re:Invent re:Cap – Key Takeaways From AWS re:Invent 2019
Every year, thousands of cloud enthusiasts, vendors and partners gather in Las Vegas for a week of learning and networking (and maybe a little downtime), all in the name of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This year was no different, and in excess of 65,000 people descended upon Las Vegas for the 8th annual AWS re:Invent conference: an event that continues to get better, and certainly bigger, every year.
While re:Invent officially began with Midnight Madness on Sunday night, Tuesday morning marked one of the most anticipated keynotes of the week: three hours with Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS.
Jassy kicked off the keynote with a short reflection on re:Invent itself: in its eighth year, with a name that sought to reflect the rapid rate of invention and reinvention committed by enterprises and governments, with AWS as the lynchpin.
What factors heed meaningful transformation? Jassy spelled out four top-down principles—notably untechnical—that companies can and should implement to meaningful and rapid cloud adoption for every organization.
From there, the announcements came quick, and didn’t stop—with enough show-stoppers to put Blockbuster back in business (powered, of course, by AWS).
Key announcements include:
AWS Outposts Now Available – Order Your Racks Today
Inf1 Instances with AWS Inferentia Chips for High Performance Cost-Effective Inferencing
EBS Direct APIs – Programmatic Access to EBS Snapshot Content
AWS Compute Optimizer – Your Customized Resource Optimization Service
Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate Now Generally Available
AWS Fargate Spot Now Generally Available
ECS Cluster Auto Scaling is Now Generally Available
Easily Manage Shared Data Sets with Amazon S3 Access Points
Amazon Redshift Update – Next-Generation Compute Instances and Managed, Analytics-Optimized Storage
Amazon Redshift – Data Lake Export and Federated Queries
Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels
Amazon SageMaker Studio: The First Fully Integrated Development Environment For Machine Learning
Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor – Fully Managed Automatic Monitoring For Your Machine Learning Models
Amazon SageMaker Experiments – Organize, Track And Compare Your Machine Learning Trainings
Amazon SageMaker Debugger – Debug Your Machine Learning Models
Amazon SageMaker Autopilot – Automatically Create High-Quality Machine Learning Models
Now Available on Amazon SageMaker: The Deep Graph Library
Amazon SageMaker Processing – Fully Managed Data Processing and Model Evaluation.
AWS Now Available from a Local Zone in Los Angeles
Lambda Provisioned Concurrency
AWS Step Functions Express Workflows: High Performance & Low Cost
AWS Transit Gateway – Build Global Networks and Centralize Monitoring Using Network Manager
AWS Transit Gateway Adds Multicast and Inter-regional Peering
VPC Ingress Routing – Simplifying Integration of Third-Party Appliances
With so much excitement and innovation happening in the cloud, Jassy turned his focus to modernization trends in the global cloud community: why cloud adoption is an active priority for many organizations, and what this new technology replaces.
A notable mention by Jassy was of the ISVs and SIs helping drive AWS’ cloud domination—can you spot a familiar logo, or two, on the Systems Integrators page? DLT is proud to be a leading partner for AWS, and proud to have other leading AWS partners in our DLT Cloud Navigator program.
“A lot of the heavy lifting of moving Enterprises to the cloud is being done by SIs that have either pivoted their model quicker and realized what the future was. These are companies like Slalom and Rackspace, or born in the cloud SIs who don’t have to worry about cannibalizing their existing business, and who are very happy to pick up the small pilot projects for all of you that don’t pay very much, they don’t seem like they’re worth it. But everybody knows you can’t move unless you get pilots done successfully. So they’re willing to bet on the future,” said Jassy.
After more than 20 announcements, a sneak peek of product previews and an overview of how AWS is positioning themselves as the industry leader in cloud, Jassy finished with one more look at all that the AWS Cloud can offer, the change it can support, and everyone in need of another cup of coffee and food to digest the three hours of content… phew!
We recharged, digested, and tweeted a bit to those unable to attend the conference in person, and stopped by the hundreds of sponsor booths at the expo hall, before joining CloudCheckr for a quick session on how the public sector can accelerate their profitability to the AWS cloud with DLT Cloud Navigator.
