Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform offering a one-stop solution for all cloud services, from data storage to analytics. AWS dominates the cloud application development services vendor market from AI & ML to DevSecOps, controlling over a third of the entire market.
As the platform grows in popularity, more and more businesses are looking to adopt it as their preferred cloud platform. This is partly due to the platform’s easy, simple, cost-effective cloud services, driving businesses to achieve increased efficiency and performance.
Innovation is at the heart of Amazon’s business mission, operating philosophy, and corporate approach. AWS is constantly devising new, groundbreaking, and revolutionary ideas to help businesses experiment and innovate quickly. If you use AWS to enhance your cloud infrastructure or are planning to move to the AWS cloud, you must keep up with AWS’s latest technologies, capabilities, services, and features.
In this interest, we have made a brief rundown of the top six latest innovations in AWS to help you leverage them to move your organization forward.
AWS’s Top 6 Latest Innovations
1. AWS Glue 4.0
AWS offers a fully managed ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) solution for categorizing and managing big data called AWS Glue. This gives you a data integration tool that formats information from disparate data sources and organizes it in a central repository where you can use it to inform business decisions.
Amazon has since released AWS Glue version 4.0, the latest version of AWS Glue 4.0. It offers you the newest Python and Spark releases so you can build, run, and configure your data workloads and derive insights faster.
This includes support for Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, and Apache Iceberg formats, giving you multiple options to store and analyze data. It also comes with upgraded native connectors for AWS Glue database sources like SQLServer, MySQL, and RDS, which makes it easy to connect to popular database sources.
In addition, it supports the newest Cloud Shuffle Storage Plugin for Apache Spark, which enables you to scale disk utility during runtime. It allows Adaptive Query Execution that can dynamically optimize your queries as they run. Lastly, the latest version enhances developers’ experience through more contextual error messages.
2. AWS SimSpace Weave
Until recently, spatial simulations were generally limited to running on a single server. If simulation developers needed to simulate a bigger and more complex world with many independent and dynamic entities, they needed to provision a larger server. This limited the number and complexity of dynamic entities that developers could build in their simulations.
Say hello to AWS SimSpace Weaver. It is a compute-managed service that allows you to create expansive and complex simulation worlds in the cloud at scale. AWS SimSpace Weaver helps you build virtual worlds comprising tons of objects that can interact with each other in real-time without you having to manage the backend infrastructure.
With SimSpace Weaver, you can distribute simulation workloads across multiple Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) instances. Amazon’s SimSpace Weaver manages the complex tasks of networking, provisioning, and de-provisioning infrastructure so that you can devote more time to building simulations and objects of the virtual world—all while paying only a fraction of the cost of on-premises solutions.
3. AWS Clean Rooms
AWS Clean Rooms is a data management service that allows you and your partners to securely collaborate on collective datasets to derive insights without copying or sharing each other’s underlying data or moving it outside the AWS environment. Creating your clean rooms using AWS Clean Rooms is relatively easy, and you can analyze your collective datasets at the click of a (few) button(s).
The AWS API or the AWS management console allows you to choose any AWS customers you are collaborating with, choose data sets, and set restrictions for the involved parties. Using AWS Clean Rooms, you can collaborate with hundreds of thousands of companies already on the AWS cloud without retaining a copy of your data outside your AWS environment.
Each time you run a query, AWS Clean Room can read data where it lives and apply analysis rules which helps keep your data under control. AWS Clean Rooms offers you a wide range of tools to enhance privacy—including query logging, query output restrictions, and query controls—which enables you to customize restrictions on any query run by clean room participants.
Also, Clean Rooms includes modern cryptographic computing features to keep data encoded—even during query processing—to comply with strict data-handling guidelines.
4. AWS Security Lake
Amazon Security Lake is a service that automatically sources, aggregates, normalizes, and manages the security data of your cloud and stores it in a security data lake in your AWS account. Security Lake gathers all security data from AWS environments, on-premises, cloud sources, SaaS providers, etc., and condenses it into a purpose-built data lake stored in your AWS account.
This gives your security teams and analysts broad visibility into your organization’s security status. It also facilitates timely responses and boosts the security of your data, workloads, and applications in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
Centralized security data includes application and service logs, threat intelligence (e.g., known malicious IP addresses), and security alerts. This data is critical to detect, investigate, and remediate security incidents.
Centralizing security-related findings and logs and keeping them in the same format makes work easier for Security Operations teams allowing them to devote more time to investigating security issues and averting threats.
5. Amazon DataZone
To unlock the full power and the true potential of data (driving innovation and value for business), you need to make it easy for the right apps and people to find, access, and share the right data when they need it while keeping it safe and secure.
Amazon DataZone is a data management tool for cataloging, discovering, analyzing, sharing, and governing data on AWS, third-party sources, and on-premises. Amazon DataZone leverages high-tech controls, thus ensuring that only the right personnel with the right permissions and in the right context can access your company’s data assets.
It makes it easy for data consumers (including data scientists, engineers, analysts, project developers, etc.) to access data across your organization so they use and collaborate with data to gain actionable insights.
DataZone is excellent for governing data sharing. It helps you automate workflows to enhance data sharing securely between producers and consumers to ensure data access by the right users and for the right purposes. Additionally, you can use the AWS DataZone tool to effectively audit who is using which datasets and for what business purpose and monitor usage and costs across projects and lines of business.
Your data teams can use Amazon DataZone’s web portal to define your business’s data catalog, configure policies, and connect to AWS services (including Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3), partner solutions, and on-premises systems.
Once the catalog is configured, data consumers can easily search, discover, examine metadata, and request access to datasets. Data consumers create an Amazon DataZone Project, which is a common space on the web. Here data users can pull in several data sets, share access with colleagues and collaborate on analysis.
6. Amazon Application Composer
Not-so-savvy developers may find it difficult to compose apps from different AWS services. This requires them to properly understand how to configure every service and then learn and write Infrastructure as Code (IaC) before deploying their application. Moreover, developers may be unable to communicate architectural changes, especially after modifying an existing application.
AWS Application Composer helps you simplify and fast-track designing, configuring, and developing serverless apps. With AWS Composer, you don’t need to learn and understand an IaC framework or browse the service documentation.
AWS Application Composer helps you drag and drop serverless resources onto a visual, browser-based canvas allowing you to quickly create your serverless application architecture. The canvas also supports grouping resources into larger architectural components to simplify editing and configuration. While you iterate in the visual editor, AWS Application Composer configures necessary service integrations and IAM policies between resources and helps you group resources with contextually relevant labels to enhance the alignment of your team.
Practical Logix: Your Partner in Cloud Application Development Services
The technological ecosystem is fast evolving, and you will need cutting-edge software solutions to remain competitive. At Practical Logix, we are a full-service custom software development company offering a wide range of software expertise, including Big Data, Cloud Engineering, GIS, UX/UI, Analytics, Agile Methodology, DevOps, and critical Support and Maintenance.
We have a soft spot for writing superior software that offers practical solutions to real business and world problems. Our mantra is to contribute to an enhanced digital lifestyle for everyone by building useful and much-needed applications.
We take pride in seeing not only your current needs but also beyond your future ambitions. Moreover, we create novel software solutions for today and tomorrow while delivering value for your end users.
Better still, no matter your needs, we will work within your project specifications, budget, and timeline. Do you need more information on the AWS Cloud? cContact us today for your inquiries on how we can help.
