AWS re:Invent 2025 - Powering your success through AWS Infrastructure innovations (NET402)

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

In this session, AWS Senior Principal Engineers Jorge Vasquez and Stephen Callaghan walk through a fictional online store—Shannon Store—to illustrate recent AWS infrastructure innovations. They cover new CloudFront flat‑rate pricing, quantum‑safe TLS with s2n‑tls, VPC security controls, AWS WAF anti‑DDoS features, the 320 Tbps Fastnet transatlantic cable, distributed network traffic engineering, Cross‑Region PrivateLink, and Ultra Cluster 3 with UltraSwitch for seamless maintenance of ML workloads.

Shannon Store Architecture

• Region: eu‑west‑1 (Ireland)
• Availability Zones: 3 AZs for high reliability
• VPC Layout:
  1. Front‑end VPC – only VPC that receives internet traffic.
  2. Back‑end VPC – hosts all microservices powering the store.
  3. Payments VPC – isolated for PCI‑compliant credit‑card processing.

CloudFront Flat‑Rate Pricing

Shannon Store adopts the newly announced CloudFront flat‑rate plans, which bundle:

• Data transfer out
• Amazon S3 storage
• AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall)
• API requests
• DNS (Route 53)

The fixed‑price model eliminates surprise bills during high‑traffic sales events, providing predictable cost even when traffic exceeds forecasts.

CloudFront Performance Optimizations

Edge Proximity & Latency Reduction

• CloudFront’s 700+ global edge locations bring content within ~20 ms round‑trip time, compared to ~118 ms between Seattle and Ireland.
• Dynamic content (personalized experiences, APIs, shopping cart) is served from the edge, cutting latency dramatically.

Connection Management

• Persistent connections from edge locations to the origin eliminate additional round‑trips after the initial TLS handshake.
• Origin Shield can pre‑open connections to the origin, ensuring a ready‑to‑use link for incoming requests.

Backbone & Protocol Support

• Traffic traverses the Amazon backbone, guaranteeing low latency and high availability.
• CloudFront supports HTTP/3 and TLS 1.3 even if the origin does not, delivering up to 20 ms first‑byte latency reduction at the 90th percentile.

Security Innovations

s2n‑tls and Quantum‑Safe TLS

• s2n‑tls is AWS’s open‑source, modern TLS library with defensive coding, formal verification, and secure defaults.
• It simplifies TLS version enforcement (e.g., TLS 1.3) across ALB, NLB, and CloudFront with a single click.
• AWS is preparing for a future with quantum computers by developing quantum‑safe TLS algorithms integrated into s2n‑tls.

VPC Block Public Access & Encryption Controls

• Centralized controls to block public access at the VPC level and enforce encryption for data at rest and in transit.

AWS WAF Anti‑DDoS with Fingerprinting

• Advanced fingerprinting mitigates ≈ 90 % of flood attacks within 20 seconds, protecting the storefront from large‑scale DDoS events.

Additional Infrastructure Innovations

• 320 Tbps Fastnet transatlantic cable – provides massive bandwidth between North America and Europe.
• Distributed market‑simulation traffic engineering – enables network optimization without a single point of control.
• Cross‑Region PrivateLink – offers private, low‑latency connectivity between services in different AWS regions.
• Ultra Cluster 3 with UltraSwitch – delivers seamless network maintenance and traffic management for machine‑learning workloads, reducing downtime and operational overhead.

Conclusion

The Shannon Store example demonstrates how AWS’s end‑to‑end infrastructure innovations—from fiber‑optic ducts and GIS‑driven planning to advanced networking services—deliver predictable costs, ultra‑low latency, robust security, and high reliability for modern, data‑intensive applications.