AWS re:Invent 2023: Things you might have missed (I did!)
Step Function adds individual State Testing
You can now invoke and test any individual State independently from the main Step Function. This is incredibly useful when developing and testing your applications. It’s supported in the Console and via API. The best way to do this previously was to use the local Step Function runner.
DynamoDB Deep Dive
I wasn’t able to make this session due to conflicts but this ranks high on my list of best talks I’ve seen at any re:Invent. Amrith Kumar does a wonderful job talking about how DynamoDB is scaled under the hood, covering table scaling, transactions, and more.
Lambda adds a useful metric: ClaimedAccountConcurrency
Ever wonder what your account can scale to? What is pre-allocated and not available to on demand Lambda’s? Now you have a metric!
ClaimedAccountConcurrency reports the sum of used unreserved concurrency, allocated reserved concurrency and provisioned concurrency. You can track this metric to understand how much concurrency is available to on-demand invocations. If you’re deploying AWS accounts at scale, this is a critical metric to alarm on.
Amazon Inspector inspects your Container images via your tools
Not everyone uses AWS tools for every CI/CD task. Thats why Inspector now supports scanning of your images directly from your CI/CD pipeline. You can get rid of your 3rd party scanning software and use Inspector directly integrated in your pipeline (ie. Jenkins, etc).
The best part is continuous monitoring of vulnerabilities.
Something that was safe at release, may not be at a later date.
Secrets Manager has 4 9’s of Availability
This is great. Another reason to avoid running your own Secrets store. 99.99% of HA guarantee is hard to beat. And it’s #serverless!
