Simulator** is a managed chaos engineering service that will be available in 2021 and introduces disruptive events across a range of AWS services, including EC2, EKS, ECS and RDS.
**Cloudshell**, a browser-based shell to interact with AWS resources, is already available and makes it simpler to work with the CLI without running an instance and handling credentials. Python is now supported by Amazon CodeGuru, the managed service for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations. 
Amazon Location, a service to integrate maps, location awareness, and other location-based features to web and mobile applications was announced in preview at the end of the conference.
Management & Governance
Announcing Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (in Preview)
Amazon Managed Service for Grafana is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create on-demand, scalable, and secure Grafana workspaces to visualize and analyze your data from multiple sources.

#Networking & Content Delivery

***New — VPC Reachability Analyzer***
As customers expand their footprint on the cloud and deploy increasingly complex network architectures, it can take longer to resolve network connectivity issues caused by misconfiguration. Today, we are happy to announce a network diagnostics tool that troubleshoots reachability between two endpoints in a VPC, or within multiple VPCs.

#Quantum Technologies

We first wrote about Amazon Braket last year and invited you to Get Started with Quantum Computing. Since that launch we have continued to push forward, and today we want to share the latest updates about what we’re doing at both the practical and the theoretical level.

#Front-End Web & Mobile

***Amazon Location — Add Maps and Location Awareness to Your Applications***
Priced at a fraction of common alternatives, Amazon Location Service gives you access to maps and location-based services from multiple providers on an economical, pay-as-you-go basis.
New AWS Amplify Admin UI Helps You Develop App Backends, No Cloud Experience Required
With **Amplify Admin UI**, developers can build complex and feature-rich apps by focusing on their domain-specific data model instead of spending hours deploying and stitching together cloud infrastructure.

****AWS added more re:Invent sessions, for example on S3 topics, from January 12 to January 14, extending the conference to the new year.****


![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/tnytqdkx2fqmxf0fjydc.jpg)


I’m curious to hear from others who attended re:Invent this year about what their favorite lessons were. AWS created multiple tracks to ensure that whoever attends, no matter their interests or backgrounds, could dive into the exciting world of aws technology and learn a lot. let me know what you liked about re:invent and feel free to raise any concerns you have regarding aws re:invent sessions.

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*****“You want to be reinventing all the time, Some of it is building the right reinvention culture, and some of it is knowing what technology is available to you and jumping on it to make that reinvention happen.” — Andy Jassy CEO AWS*****