The first week of the year isn't exactly exciting when it comes to news, so I'll discuss some things from last year. As is so often the case when I'm looking back at a longer period, that means containers and serverless.

My annual look back at the past year, and forward at the coming year.

Australia implements a stupid law regarding encryption and Microsoft announces they'll switch to using Chromium for their Edge browser.

I'm writing this during a 14 hour flight to re:Invent, so once again this is very AWS focused. Several new releases this week include the Route 53 Resolver for Hybris Clouds, the Resource Access Manager, and Predictive Scaling for EC2.

Clearly we're in the lead up to re:Invent as AWS has started releasing the big features that didn't make the cut. Today I'll focus on CloudFormation Drift Detection, Multiple Instance Types in AutoScaling Groups, and Amazon Corretto.

The lead up to re:Invent has started, so we're getting a lot of announcements coming out of AWS. Two very interesting ones last week are the introduction of AMD instance types and Inspector's agentless network assessment.

IBM buys the biggest open source company in the world, and GitHub had a long outage.

Every day AWS releases features that by themselves are often not all that impressive. But when taken together paint an interesting picture of what happens to services. So, let's see what that means this month in terms of love for (traditional) databases as well as containers and Lambda.

On a day where GitHub is having a major outage, what better subject to write about than new GitHub features? So today's subject is the new GitHub Actions and Suggested Changes introduced at GitHub Universe last week.

Cloudflare introduces Encrypted SNI, AWS has a number of new Aurora features, and Azure comes out with a service to let you build your VM Images.

Once again I have some catching up to do, and as usual that means I'll first focus on AWS announcements. Two very powerful new tools were released with CloudFormation Macros and the Session Manager. In addition Fargate now supports scheduled tasks.

You can now use Secure String values from the Parameter Store in CloudFormation and ECS supports Docker volumes. And Twitter limits the abilities of third-party clients.

A late and limited weekly note, focused only on the general availability of Serverless Aurora for MySQL.

Istio reaches 1.0 and AWS releases the AWS CDK.

A catch up of recent AWS releases: Lambda SQS event source, ALB redirects, Application Auto Scaling, and Fargate's release in Sydney.