It was a very well-attended session, and we’ll continue to share the success and evolution of this program throughout the coming year.
Finally, we capped off the day with our Public Sector Partner Reception at Top Golf, and sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Red Hat, Veritas and AppDynamics. It was a great par-tee, and we’re happy to have celebrated the launch of DLT Cloud Navigator with our partners and clients.
The next day, several hundred members of the public sector cloud community gathered bright and early to join Teresa Carlson for the annual Worldwide Public Sector Breakfast. Carlson kicked off the breakfast by welcoming the worldwide public sector community to re:Invent, and noted that re:Invent attracted over 6,000 public sector attendees—70% of which identified as having a public sector practice.
As with all keynotes, Carlson’s keynote was action-packed and full of exciting announcements and great takeaways. Some of our favorites include:
• Governments should operate with a “customer first” methodology, with the design that meets citizens where they are with what they want;
• Cyber attacks are ever-increasing, and the public sector should tackle three low-hanging fruit: ENCRYPT: in motion and at rest; BACK UP data and system; and INTERHIT AWS best practices.
• Innovation requires education: by developing the skills of your organization, you’ll cultivate a culture of innovation that is dedicated to serving your mission;
• The cloud is available no matter where you are or how big your budget;
• The cloud is your oyster—start big, or start small, but just start. “Most consultants will tell you to start small in your project and build from there. We went the other way and moved one of our biggest systems to the cloud,” says David Catanoso, Director Enterprise Cloud Solutions Office at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The winners of the City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge were also announced, with 18 winners across the country—read more here.
“Skills & culture matter! They help you achieve your mission in the public sector,” says Teresa Carlson, VP, WWPS, AWS.
For an in-depth look at everything announced during the Worldwide Public Sector Breakfast, read this blog.
By way of teleportation (or running through The Venetian and breathlessly entering the hall just as the keynote began), we managed to make it the breakfast to the Global Partner Summit where Doug Yeum, the newly appointed Head of Worldwide Channels and Alliances, gave more exciting announcements for the ever-expanding partner community.
Marketplace was a key theme of the summit, with Yeum bringing onstage Dave McCann, VP of Migration (Marketplace and Control Services) to discuss AWS Marketplace momentum and exciting announcements for partners. AWS Marketplace gives customers access to a curated digital catalog of third-party software, services, and data that customers need to build solutions and run their businesses.
DLT’s work with AWS on Discovery API was featured by Dave McCann when announcing Discovery API. Discovery API allows partners to integrate a product selection from AWS Marketplace into their own product experience. We’re proud to be the notable industry leader in this space, and providing customers with a frictionless experience to find and procure products within the tools they already use. To learn more about how AWS Marketplace is making it easier for customers to discover third-party software and data products, read this blog post.
An exciting morning, with even more exciting implications for the partner and public sector communities.
The final keynote came from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on Thursday morning and (for the hundredth time this week) had me wishing I’d kept an eye on the ‘Reserved Seating’ release time for the keynotes, instead of watching from one of the overflow rooms.
Vogels began the keynote with a background and an overview of how AWS empowers customers to tap into every bit of performance from their (many, many) services. With a few announcements in between, Vogels turned to the reality of Industry 4.0—which will comprise of widespread predictive maintenance, automation, collaborative robots, mass customization and innovations that harness the power of cloud to blur the lines between the physical and digital.
Are we there yet? Not quite. As at 2015, the average age of equipment in factories is 22 years old—far too old for the autonomous factories of the future (in human years, these factories are mere millennial). What could these factories of the future look like? Vogels turned to Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses as an example: robots, computer visions, machine learning generated insights and forecasts.
re:Invent 2019 was a big conference: geographically, attendee-wise, with the number of announcements, previews, launches, vendors, parties, and more—but the opportunities with cloud are bigger. Where will we be in one, five, or ten years from now with cloud? Who knows… the sky will never be the limit with AWS.
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