AWS re:Invent 2021 day 1: Top 3 announcements

AWS re:Invent 2021 is here! Here are a few of the biggest announcements from the first day of re:Invent and a bit on why we think they're awesome.

Amazon has announced the relaunch of Amazon Inspector, which dates back to 2015. This service can be used to automate security assessment and management and can help organizations with security and compliance requirements for workloads deployed to AWS.

Our take on the new-and-improved Amazon Inspector?

It's cool, but maybe a bit clunky. It seems like they basically blasted Inspector (now Inspector Classic) back to atoms and came up with a new one from scratch to do what people actually need in an enterprise environment without creating additional friction.

There are three things that really stand out to us:

1. Support for container images — not just limited to EC2)
2. It uses AWS SSM Agent — There's no need to install an additional client
3. Automatic scanning — It can automatically detect and deploy itself to eligible targets

Get started with ACG and transform your career with courses and real hands-on labs in AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and beyond.

On Monday, Amazon announced pull through cache repository support in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).

This solves another point of security friction in enterprises. Many big customers have hard rules around things like "You cannot use code from outside our private systems!" And because telling your security team "Quiet down and get real!" is maybe not the wisest course of action, AWS have come up with a solution for container images. Instead of needing to write scripts and manage them to keep copies of public images up to date, AWS now does it auto-magically. Not bad!

Plus, it probably doesn't really cost AWS anything to run since no doubt there'll be hundreds of copies of nginx:latest, and they'll only need to store one.

Last year, AWS launched AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0, which the company describes as "an open-source edge runtime and cloud service for building, deploying, and managing device software and applications." Now, AWS has rolled out the ability to securely manage your Greengrass edge devices using AWS Systems Manager (SSM).

This is a pretty basic proposition: IoT is hard to manage, so AWS made Greengrass. IoT is harder to manage at scale, so AWS integrated it with SSM.

Now you can manage both your servers and IoT devices at scale using the same tooling, theoretically. Pretty awesome! You could already do this through various custom means, but again, AWS is simplifying and streamlining the process — and letting the customer focus on "make things do cool stuff" rather than undifferentiated heavy lifting.

Check out the ACG and Pluralsight re:Invent content hub to keep up with all things re:Invent 2021.

You can also follow ACG on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to A Cloud Guru on YouTube for all the re:Invent 2021 updates you can handle!

And join our awesome Discord Community to rub digital elbows with AWS Training Architects and other like-minded cloudy people.