Some quick stats from AWS re:Invent 2018
7th annual event, 50,000 attendees, 100,000 more on livestream, and over 2,100 breakout sessions. After 12 years in the business, AWS has millions of active customers, has gained 27 billion dollars in revenue this year, revealed their 46% annual growth figure, and is seeing a huge business shift to the platform across every vertical sector including the largest number of public sector customers on the cloud. According to Gartner, AWS has 52% of the cloud market segment share, worldwide, despite what its competitors are claiming. They had a ton to say, let’s get into our favorite announcements.
So who stole the show?
- Machine Learning and by far with 13 announcements including 5 new SageMaker capabilities and DeepRacer, which is 1/18th the size of a real race car and uses reinforcement learning (RL) to learn driving behavior in order to make short term decisions while optimizing for a longer term goal. This is the most hands-on way to start using ML and the best toy for geeks ever! They also released the most powerful instance known to the cloud, P3dn, designed for distributed training with 100GB networking throughput, which is also new and record breaking.
- AWS, VMware and Outposts – there is more where that came from, you could definitely could feel the strengthened partnership between these two giants, we love their synergy, instead of competing they complement each other, helping customers get exactly what they need. They announced RDS on VMware making it easy to operate and scale databases in VMware vSphere or to migrate them to AWS, as well as launching Outposts which brings AWS services and tools to virtually any on-premises facility for a consistently low latency hybrid experience.
- A1 Instances – powered by AWS Graviton Processor. Yes, they did it, they made their own processor that can cut costs by 45% and is ideal for scale out workloads such as containerized microservices, web servers or caching fleets.
- Transit Gateway – our customers are going to love this one! Scales connectivity across thousands of VPCs, accounts, and on-premises networks, acting as a hub that simplifies management and reduces ops costs.
- Firecracker – is open source and allows customers to start building with the same technology used in the severless and container services, Lambda and Fargate. It lets you securely operate multi-tenant container-based services; combining the best of both worlds, it has the security and isolation found using traditional VMs and the speed and performance offered by containers.
- Streaming just got simpler with another open source service, Managed Streaming for Kafka, which is essentially a fully managed, highly available streaming service for Apache Kafka on AWS. No more heavy lifting.
- Along with the announcement of the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, they also rolled the Well-Architected Tool which allows developers to find out and use the best practices for building the most optimal cloud architecture. You have options, you can turn to a partner or you can do it yourself but you must be Well-Architected.
- Amazon FSx is a fully managed native Windows file system built on a Windows Server. It provides full Windows native compatibility, adheres to ISO, PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliance, as well as provides fast performance and is cost effective.
- Security Hub – as security experts, we are especially excited about this update which will allow customers to centrally view and manage security alerts and automate their compliance checks.
Final thoughts
As we know from the Keynotes over the last few years, AWS loves to use music and lyrics as themes for announcing their updates. If I had to give this year’s re:Invent a song, I’d chose “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by Daft Punk. AWS has listened very closely to exactly what it’s customers are requesting. They’ve pursued their VMware innovation to accommodate hybrid customers, improved and added hundreds of capabilities to their most favored services, along with making them serverless and fully managed for ease of use.
APN Partners are their strongest asset, AWS is allowing its partners to create customized solutions to reach more customers and speed their rate of innovation. Andy Jassy, AWS CEO, hit it on the nail when mentioning “Landing in the Zone”, customers need excellent partners that are focused and skilled at creating customizable, out-of-the-box solutions in order to not get lost in the mess of mass migration. We were excited when we heard this because it’s exactly what AllCloud’s Enterprise Landing Zone is committed to providing customers; simplicity, best practices and secure adoption that helps customers effectively manage organizational IT and enables them to do what they do best. Build.
Read more about all of AWS’ announcements at re:Invent here.