We did a compilation of all announcements from the AWS re:Invent 2019 that are relevant for Serverless teams, broken down by services:

Lambda: Provisioned Concurrency

Cold Starts have been an issue since Lambda was launched, years ago. Many attempts by the development community have tried to mitigate it with various degrees of success. Now AWS launched Provisioned Concurrency.

In short: instead of waiting for requests to come in before instantiating resources to serve them, developers can tell AWS to keep a certain number of function instances warm and ready to serve invocations.

To learn more, read our blog article and complete guide on the Provisioned Concurrencyfeature.

S3: Access Points

Instead of concentrating all bucket access policies in a single place, AWS S3 now allows to distribute access rules across multiple Access Points.

Each access point is an HTTP endpoint that can be shared with one or more internal services, or even publicly. Through the access point, the requester can only perform the type of operations and to the objects allowed by the access point policy.

To learn more, read our blog article about the feature.

Managed Cassandra

Although DynamoDB is a perfect-fit for serverless applications, many teams and companies have been wary of using it due to lock-in fears.

Now AWS offers a similar database engine with Cassandra Managed. It combines the high-throughput, highly scalable capabilities of DynamoDB with the portability of an open-source API.

To learn more, read our blog article.

_ We’re publishing a thorough comparison of Cassandra Serverless and DynamoDB this week. Subscribe here to receive an alert when it’s live!_

API Gateway: HTTP APIs

On top of an HTTP proxy service, API Gateway offers a wide range of features: API Keys management, SDK generation, throttling, etc. All these extra features come with a cost, though.

Many projects only require the HTTP proxy service and don’t enjoy the benefits of the other features listed. This used to make API Gateway cost-prohibitive for some use cases.

Now AWS has launched a simplified version of API Gateway that acts as an HTTP proxy that can work in connection with Lambda functions, for example. It costs 1/3 the price of the fully-featured version.

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