2022 AWS Re:Invent; Important Highlights Between the Keynotes

If you’ve attended a conference before, you know that the most exciting things don’t necessarily happen in the sessions themselves. Unfortunately, I’m not in Las Vegas, so I can’t enjoy the hallway track. Still, AWS is kind enough to offer an alternative by releasing some of its announcements outside the keynotes. Best of all, you can see these announcements happening throughout the day without needing to get up at 3 am! Below are some of the announcements that stood out to us.

Over on the CMD blog, my colleagues and I have been writing about the announcements at re:Invent. It’s been quite a busy week. Obviously I recommend you read the one that just went up where I discuss some of the interesting items that weren’t mentioned in keynotes: 2022 AWS Re:Invent; Important Highlights Between The Keynotes

In addition to that however, here are some others that my colleagues wrote and you might find interesting:

Top highlights from AWS pre:Invent 2022 we're most excited about

Every year as we get closer to re:Invent, AWS starts releasing the big items that didn’t quite make the cut for the major announcements. That doesn’t mean these releases are less interesting than what will be released at re:Invent; just that they don’t necessarily fit the narrative for the conference. In fact, some of my favourite announcements in previous years happened during this time. So, with re:Invent now only a couple of days away, let’s look at some of the gifts AWS brought us during pre:Invent.

Over on the CMD blog, I wrote a post discussing some of the highlights from the pre:Invent period. For obvious reasons I couldn’t exactly fit all announcements into a single post so some of your favourites may be missing, but maybe you’ll enjoy some of these as well. It’s available to read on the CMD Solutions blog.

In addition, last night at the Melbourne AWS User Group I discussed some of these same items in our usual What’s New section. If you’re interested you can have a look at that too.

Why the AWS Melbourne Region is a good thing for APRA-regulated businesses

We’re now in the second half of 2022, which means that the new Melbourne Region for AWS can open up any day now, so it’s a good time to have a look at the implications for an APRA-regulated business. This post builds upon the excellent posts written by my colleagues about the new AWS Melbourne Region and moving to AWS as an APRA regulated business.

A different kind of article for me, less technical and instead focused on the opportunities provided by the upcoming region for strictly regulated businesses. It’s available to read on the CMD Solutions blog.

Why the AWS close-account API is a big deal

Once in a while AWS releases a feature that people have been demanding for a long time, and they did so again when they added the ability to close accounts from your Organization management account. Let’s have a quick look at why it’s so good to have this ability, how it actually works, and what this will enable us to do.

My first post on the CMD blog since I officially joined them has gone up. In it I’m talking about the new(-ish)1 close-account API that many of us were happy about when it was released. If you’re interested, you should read it.


  1. Obviously this was released quite a while ago by now and I actually started writing it the day after it was released. But then life happened and I, ehm, forgot… ↩︎

Starting a new job at a new company, sort of

Yesterday I was a Lead Platform Engineer at DigIO, but today I am a Principal Consultant at CMD Solutions. So, if I actually had business cards they would show I’ve got a new title and work at a different company. Which is sort of true, but also very much not.

🎙️ - Melbourne AWS User Group Podcast - Episode 21

In this month’s episode Arjen, JM, and Guy discuss the news from January 2022. Well, everything announced after re:Invent really, but that’s mostly from January. There are good announcements all over; from a new Console Home to unpronounceable instance types, but there is also some news around the podcast that’s either good or bad depending on how you interpret it.

Using the CLI with AWS SSO

In an interesting discussion at work today, someone mentioned a tool that would allow you to only log in once for AWS accounts in an AWS Organization. Which surprised me, as that is built into the way the CLI works with AWS SSO. It turns out that many people were unaware of this. As I tend to complain about SSO, I figured I might as well point out one of the parts I really enjoy about it.