AWS’ Hottest New Products Launched at re:Invent 2015

Amazon Web Services’ yearly shindig, re:Invent, turned out to be yet another whirlwind of information and product releases. Here’s the skinny on all of the important new services, in the order of what I see as the most impactful. Like all major cloud providers these days, AWS is launching these services in beta or preview mode. But in AWS parlance, that simply means that the services don’t yet have all features they’d like to see in production. All of the services below are available for immediate use.

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What’s the Value of an AWS Certification?

It’s common knowledge that earning an AWS certification is a great way to qualify your experience in the eyes of your peers and employer and to increase your organization’s proficiency with AWS-based applications. However, there is another benefit that has not be quantified until now. Results from the 2014 IT Skills and Salary Survey conducted by Global Knowledge and Windows IT Pro revealed that the average pay of four AWS certifications exceeded $100,000. While there is no guarantee that a certification equals a six-figure salary, it certainly couldn’t hurt.

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What is Amazon Redshift?

Like any “big data” initiative, deploying and operating a data warehouse of any size used to be limited to only large enterprises with deep budgets for proprietary hardware and multi-year software licenses. Pay-as-you-go cloud products like Google’s BigQuery and Amazon Redshift change all of that, putting a fully blown, fully managed data warehouse within reach of even the smallest business. This article addresses what Amazon Redshift is (and is not).

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