As always, we’ve been closely following Amazon’s new cloud technology announcements at re:Invent 2020. The event was fully virtual this year and all the talks were streamed online. Announcements were mostly made during the keynotes, while the rest of the re:Invent presentations typically focused on education and customer showcases.

Here are some of our favorite picks this year.

AWS CloudShell – A simple way to launch a Linux shell in the browser in AWS Console. CloudShell doesn’t yet have VPC support so it’s limited to public cloud operations.

AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN – A connectivity solution for LoRaWAN devices that use the LNS and CUPS protocols. You can find AWS-certified devices for a few hundred dollars. Clouden operates our own The Things Network Gateway, which is a public LoRaWAN service. Amazon’s solution is intended for building closed LoRaWAN networks.

Greengrass 2.0 – Amazon’s edge application platform is now open source, released under the Apache 2.0 license.

API Gateway Step Functions Integration – A new way to develop REST based applications by executing synchronous Step Functions instead of Lambda functions. This will potentially pave the way for low-code/no-code cloud backend applications that are built by combining Step Function States instead of writing code.

Consistent S3 Read After Write – Guaranteed consistency in read results after writing an object to S3. We are big fans of S3 as a general-purpose key-value store and as a HTTP web server and it’s powering many of our web apps, including WebCat. The new consistency feature widens the scope of S3 applications.

If you want to check out all the announcements, see the AWS What’s New Blog for a frequently updating list.