re:Invent 2023 day 1 recap

After the absolute barrage of announcements on day 0, day 1 brought us some mild excitement and one big disappointment…

Elasticache “serverless”…

Here’s the official announcement.

Just like OpenSearch “serverless”, this one is bad 🙁

You are charged for data storage and processing unit. The kicker is the minimum metered storage. Even with no data, you’re charged $0.125 per GB per hour. Which works out to a minimum cost of $90 per month.

If you have 1.000000001 GB of data, that’s $180 per month.

No, thank you.

And you have to put your Lambda functions in a VPC to use it. Which incurs additional VPC-related charges such as NAT Gateway or VPC endpoints.

And scaling up is pretty slow. You can only double capacity every 10 minutes.

If you are in need of a serverless caching solution then check out Momento instead. They have a pay-per-use pricing tier that charges you based on data transfer only. And it comes with a generous free tier of 5 GB/month.

Note: Khawaja Shams (founder of Momento) gave a measured take on Elasticache serverless, worth a read.

Aurora Limitless Database

Here’s the official announcement.

“enables you to scale your Amazon Aurora clusters to millions of write transactions per second and manage petabytes of data”

Most people won’t need anywhere near that level of scalability, but on a technical level, this is very cool!

SQS FIFO throughput goes brrrr….

Here’s the official announcement.

You can now process up to 70,000 messages per second with SQS FIFO (in high throughput mode)!

SQS FIFO DLQ gets redrive support

Here’s the official announcement.

Back in June 2023, AWS announced support for dead-letter queue redrive via the StartMessageMoveTask API. At the time, you can only redrive a standard DLQ to another standard queue.

From today, you can redrive a FIFO DLQ to another FIFO queue.

Step Functions integrates with App Composer

Here’s the official announcement.

AWS App Composer, the spiritual successor to Stackery, now integrates with Step Functions. So you are able to drop a state machine into a stack and edit it in the Step Functions Workflow Studio.

Pretty slick!

This year’s Go Build award goes to…

Luc van Donkersgoed! For his work on the unofficial re:Invent scheduler and the fantastic AWS News site.