Live Updates from the 2018 AWS Summit New York
For a concise retelling of the event, check out our recap article.
8:00 Good morning! Solutions Review is reporting live from the 2018 AWS Summit New York at the Javits Center. This AWS Summit has been touted as the largest outside of AWS: re:Invent in Las Vegas. We’ll be updating you throughout the day with new releases, best practices, trends, and more. We already covered a new product announcement from Alert Logic!
8:02 Got my badge, so official!
8:30 Kubernetes talk with breakfast!
9:07 Waiting for the keynote from Amazon CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels!
9:20 massive crowd waiting for keynote, can’t fit in the photo!
9:30 Here comes Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels!
9:35 Big emphasis on AWS benefits for startups and enterprises. Vogels is discussing the benefits of migrating to AWS for enterprises and public sector.
Vogels emphasizes the importance of freedom for AWS users. Amazon doesn’t want to force developers to operate in a specific way, but the user is king under AWS.
Prior to cloud, scaling was incredibly difficult to manage. Monolithic tools and building blocks were unreasonable when you hit your database cap, that’s what inspired Dr. Vogels to work on the AWS cloud.
AWS Cloud9 changes the way code is developed. This is a collection of various services such as AWS CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and AWS Config. Amazon has added more than 1,400 mainline features to their systems. Users are able to choose the tools they need.
Epic Games’ Chris Dyl is a surprise guest speaker!
Epic Games created Fortnite and unreal engine. Unreal Engine is responsible for many games and other forms of animation techniques, and Fortnite is the most popular online game in the world right now.
They utilized AWS for development and services. Fortnite was able to grow so quickly due to the scalability, elasticity, and global expansion capabilities of AWS Cloud. They’ve run global events, like launching a rocket ship, to test the capabilities of their systems. Epic achieved a level of scale that was thought to be impossible a few years ago.
The company’s analytic pipeline collects 92million events per minute, which amounts to 54Billion gigs of data. They use a realtime pipeline with Amazon DynamoDB. Their entire data warehouse is in S3. They utillize data to improve server health, run live tournaments, basic KPIs, and game analysis.
Epic wants to harness the global resiliency that comes from AWS. They want to add micro-service management platforms, threat detection, and social network and anti fraud.
Dr Matt Wood, GM of AI at AWS, has arrived to talk about machine learning and more.
Dr Wood is discussing the methods various organizations are harnessing the power of AWS. He mentions NFL and their statistical analytics, F1 strategy and analytics, and more.
AWS takes data directly from S3 with a single pass train over the engine. This allows them to checkpoint models and add more data easily. It’s able to be accomplished on SageMaker.
Dr Wood announced new Amazon SageMaker product, Elastic Hosting. He emphasizes the importance of high flexibility.
Another announcement, Amazon SageMaker Batch Transformation. This processes data dumps in a batch, processing large files more easily. Batch test models before hosting, test models before the deployment at the edge. It can use same model for batch and real time, reuse pre-processing pipelines between training and prediction. It is also fully managed batch transforms.
Use cases for AI: Contact centers are able to harness Amazon Connect, Amazon Lex, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Comprehend. From here There are useful analytics for the entire contact center workload. These tools can provide contact centers with information on trends, and more.
Dr Wood has also announced the newest capabilities for Amazon voice services, new language translation, channel synthesis, and Comprehend Syntax Identification.
10:20 20th Century Fox is here, CTO Paul Cheesbrough is speaking!
With AWS, 20th Century Fox was able to consolidate their data centers from 74 to 4. 80% of their compute will take place in the cloud by the end of 2018.
The company has re-architected the way they work by harnessing AWS’ ease of use. They emphasize speed and agility at scale.
AWS allowed 20th Century Fox to scale their options and improve their mobile services. They’ve worked with AWS to harness machine learning and real-time intelligence. The company went from raw data to using Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and Amazon SageMaker.
As entertainment shifts, using modern tools needs to occur as well. 20th Century Fox using AWS positions them as a company that can withstand the streaming revolution.
10:30 Dr Werner Vogels is back
Dr Vogels states that the difference between companies is how they use data. Everyone has access to the same tools, but all data is different. AWS works to bring cloud scale to databases.
Since AWS Database Service was available, they’ve migrating over 80,000 unique databases to the cloud. The tool allows enterprises to migrate between databases, automate schema conversion, and replicate data for zero downtime.
Amazon Aurora is the fastest growing service in AWS history. It comes with a different licensing scheme than different databases will provide.
Vogels is going over the recently added features for Amazon Aurora. Aurora Backtrack allows you to go back to any database transaction easily. This allows enterprises to rollback their clusters and fix errors. Aurora Multi Master is the first relational database service with scale-out across multiple datacenter.
Unpredictable workloads change the way database requests work. The company released Aurora Serverless to automate scaling of the database for applications with unpredictable or cyclical workloads. This allows users to optimize their database. The scaling capabilities create peace of mind, since scale is a common concern.
Amazon DynamoDB provides on-demand and continuous backups. It has point-in time recovery so users don’t have to worry about making mistakes.
Organizations interested in Data Lake will be able to use Amazon S3. S3 has a significant advantage in partner integrations. It also has the power of Amazon security and scalability.
Dr Vogels emphasizes the importance of security. Innovation isn’t innovative if it isn’t safe. Automation tools allow security to be consistent and effective. Managed service providers also provide the resources you need to stay safe on the cloud.
