AWS re:Invent kicked off with a bang of a different kind this year – no flashing lights or midnight madness in the biggest hall in Vegas, but possibly the biggest global “webinar” broadcast event in history.

The keynote focused on reinvention, aligning with the name of the conference (of course) but with a bit of a different spin this year. The words “hybrid cloud” were mentioned during Andy Jassy’s keynote – a term normally considered the least favourite strategy in the AWS playbook. Until now.

With the release of ECS and EKS anywhere, AWS is positioning their container orchestration services to be deployed on your favourite on-premises servers. The AWS goodness and deep reach to enable you to move workloads into the public cloud at your pace does not stop there.

Two key service launches that offer customers the next step in their Cloud Adoption Journey are mini Outposts and a fantastic solution to move workloads away from SQL Server licensing models.

Introducing AWS Outposts 1U & 2U

These smaller AWS Outposts offer a rack-mountable server solution for smaller workload requirements where local compute and process latency is of the essence. A well-rounded use case for this may be customers who are operating in GovDC today, have a Public Cloud Strategy at play, but are not yet ready to move all the workloads into AWS’s Public Cloud.

Using the smaller form factor AWS Outposts will offer customers the opportunity to co-locate some of their core workloads but start utilising AWS services like EC2, ECS, EKS or SageMaker Neo to future proof their technology investments.

The launch of the smaller form factors offers customers the opportunity to utilise Outposts - previously considered out of reach due to the floor space requirements, investment and cost associated with a full-blown rack.

AWS Outposts 1U & 2U options will be available in 2021 – reach out to your AC3 Account Manager to obtain more information on how you can gain access to this exciting service.

NB: if 1U or 2U is just not enough capacity to satisfy your compute need – be sure to check out the AWSOutposts 42U rackoption, capable of also running Amazon RDS, Amazon EBS, Amazon EMR and Amazon S3 (plus a few more services).

Now for the most exciting AWS service to help you execute on you AWS Cloud Strategy –

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server compatibility for Amazon Aurora

This sounds too good to be true and the title is a bit deceiving, as the news is arguably even better.

The detail behind this service capability release is “Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL”, a translation layer for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL that enables Aurora to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server.

A major roadblock to an AWS Public Cloud Strategy has long been applications (commercial or in-house) that are deeply integrated and dependant on Microsoft SQL Server. AWS offers a vast array of services to aid customers in modernising their applications to more cloud native solutions, which include database transformations, and while services like Database Migration Service with the Schema Conversion Tool are helpful in migrating between database engines, the sheer size and effort involved to update these applications to transact with the new database engine is often a challenge. This roadblock is often a top-item in the project risk table and for most engineering teams the reason to not even try the move at all.

Babelfish now offers customers looking to move away from Microsoft SQL Server another option.

With Babelfish, Aurora PostgreSQL now understands T-SQL, Microsoft SQL Server's proprietary SQL dialect, and supports the same communications protocol, so your apps that were originally written for SQL Server can now work with Aurora PostgreSQL with fewer code changes. As a result, the effort required to modify and move applications running on SQL Server 2014 or newer to Aurora PostgreSQL is reduced, leading to faster, lower-risk, and more cost-effective migrations.

When enabled, Babelfish adds an endpoint to your Aurora PostgreSQL “instance” that understands the SQL Server wire protocol Tabular Data Stream (TDS), as well as commonly used T-SQL commands used by SQL Server. In essence, this offers engineering teams a strategy to slowly move an application from 100% SQL Server integrations using the two different endpoints. Using the one endpoint for newer PostgreSQL queries and the Babelfish endpoint for the legacy application code – moving at their pace and the team’s capacity to a modern, lower cost database engine.

Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is now available for preview and you can explore by requesting early access and filling out the signup form.

Another fantastic bit of news is the Babelfish source code will soon be available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license as an Open Source Project – head here for more information on how you can get involved in this ground-breaking project.

Navigating your cloud strategy can be challenging. No matter where you’re at in your journey, AC3 and AWS are here to help!