AWS re:Invent Week One: Highlights

Author: Jacob O’Farrell, Technical Delivery Lead at Max Kelsen

Max Kelsen is only one of three Australian companies to attain AWS’s machine learning competency status, and was named AWS’s 2020 Partner of the Year for Data, Analytics and Machine Learning. We are constantly in the thick of upskilling our team by attending conferences that fuel our thirst for knowledge and keeping our curiosity alive.

AWS re:Invent is a free 3-week virtual conference held by AWS as an opportunity for AWS experts to lead sessions and share the latest news, technologies, and trends within the space. The Max Kelsen team are attending for the entirety of the conference and sharing with you a weekly summary of the key sessions that touch upon the components and sub-services that we use, what we are excited about and why these are important.

#1 — Container Support in Lambda

Session Introduction:

With AWS Lambda, you upload your code and run it without thinking about servers. Many customers enjoy the way this works, but if you’ve invested in container tooling for your development workflows, it’s not easy to use the same approach to build applications using Lambda. To help you with that, you can now package and deploy Lambda functions as container images of up to 10 GB in size. Access the full recording here.

Max Kelsen Summary:

People are already beginning to leverage this to support CPU-based inference workloads — as seen in Matt Coulter from Liberty Mutual’s tweet below:

This represents a big step forward for deploying highly customised python environments, whilst allowing developers to leverage tooling such as CDK to get up and running quickly — the ability to stand up a customised python container behind an API gateway in a few lines is a very exciting feat.

#2 — GP3 EBS Volumes

Session Introduction:

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy-to-use, high-performance block storage service…