AWS re:Invent 2022 Recap

And just like that AWS re:Invent 2022 is done. This is my second time going to re:Invent and after last year’s post-Covid conference, this one was massive, I think in the range of 50k-60k attendees, which makes it pretty much the biggest cloud technology conference – I even saw a tweet that this year, there were more after-hours parties/events than there were conference sessions. I guess it makes sense post-Covid.

But regardless of the off-hour events, this year I saw a few announcements and trends that are worth mentioning.

As someone who has been dealing with data for many years (either as a DBA or from the storage side), I really like the RDS announcement on the fully managed green/blue deployments with MySQL compatibility.

There were a few new instances that were also introduced to EC2, I even got to play with one of the new r6in instances in my upcoming blog (“Maximize your Oracle Performance on AWS While Keeping Your Costs Low – the Lightbits Way”).

As for trends, what I saw in the exhibition hall is a lot of Kubernetes (make sense), a lot of security (the Amazon Security Lake is a great tool in my opinion to enhance security in organizations) and I also saw a lot of floor ground with 3rd party storage solutions – and that brings me the one thing that was I thought was missing in terms of announcements and that is storage related new features.

If there is one thing that I’ve heard multiple times from people that came to our marketplace mini-booth (Thanks, Intel!), or people that I’ve talked to from other companies, or just random folks or potential customers that I’ve met on the floor, is that Amazon EBS is not a complete SAN solution – and this is a great segway to talk about Lightbits and our offering in AWS.

 

Lightbits: your SAN on AWS

Lightbits was formed in 2016 by leaders from the 3 domain aspects that make a great software-defined storage (SDS) solution – Network, NAND flash memory, and clustering.

The company is recognized as the inventor of NVMe® over TCP (NVMe/TCP), which is the de-facto data transport protocol for storage, and with a growing number of customers already in the on-premise domain that asked also for an off-premise solution we have introduced our software as an AWS marketplace solution.

Our software is a complete and true SDS, that is easy to install and manage and provides a resilient and performant solution that is unmatchable in today’s modern data centers. We took this simplicity, resiliency, and performance and moved it into the AWS domain.

Lightbits provides all the desired capabilities and required features that come from a complete SAN solution on AWS, only without the extra charges that are usually associated with such features, so your snapshots, clones, compression, encryption, decisions on the number of volume replications, and multi-availability zone support are all free with our solution.

 

Performance

Going back to the subject of a complete SAN solution in AWS, one aspect that organizations migrating from on- to off-premises are used to is a certain level of sustainable performance from their block storage. And while EBS is a great solution for low-to-mid performance block storage and AWS has great object and file storage offerings, it lacks a high-performance solution in the block storage domain.

A Lightbits cluster can provide close to 4 Million 4k read IOs on just 3 EC2 instances, this was achieved using SLOB as the workload generator and Oracle Database (my upcoming blog will explain this in more details). More instances mean more performance. These are numbers that are impossible to get from EBS’s io1, io2, and io2 Block express. As stated previously, look for a blog that I’ll be publishing soon about testing Lightbits with Oracle and SLOB that will show these performance numbers and will dive into how to achieve them with minimal effort simply by using Lightbits on AWS.

 

AWS re:Invent 2023

While we’re just past the close of 2022 re:Invent, we at Lightbits are already thinking about the next re:Invent event. Look for blogs and technical papers that we are going to publish around block storage in AWS and the usage with SQL and No/SQL databases and also with large Kubernetes clusters.

I’ll see you at our booth in December 2023!

 

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