Hello Cloud Gurus, and welcome to AWS This Week! AWS re:Invent, the largest cloud conference in the world, is kicking off this week and AWS has already started to ramp up with some exciting announcements, including: EventBridge piles on new features, Step Functions adds easy cross-account functionality, CloudFront adds continuous deployment support, and I'll also give you the inside scoop on the latest version of the Solutions Architect Professional exam. I'll also let you know how you can follow our daily re:Invent coverage. I'm David Blocker and this is AWS This Week. EventBridge is the serverless Event Bus service that can be used to receive and respond to events from a variety of sources, including Lambda functions, API destinations, and even other event buses. EventBridge is increasingly considered the Keystone Service of any event-driven architecture hosted on AWS. Earlier this month,

AWS announced the New EventBridge Scheduler, a managed interface to schedule time-based events to trigger actions in over 270 different AWS services. This week, AWS continued to pile on new EventBridge features, announcing two more quality of life updates. You can now generate CloudFormation templates from existing EventBridge rules, as well as automatically generate patterns from an event schema. Patterns are used to check whether an incoming event matches the expected format, and historically, these had to be written manually. I'm excited to see what other EventBridge features will be unveiled at this year's reinvent. Also, this week in serverless world,

AWS announced expanded and simplified cross account functionality with Step Functions. Step Functions are used to orchestrate serverless workflows across many services and even across many accounts. Historically, users have leveraged resource-based policies to grant Step Functions access to resources in outside accounts. However, not all services supported by Step Functions support resource-based policies. So as of this week, users can now leverage identity based policies, essentially allowing Step Functions to assume user like roles in outside accounts. With this new functionality,

it will be easier than ever to use Step Functions' direct integrations with resources across multiple accounts. CloudFront is the AWS content delivery network or CDN, optimized to deliver and cash content to application users around the globe. This week, AWS announced Continuous Deployment support for CloudFront, which allows developers to stage CDN configuration changes and test them at scale using blue-green or Canary deployments. This means you can now create a new version of your distribution and precisely control the share of traffic being routed to each version without having to inject custom headers or override client DNS settings. With this feature, you can easily test the impact of switching to a new content origin or implementing new geographic restrictions.

It's great to see AWS continue to improve CloudFront, and I'm excited to see the creative ways users integrate this new feature into their CI/CD pipelines. As of November 15th, AWS has officially switched over to the latest version of their Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam. I took and thankfully passed the updated version to give you the inside scoop, and I'm happy to report that most changes to the exam are minor. They removed the cost control portion of the exam and distributed it across. The other four domains of the exam are now design solutions for organizational complexity, designed for new solutions, continuous improvement for existing solutions, and accelerate workload migration and modernization. Organizational

complexity now takes up a much larger portion of the exam, moving from 12.5% to 26% of the total weight. I found that this mostly manifested in more questions about managing multiple accounts with AWS organizations and granting cross account privileges to users and resources. If you'd like to brush up on multi account management, check out my course, "How to Organize your Accounts in AWS", which can be found in this video's description. That's all the announcements for this week, but be sure to check in throughout the week. For our reinvent coverage, we'll be providing daily updates on AWS re:Invent 2022, including live streams, video recaps, and blog posts throughout the event.

If you're attending re:Invent in person, check out our landing page to find out where we'll be and how you can stop by to say hi. For all things reinvent, you can find links in this video's description. That's all for AWS This Week. Keep being awesome. Take care of each other, and if you're attending re:Invent, I hope to see you there.