re:Invent 2023 day 4 recap

Werner Vogel’s keynote is usually the highlight of re:Invent and 2023 is no different. Although there were no noteworthy service announcements, Werner gave a timely reminder that cost is an important non-functional requirement and that we should all strive to be a frugal architect.

App Composer comes to VS Code

Here’s the official announcement.

You can now use App Composer to visualize and design your SAM or CloudFormation templates inside VS Code. This is great if you use SAM or work with raw CloudFormation templates.

CloudWatch Application Signals

Here’s the official announcement.

Automated instrumentation for Java applications running on ECS, EKS and EC2. This is a great move from AWS, but it still needs to be seen how good the instrumentation is.

Amazon Inspector adds new capabilities

Here’s the official announcement.

Amazon Inspector can now continuously monitor your EC2 instance and use genAI to analyze and flag insecure code in your Lambda functions.

On the surface, this seems like some great additions.

But at the cost of up to $0.90 per function per month, this has the potential to catch plenty of people off guard.

With tools like Amazon Q, Copilot and CodeWhisperer, you can get some of the AI-assisted capabilities without the extra costs.

The advantage of using Amazon Inspector is that it’s automated and does not rely on developer discipline. It can be activated from a delegated account for the entire AWS Organization, which helps a central security team provide governance and support for the entire organization.