Encryption is critical to maintaining security best practices. This crucial feature is included with AWS Secrets Manager, keeping your data yours.
11:00 DTCC’s Robert Palatnick is discussing the cloud journey in the highly regulated financial industry.
The company had exorbitant costs with traditional datacenters. They discovered AWS early on and saw the cost benefit. They implemented it to enhance their compliance, analytics, and more.
The company processes over 100million transactions per day. They built and standardized a data model with the flexibility to add machine learning.
DTCC had to coordinate between different regions. They had large projects that normally take years, but with AWS it only took a few months.
11:10 Final words from Dr Werner Vogels
Dr Vogels is discussing the importance of serverless. He’s going through the history of traditional VMs to containers and the inevitable popularity of serverless.
Available in the coming weeks, R5 memory-optimized instances. It harnesses big data and in-memory caches.
Bring Your Own IP announced. Keep your IP address reputation and avoid IP whitelisting.
Werner is talking about containers being used to deconstruct monolithic servers. Each container has unique identity, which is an important feature of security. ECS is a highly scalable managed platform. It has over 100,000 active clusters, and due to customer demand, AWS integrated EKS for enterprises to run production-grade Kubernetes.
He’s critical of containers, though, because they are still run as virtual machines. There is a lot of infrastructure management, which he says is a pre-cloud system.
The benefits of serverless applications include no server management, flexible scaling, high availability, and no idle capacity.
He says that young companies tend to gravitate towards new technologies before big enterprises. This hasn’t been the case with serverless, though. They see the clear benefits of serverless.
Presentation about end to end visibility when migrating to the cloud with Splunk
Splunk is partnered with AWS and have passion about their joint customer success. Their tools provide visibility for organizations moving to the cloud.
Splunk helps enterprises control AWS costs, track infrastructure and service usage, capacity planning, and collecting different formats of data.
Agero, a company that works with car insurance carriers, emphasizes the importance of DevSecOps, leaving DevOps behind. They completed their lift and shift to the cloud with the help of Splunk.
Cloud engineer and manager of Agero talks about developing a platform for monitoring, alerting, and analytics for operations, engineering, DevOps, and business teams. Agero uses Splunk to customize Ops, DevOps, and business Analytics dashboards.
Hilton, the global hotel chain, uses Splunk for cloud monitoring, security monitoring, and DevOps monitoring. They use Splunk as a managed service provider, so they don’t have to manage their platform internally.
Moving out of the datacenter
Most legacy systems struggle to meet expectations for enterprise users. Hybrid cloud data services company, NetApp, has solutions that can migrate legacy applications to AWS. Sometimes migration can be difficult, as apps need to be adjusted to the cloud.
The difficulty doesn’t just exist during migration, sometimes running a hybrid cloud can create some unwanted issues. Increasing capability between an on-premises data center and a public cloud is critical to successful hybrid cloud adoption.
On-premises and public cloud don’t need to be mutually exclusive. These tools should be able to work together. NetApp allows enterprises to move their data wherever they need to.
The Expo
Had some great discussions with Alert Logic, Datadog, Cloudreach, 2nd Watch, CA Technologies, Cloudability, Spotinst, and Embotics
I spoke with Mark Brooks, VP of solution engineering for Alert Logic, we discussed the state of container security and management. Their new network intrusion detection allows users to recognize abnormal behavior and harness the power of containers without worry. We will have an in depth interview about these topics in the future.
Datadog walked me through a demo of their product offerings. Specifically, they showed me how simple it was to use their dashboard. A dashboard can make or break a monitoring solution, and Datadog’s is highly functional.
Cloudreach and 2nd Watch discussed the strengths of their managed services. You can read more about their offerings in our Free Managed Service Provider Buyer’s Guide.
CA Technologies taught a small group about Runscope, the company’s API management tool. This tool was simple to use and provides detailed data during an API failure.
Cloudability talked about the power of a strong cost management platform. They mentioned use cases and how their platform can help any enterprise cut unnecessary costs.
Spotinst is a cost management tool for containers. Unlike most cost management solutions, Spotinst does work for you. The platform isn’t simply a suggestion tool, it’s a proactive solution.
I spoke with Embotics to gain insights into the hybrid cloud management space. They talked about their relationship and integration capabilities with managed service providers. Since managed service providers offer assistance with hybrid management and migration, Embotics is able to excel alongside the managed services boom.
Developer Lounge
Linda Nichols is hosting a Dev Chat in the developer lounge. The talk is titled “How to Dismantle Your Monolith with Serverless Architecture.” As is required, Nichols uses the Monolith from 2001 A Space Odyssey for her slideshow.
Modernizing workloads is crucial in today’s enterprise world. Monolith applications are obsolete and moving enterprise computing forward requires major changes. Serverless has been a popular topic of discussion at the event, signifying the advancement of software development. Nichols defines serverless as an event-driven system that uses remote functions without concern for operations. Developers no longer have to care about operations (No Ops) and can focus more on coding. Serverless architecture is event-driven, so internal and external to the cloud platform can trigger events.
Conclusion
There will be a lot of content coming up this week regarding the Summit. There are many takeaways to be had and trends to follow. Specifically, the emphasis on serverless throughout the conference. Special thanks to Cloud Academy for sponsoring my trip.