Another year at AWS re:Invent 2016. This event that each year becomes more popular and hits attendance records every time. Every year full of thousands of adepts that can’t wait to know all the news and the company’s strategy, which sets the trend on the public cloud.
This year it was especially curious. Jeff Barr kept posting news on his blog and twitter, advancing more news before AWS re:Invent 2016. That foreshadow an event full of news. In a way, it didn’t deceive.
AWS re:Invent 2016 Sessions
A very important part at AWS re:Invent are the sessions that take place at the Venetian, although this year (32k people!) it wasn’t possible. AWS re:Invent 2016 extended also to the Mirage and the Encore for some of the activities that in the past took also place at the Venetian.
These sessions are classified by levels, according to the target’s expertise and by topics (security, network, finance, gaming…). They are also classified by the kind of talk, usually indicated in the name and that helps you guess what will you find there (workshops, chalk talks, breaking sessions, deep dives…).
All training sessions at the event are important, also competitions, re:Play (the last night party), partner talks… Even though, the focus of the event are the two keynotes on Wednesday and Thursday by Andy Jassy (CEO at AWS) and Werner Vogels (CTO/VP at Amazon.com).
AWS re:Invent 2016: news
At AWS re:Invent’s keynotes, you can perceive the strategy and the trends for the next year, besides the news about recent or existent services. If last year it seemed that there were only IoT and containers, this year had other focuses:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): AWS gets cracking to cut the gap it had with direct competitors like Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Alexa already made us foreshadow this kind of movement, that was confirmed at the keynote.
- Serverless is the new compute thing: Probably they can’t say it louder nor clearer. They’re categorising services that you wouldn’t think they’re on this range like serverless. It’s obvious that this will not (yet) be the present, but it won’t be long. The news was running non-stop: C# for Lambda, Greengrass (Lambda for IoT), Athena, [email protected] for CloudFront, Lex, Step functions…
Obviously, keynotes were fuller of news.
- New compute instances (for those who doesn’t like -yet- serverless ;-D)
- GPU on demand
- PostgreSQL inclusion on Aurora (Hello Oracle!)
- Athena (SQL Serverless) that allows SQLish queries on S3 without the need to set up complex processes to extract, transform, and load the data
- Glue (managed ETL)
- …
And an endless list of new services that make the web console restyling (with a services search), one of the best possible news. About security, another great incorporation is the Shield that activates DDoS protection by default anywhere and also WAF (Web Application Firewall) inclusion at a balancer level (just for ALB).
Also, at AWS re:Invent 2016 the ring around continuous integration for developers was compleated with CodeBuild, that allows code compilation, test execution and package generation. It was also announced X-Ray, an application performance monitor that integrates with AWS services to debug code performance.
Another interesting aspect of AWS re:Invent 2016 was the launch of two new products that seem to show how they want to approach the market in the next months, and they are completely opposite. On one hand, we have Lightsail, that will put AWS as a player on the VPS market, competing with Digital Ocean, OVHs… On the other hand, there’s the partnership with VMWare to provide hybrid infrastructure, focusing on companies that still want to put a name to their machines and even visit them every once in a while.
TAGS: aws, AWs reInvent
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