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.

Route 53 Resolver

Route 53 has been around for a long time, as has its ability for private zones. These are zones that allow you to have a DNS zone specific to your VPC, and it’s invisible to the outside. What the new Route 53 Resolver allows however is the ability to share this DNS with your internal DNS, and also to access that DNS.

What this means is that you can have a name server in your internal network, and a private Route 53 zone for your VPC and the two can talk and stay in sync. The service is not cheap though, and as always it’s possible to build your own solution for something like this that might be cheaper to run. However, there was another announcement that potentially makes this a more interesting option after all.

Resource Access Manager

The Route 53 Resolver is the first service that can be used with the Resource Access Manager. The Resource Access Manager allows you to literally share resources across accounts. This can be within an Organisation, or it can be with a specific account.

In the case of the Resolver this means that you can share the ENIs that get created for this, and thereby allow all of your accounts to have access to this new DNS. As you don’t pay anything for the sharing itself, although obviously still for the usage, that means the costs for using the Resolver can be spread out over multiple accounts while you get the benefit for all of those accounts it is shared with.

Predictive Scaling for EC2

Possibly the coolest thing to come out this week however is predictive scaling. As the name implies, predictive scaling literally predicts the scaling actions your autoscaling group should take and makes that happen. It bases this on historical data, thrown over a bunch of machine learning.

So, if for example you have always scaled down your instances during the night because of less traffic, it will see this and do the scaling for you. However, as it uses all of the data available to you, it should¹ do this at better times. So instead of your usual scale down at 9pm from 8 to 2 instances it might scale down to 6 by 7 o’clock, 4 by 7:30, and eventually down to 2 by 8:42.

Yes, you can do a lot of this by configuring your autoscaling groups based on load, but similarly it will be able to predict more load. So if for example it detects that around lunch time you usually have a spike in traffic, it can scale up your instances before the spike happens, thereby ensuring the best possible experience for your visitors.

I have to admit though, and I haven’t found an answer to this yet, I wonder how this will work with daylight saving time. The predictions are still based on time, and if the time changes for the people, but not the predictive software, how will that impact those predictions.

re:Invent 2018

As I said at the top, I’m on my way to re:Invent. I’m also quite confident that there will be a lot of new things announced that I’ll want to write about. Right now I don’t know how or when I will be doing that. There is a chance that I’ll be writing a lot², but equally I could be so busy that I won’t write anything³. Either way, expect that I’ll have a lot to say afterwards.