Last week, I attended re:Invent 2019 with Deloitte – an Emerald Sponsor. Reflecting on an action-packed week, this blog brings you some of the key highlights of the week, and my own personal takeaways.
For those not familiar, re:Invent is AWS’ annual showcase of all things cloud. Primarily aimed at the AWS technical community and AWS partners, the event provides a unique opportunity for learning, networking, and collaborating. Over the course of the week, thousands of sessions take place providing attendees with insights into, and use-cases for, AWS’ services.
The first thing that strikes you about re:Invent is its sheer scale; encompassing several hotels from the MGM at the south end of the strip to the Venetian at the north, it requires buses to ferry attendees between venues!
The first thing upon arrival at re:Invent is to pick up your SWAG (that’s merchandise for those not familiar!) This year the now ubiquitous AWS re:Invent hoodie reappeared in a rather fetching blue, with a water-bottle (they know we drink coffee, right?).
AWS Ambassador Event
On Monday, I attended the Alliance Partner Network (APN) AWS Ambassador event, where I represented Deloitte as their EMEA AWS Ambassador. The AWS ambassador program is a community of AWS Technical Experts passionate about sharing their experience with cloud. We were very pleased to see Jeff Barr – AWS’ Chief Evangelist (sans purple hair) – at the event, he provided some particularly useful insights into AWS’ forthcoming announcements.
This session also gave us the opportunity to discuss and ask questions about the new AWS services. This was an invaluable experience, and really helps us to understand what AWS hope to achieve from their services.
Andy Jassy’s Keynote
Tuesday’s main event was AWS CEO Andy Jassy’s keynote which saw him reveal an exciting array of new services. Andy also discussed how partners, such as Deloitte, are helping deliver innovative cloud solutions for their clients.
One of the things that really stood out to me this year was the marked evolution of AWS’ services. Having reached such a breadth of capability, this year’s changes seem to focus on maturing the various technology stacks that AWS provide. Arguably, you could view services such as SageMaker Studio, Processing, Experiments, Debugger, Model Monitor, and AutoPilot as new services; for me though they are a welcome maturing of AWS’ Machine Learning platform.
There are too many announcements to cover in this article. However, a few of my highlights included:
- AI/ML: Significant changes to SageMaker, providing the most complete AI/ML environment available – allowing companies to create, test, and execute ML models faster than ever before;
- Compute: The introduction of Nitro Enclaves which allows a highly secure VM to attach itself to an EC2 instance, for dealing with highly sensitive data such as PII (Personally Identifiable Information) – a great addition from a Security & Compliance perspective;
- DevOps: the introduction of CodeGuru to support the authoring of performant and secure code, and to analyse that code when it is running in the cloud;
- Analytics: A new Managed Cassandra database;
- The opportunity to write Quantum algorithms and to execute them on real Quantum compute instances using AWS Braket (to learn that Braket was a notation used for recording quantum state rather than a misspelling was a relief!) – this will allow those interested in Quantum computing try it out before the technology hits the mainstream.
5G
A surprising announcement, worthy of its own sub-heading, was a new partnership between AWS and mobile companies to deliver AWS capability at the 5G network-edge. Technically, this means AWS situating their services, such as compute and storage, alongside the telephone company’s own infrastructure. This caters for companies that require very low latency (in the millisecond range) for their cloud solutions running on 5G devices.
Hans Vestberg CEO of Verizon, (pictured below), discussed how Verizon were working with AWS to roll-out this capability in the Americas (Vodafone, for reference, will deliver this capability for EMEA).
Partner Keynote
Wednesday was the Partner Keynote session where, in addition to discussing the changes announced by Andy Jassy and the impact those changes will have on customers, AWS also announced a new Competency Program for their partners. The “AWS Public Safety & Disaster Response Competency” programme aims to provide a focus on delivering solutions for “first responders”
Dr. Werner Vogel’s Keynote
On Thursday CTO Werner Vogel’s keynote discussed “Industry 4.0, the next industrial revolution” (please don’t ask me to describe what Industry 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 were!!). Despite the haughty title, the premise was simple – that much opportunity remains in the manufacturing space such as automation (robots, transportation), and predictive asset maintenance.
Dr. Vogel discussed how Amazon approached fulfilment themselves, and in the name of collaboration introduced the “Amazon Builders’ Library” – a collection of 15 Articles (so far) by Amazon Technical Experts that describe how Amazon operate from an Architecture and “Software Delivery and Operations” perspective.
Signing-Off
After a busy year’s work we also managed to find time to enjoy ourselves – whether that was getting a photo taken with a famous Cloud Guru, demonstrating our questionable dance expertise at Deloitte’s pre:Invent event, or getting super-excited waiting for a keynote!
