We’ve got the 6 key takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2021

The tenth edition of AWS re:Invent was a lot like the previous nine – zero in on key learnings for the global cloud community and help customers take advantage of new and upgraded offerings. The key difference this year was volume and scale, with the event playing out both on-site in Las Vegas as well as virtually.

As in past years, SHI and Stratascale were in attendance, and our subject matter experts have selected a number of key announcements of particular interest to the cloud community:

AWS Private 5G

Many companies have experience deploying Wi-Fi infrastructure – but cellular implementations may be a bit of a stretch. AWS Private 5G allows AWS customers to replace their existing Wi-Fi networks with 5G/cellular-based networks that are entirely managed by AWS. This offering lets organizations take advantage of advanced 5G services on an accelerated timeline, as they don’t need to train their own staff in cell-based technologies.

SHI and Stratascale can facilitate this transition, offering AWS expertise that helps customers take advantage of the advanced services – including IoT, Edge, and analytics – private 5G network makes possible.

AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform

Support for Terraform has been added to the AWS Control Tower Account Factory offering – which allows customers who have standardized on Terraform to now take full advantage of Control Tower’s account provisioning capabilities.

As a Premier Consulting Partner for AWS, SHI announced at re:Invent that it had been named a launch partner for the Built on Control Tower program. Leveraging SHI’s AWS Migration Competency and AWS Storage Competency, Stratascale engineers have built Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) solutions to allow customers to set up and manage fully secure multi-account Cloud9-integrated development environment (IDE) instances on-demand. These solutions are available both in AWS Marketplace and directly within AWS Control Tower.

Sustainability Pillar for the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Sustainability is a major goal for many of our Enterprise customers. Stratascale, as a Well-Architected Review Partner, helps many of our customers assess their workloads against AWS Well-Architected best practices, including Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. Now we can help our customers reach their sustainability goals and reduce their carbon footprint by assessing their workloads against the new Sustainability Pillar.

AWS Backup gains VMware workload support

Data governance takes a leap forward with updates to AWS Backup that allow hybrid VMware environments to be protected within a single policy. With backup often being the first step into cloud for many customers, this update could be an important gateway as organizations continue to plan for hybrid deployments.

“This could be a significant impact for our VMware customer using both VMware and VMware on AWS,” says Dan Newman, Principal Consultant with Stratascale. “AWS backup and support for VMware ties within SHI’s hybrid cloud strategy and means that customers can leverage AWS Backup service to back up on-prem and in the cloud VMware Cloud on AWS instances. And if they were using it for other AWS services, they could now consolidate to a single backup platform that resides in the cloud. In addition, customers can choose to remove legacy or costly backup solutions.”

AWS Networking & Content Delivery

With the release into preview of AWS Cloud WAN (Wide Area Network), Stratascale’s Enterprise customers can simplify the build, management, and monitoring of their global networks using AWS. Enterprise customers can centralize their network operations and reduce the complexity of managing multiple networks with diverse connectivity and requirements. AWS Direct Connect SiteLink, now in general release, is especially compelling to global-scale organizations, allowing them to implement private network connections between on-premises locations anywhere in the world.

Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server

Stratascale helps many of our customers migrate their Microsoft SQL Server databases to AWS, but in the past have often been forced to run self-managed databases on EC2 due to the need for the application to have access to the underlying operating system and database environment. With the release of Amazon RDS Custom SQL Server, those customers can now take advantage of the benefits of RDS – and in the process reduce their operational overhead.

AWS re:Invent 2021 gave cloud-first customers lots to think about. For more information on how our experts at Stratascale – particularly within our AWS Cloud Practice – can help deploy these services safely, securely and at scale, check us out here.