Another year is about to end and another re:Invent has come and gone. As we drive into the Holiday season, it is a great step to look into the rear view mirror and observe the new developments during the recently concluded re:Invent 2022. A wave of announcements were made in the past days, as AWS showcased the latest and greatest of their updates to their products & services in their annual conference. As VeUP is an AWS consulting partner that exclusively works with AWS Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), it is important for us to highlight the key outcomes to ISVs from this year’s re:Invent.

The primary outcome for ISVs is the emphasis on AWS Cost Optimization

Due to the double whammy of the pandemic led ‘Great Resignation’ and the ongoing recession, most AWS partners, including ISVs, are currently facing the strain of maintaining optimal resources, both talent & technical workloads.

As the CEO of VeUP I was glad to hear Adam Selipsky, CEO at AWS, discuss this uncertainty in the markets stemming from talent crunch, inflation, supply chain disruptions and energy price fluctuations. He empathized with the cloud leaders around the world who all have been impacted by these external factors. It is clear from Selipsky’s statement and our expert understanding of how AWS ISVs operate, that partners will feel tempted to cut costs haphazardly during this uncertainty. But the smart thing to do for a cloud driven ISV would be to use AWS more effectively to control their costs and improve profitability.

Depending on the kind of vertical one is in, ISV partners will find value in many announcements aligned with improving AWS cost optimization. In my expert analysis, there are 3 key takeaways for ISVs from this year’s re:Invent.

1. Improved supply chain management

Selipsky announced the preview of AWS Supply Chain, describing it as a solution “with actionable insights to mitigate supply chain risks and lower costs.” This service can easily connect with ERP like SAP to pull supply chain data and then create the apt data lake without manual mapping. This can then push insights in form of real-time map of inventory use and improve transparency to stakeholders, reducing costs and risks in the supply chain. With AWS Supply Chain, partner leaders has a singular view of their supply chain data and derive recommendations generated by ML, and built-in collaboration capabilities to resolve unexpected issues faster.

2. Faster integration between AWS Services

AWS CTO Werner Vogel who took lead to announce the Amazon EventBridge Pipes, exclaimed the outcome of accelerated development velocity as this service is able to cut time needed to learn the services and write integration “glue” code. Using EventBridge Pipes, your technical team in a cost-effective manner can:

• integrate AWS and self-managed services, as event producers and event consumers, and
• enrich the events using built in free transformations, or advanced transformations using Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions etc.

3. Quicker serverless implementation

Despite serverless becoming more ubiquitous in the past years, many developers and engineers are yet to involve themselves in serverless applications. So the purpose of the recently announced Application Composer would be to make developers who have minimal experience in serverless to create architecture and build functions by using just a simple drag-and-drop workflow. On the browser based visual canvas, users can start a fresh architecture, or import an existing CloudFormation templates, and subsequently connect AWS services to generate deployment-ready projects. AWS Application Composer can also maintain the diagram of your application architecture aligning against your IaaC in real time. Werner Vogel’s announcement of Application Composer Preview ensures product leaders can soon leverage this service to achieve faster turnaround time to serverless solution deployment.

VeUP enables better AWS cost optimization for partners

It is important ISVs take the theme of cost optimization into heart and consider these 3 services, and other service announcements, into their service strategy planning exercises. In times of uncertainty, these developments to the AWS technology landscape ensure the product leaders can maintain profitability by optimizing the workloads and business processes. VeUP is always at the forefront of studying the AWS technology landscape and ensuring our partners can leverage such innovative services in a more effective manner. Our services are defined to relieve worries the product leaders have with regards to cost optimization and ensure the partners can devote time to do things they want instead of things they need.