This is is the 7th Annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. It’s amazing to see just how the scope and breadth of this user conference has grown from its “quaint” beginnings back in 2012. Looking back to 2012, it's hard to even see this as the same event as before. Back in 2012, there were about 6,000 total attendees to the event — and it was housed exclusively in the Venetian/Sands Convention Center. Fast forward to 2018 and the total attendee count could reach nearly 50,000 Cloud Architects, Operators, and Executives.
Last year was the first year they broke out the conference into multiple hotels scattered throughout the Las Vegas Strip, and this year the trend continues taking over Vegas for a week of all things Cloud.
So what were some of the highlights last year? Some of my favorite announcements from last years’ AWS re:Invent conference included:
Amazon EKS
Now considered the De-facto standard for deploying applications across the count, Kubernetes has taken over and is reaching the highest summits of the hype cycle. In a rare moment where AWS wasn’t the leader — their announcement of EKS followed cloud vendors such as Google and Microsoft. But it continues to validate that Kubernetes is here to stay.
Nitro Hypervisor
As an Operator first and foremost, I’m always excited to see new announcements around the improvement around some of the earliest services like EC2. The new Nitro hypervisor is slimmed down Xen with high performance. It came with some of the new instance types with C5 and M5 class instances.
Network Load Balancer
An evolutionary step forward for AWS — which is designed to handles millions of requests per second and most importantly does not require a pre-warming like its predecessor ELB, all with extremely low latency. The new NLB also allows for PrivateLink — which simplifies the ability to share data across other cloud-based applications while removing exposure to the public internet.
Cross Region VPC Peering
At this point you can tell that someone who’s spent a very long time managing systems in the cloud wrote this blog post — because who else would be THIS excited for this arguably minor feature announced last year. This was really a game-changing moment for many people who are building applications on the cloud as it makes it incredibly simple to connect multiple regions together. Gone are the days of having to manage and link together multiple VPN concentrators together! Hurray!
What’s next for Amazon’s largest user conference?
In some of the previous years, the weeks and sometimes even months leading up to re:Invent normally included many new announcements of new services or even new instance types. I haven’t yet seen anything particularly large get announced yet and we are now less than 2 weeks away. Perhaps Amazon is keeping all their cards close and waiting for the Keynotes by Andy Jassy and Dr. Werner Vogels. I expect to continue to see some casual shade fired at Oracle (as per usual).
I also anticipate continued focus on to the enterprise as more and more of the Fortune 500 bring their mission-critical applications over. Expect security to continue to be a focus – Amazon has been dipping their toes into the space with a bunch of point solutions such as Guard Duty and Inspector, but currently does not have a great way to tie them together.
In addition to databases and data warehouses like Aurora and Redshift, expect much more Kubernetes discussion, especially too in the wake of VMware’s purchase of Heptio, and the explosion of Kubernetes in the Enterprise…Amazon is absolutely going to want a piece of that pie.
Going to be at re:Invent this year? Find me and the rest of the CHAOSSEARCH team at Booth #238 and check out how we’ve turned your Amazon S3 into a full text Elasticsearch cluster. I’ll show you how you can access more data, run fewer servers, and spend less money.
Whether you are a first timer or seasoned veteran, check out the great “Startups Guide to re:Invent” that Amazon has created. As well as – Mark Nunnikhoven wrote the amazing “Ultimate Guide to AWS re:Invent 2018”. There is a lot going on all week – so use this time now to plan to make the most of it!
See you in Vegas!
