Rafay at AWS re:Invent 2023¶
The Rafay team was at AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas from 27-30th Nov, 2023. In this blog, we summarize some of our announcements at AWS re:Invent 2023, describe some of the cutting edge demos we showcased to the attendees at the event and also highlight some of our observations.
The Rafay Booth & Swags¶
AWS re:Invent has been an annual trek for the Rafay team for years now. This year was unusually busy because there were reportedly ~60,000 attendees and it showed. We were giving away our super popular Don't h8 k8s t-shirt and we ran out of 500 t-shirts in less than 60 mins on Day 1 of the event.
Our Announcements¶
We announced the general availability of the Rafay Cloud Automation Platform. It combines Rafay’s Kubernetes and environment management offerings into a single platform. This unique combination enables platform teams to deliver automation and self-service capabilities to developers, data scientists and other cloud users.
We also announced the availability of Rafay's Management Operator as an add-on for Amazon EKS. This addition to the EKS add-ons collection simplifies the installation, configuration, and update management of cluster capabilities for administrators using Amazon EKS.
Unique Demos¶
Over the last few months, we have been hearing a few use cases consistently from several customers. We put together a few demonstrations showcasing solutions for these use cases to attendees. Here is a brief description of each demo.
1. Self Service Environments for Gen AI based on Amazon ECS and EKS¶
Developers in every application team seem to have been tasked to figure out how they can transform the user experience by leveraging "Generative AI". No wonder this is one of the top, new use cases we hear from customers.
Platform teams have been tasked by their CIOs to support their application teams with access to functional environments for Gen AI development and testing. We have also written extensively here and here about this.
In this demo, we showed how a developer can get self service access to an Amazon ECS or EKS based environment pre-configured for Generative AI in less than 5 minutes.
Note
With this environment template, the infrastructure cost for each developer environment is extremely cost effective at less than $9/month.
2. API Deprecation Checks For EKS Upgrades¶
Platform teams that operate Amazon EKS clusters for application teams seem to be unable to keep up with new Kubernetes versions because of API deprecation issues with applications deployed on the clusters. As a result, they have fallen behind and AWS has been forced to provide solutions such as paid extended support for really old Kubernetes versions.
This is a very unhealthy situation. What if there was an easy way to determine the list of resources that need to be updated?
In this demo, we showed how a platform engineer can sweep through a fleet of Amazon EKS clusters and in less than 1 minute determine the list of incompatible resources by cluster, by namespace that need to be updated before the EKS cluster can be upgraded to a new Kubernetes version.
3. Update Vulnerable Add-ons on a Fleet of EKS Clusters¶
Software add-ons such as Ingress Controllers, Service Mesh etc. are deployed on every Amazon EKS cluster by platform teams to make these usable. When critical security vulnerabilities are reported for add-ons, it is critical for platform engineers to be able to update these add-ons across their entire fleet of clusters quickly and efficiently.
We literally saw this a few weeks back when a critical security vulnerability was reported for certain versions of the nginx ingress controller.
In this demo, we showed how a platform engineer can sweep through a fleet of Amazon EKS clusters and in less than 1 minute update vulnerable software add-ons with the latest version.
Next Steps¶
If you missed us at AWS re:Invent and would like to see these demos in action, please reach out to schedule a demo.
Our sincere thanks to readers of our blog who spend time reading our product blogs and encourage us to share our thoughts frequently. Please Contact the Rafay Product Team if you would like us to write about other topics.