AWS re:Invent 2020: AWS Community Builders Program Top Highlights

AWS Community Builders @ re:Invent

✅ Week One's Top Highlights

• Data is at the center of all apps, software, and systems; and because of this, companies must use data effectively and efficiently to build a foundation for future innovation.
• With a strong data foundation, you stand the best chance to overcome the unexpected and innovate in new ways as the future continues to digitally transform.
• Considering the transition from on-premises systems to the cloud, it used to take months to get hardware to experiment with ideas or building a monolith application couldn't be easily serviced or scaled, and infrastructure sizing mistakes could delay projects by months. Thanks to the cloud, data architectures and systems can be experimented and iterated on near instantly, at scale.

• An authentication and authorization strategy should include an (1) organization that corresponds to the customer; (2) a management account that pays the bills for these accounts; and (3) identity and access management via service control policies.
• Someone is authenticated via AWS' IAM (identity access management) service which includes two kinds of principles: IAM users and IAM roles.
• You can get started right away with AWS' Single Sign-On solution (SSO), which will let you create a user pool directly in your AWS environment

• By LEGO implementing the circuit breaker pattern with AWS Step Functions, the company can manage failure message replays with state machine.
• LEGO uses Amazon EventBridge to send back-in-stock notifications right to the customer, thanks to the power of AWS and the cloud.
• A single EventBridge event contains multiple feedback events, allowing LEGO to email feedback event streams with batching.

• Disney+ is one of the world's largest online video streaming platforms, and delivers its near limitless library of digital content to over 60.5 million subscribers, thanks to Amazon DynamoDB.
• Disney+'s Content Discovery team leverages DynamoDB global tables to scale and deliver features like Continuous Watching, Watchlist, and Personalized Recommendations because of AWS' easily scalable database structures in the cloud.
• DynamoDB allows the global Disney+ team to enable regional expansions of content and provide this content on-demand instead of a solely provisioned mode.

✅ Week Two's Top Highlights

• Infrastructure is not the thing — it is just a means to the thing. It is the fundamental blueprint to build the house, but we cannot lose sight of the house that we still need to build.
• The trade-offs to consider as builders and developers are four key parameters that we must balance: (1) availability, (2) scalability, (3) productivity, and (4) cost.
• So what makes the most sense to focus on? Colm recommends focusing on: security scanning and patching; working backups and tested restore; resilience and redundancy; and serverless.

• Amazon QLDB is applying an immutable and distributed process for data provenance and cryptographic verifiability for implementing systems of records with data integrity and verification as a priority.
• With Amazon QLDB, business applications can leverage scalability (event-driven distributed systems), flexibility (flexible document data models for NoSQL and document databases), consistency (relational database transaction processing), and built-in data integrity (for immutable append-only databases for blockchain and cryptography).
• Thanks to an immutable ledger database, business applications can leverage auditing databases, event sourcing, transactional systems of records, and an alternative to blockchain to store cryptographically verifiable state and changes with a centralized authority model.

• AWS CodePipeline provides visibility across your application code with numerous stages, such as source, analyze, and build. DevOps can play an important role in the systems of your production workload; for example, enforcing linting practices in the pipeline without increasing build time.
• For an e-commerce company that is entirely serverless via containers that spans multiple components and microservices, a platform like Datadog can identify and isolate issues within the application and infrastructure to mitigate errors, identify server-side and client-side DNS issues, and more.
• It can be all too easy to blame the network, but with a platform like VMware's NSX Advanced Load Balancer, you can identify issues within your application, increase its resiliency quickly and easily, all without ever taking the application down for maintenance.

✅ Week Three's Top Highlights

• Venmo is a born-in-the-cloud payment platform running on AWS, and as an early adopter of cloud-based technologies, this helped the innovative company fast-track its business use cases.
• Venmo's payment volume has grown 9X over the years and is supported by Amazon Aurora's ease-of-use and seamless scale for its 6 TB+ of data while enabling up to 1,000 TPS.
• Thanks to AWS database solutions (Amazon VPC, EC2, S3, Aurora, Transit Gateway, AWS WAF, DynamoDB, Lambda, EventBridge, SQS, Kenesis, and Amazon EMR to name a few), Venmo is able to pilot new features lightning-fast, stream users' data directly to them, and bring their ingenious contactless payment features to production sooner and with less administrative work.

• Global tables are an ideal use-case for high volume replication and low latency replications.
• Summary analytics are key for streams and Lambda aggregation methods. DynamoDB Global Replication is fully managed, active-active, and multi-region that enables cross region replication in less than 2 seconds.
• A technique that can reduce costs is write sharding for selective reads. Partition / shard key is used for building an unordered hash index and this allows tables to be partitioned for global scale.

• If you're looking for a database to use in your software, PostgreSQL is an open-source technology that's rapidly growing in popularity due to its abundance of features, vibrant community, and compatibility with commercial databases used today.
• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a managed regional database that can plug into numerous database engines — such as Amazon Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle — providing you with easy administration, availability and durability, performance and scalability, and security and compliance.
• Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility fully leverages AWS services to give you 2-3x better throughput on the same instance sizes, scalability of up to 128 TiB, and highly-available durability and fault-tolerant storage across 3 availability zones.

• Post-quantum cryptography is needed because the key agreement algorithms we use today will break given a quantum adversary and we don't know precisely when (or if) that will happen. We always need to be prepared.
• It takes 10-15 years of work for algorithms to work their way from invention to standardization in the encryption space. The work being conducted now will curve the need to rush the development of encryption algorithms in the future.
• AWS is already working on and promoting the use of hybrid key agreements in the ETSI (European Telecommunication Standards Institute) and advocating for it in forums with NIST, as well as deploying hybrid post-quantum TLS to their most security-critical services, like AWS Key Management Services.

💭What Was Your Favorite Session at re:Invent?

📝This Article was Written by: Brian H. Hough (@BrianHHough)

My name is Brian H. Hough and I am a branding strategist, UI/UX designer, and software engineer with a passion for innovation. As an AWS Community Builder and 4x global hackathon winner, I love sharing how technology can change the world and increasing accessibility into the industry so others can too.