re:Invent 2017 — bigger than ever
This was my fifth year attending what’s arguably the biggest cloud event of the year: AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. And it just keeps getting bigger, with over 43,000 attending this year (compared to around 6,000 for its first incarnation in 2012). Back then, it was not uncommon to find people in IT that didn’t know what AWS was. But it’s quite different today, with an AWS annual run rate publicized at $18B and almost everyone considering a cloud strategy.
Here’s my quick recap of impressions, interesting announcements, and more:
While this year re:Invent extended to multiple venues throughout Las Vegas, it was still hard to escape the crowds. The overarching message of size and dominance was also delivered repeatedly by AWS CEO, Andy Jassy. In his keynote, he cited that AWS has 44% of the public cloud market share.
Jassy added “with a business that most estimate is several times the size of the next nine providers combined, we’ve learned certain lessons that you just can’t learn until you get to that level of scale.”
Jassy concluded his keynote with a bold call to action for anyone holding back on their move to the cloud, threatening that if they don’t move quickly, they’ll be left behind without a chance of ever catching up.
Part of what will make it hard to catch up is the sheer volume of services to understand and choose from. Jassy stressed, as he has done each year, that the pace of innovation is expanding with over 1300 service announcements in 2017. He summed it up by borrowing from Lauryn Hill’s song, “Everything is Everything.”
But in talking to many at the show, I found that the sheer volume of features has a limit on its ability to impress. Many people, especially those in established enterprises, are overwhelmed by all of the options and new technologies. They are struggling to take the DIY approach to piecing together these tools into solutions. So this is a big opportunity for partners of AWS, like Frame, to deliver higher-level services that are easier to understand and consume.
One example, is how Frame is using the new AWS Elastic GPU technology to lower the cost of graphics use cases in the public cloud (now available in more regions). Frame CEO, Nikola Bozinovic, presented along with AWS Sr. Product Manager, Letian Feng in their session on Elastic GPUs. Check out this link to the session where you can learn more.
One of the nice things about re:Invent is that you don’t have to brave the crowds or deal with the vices of Vegas if you don’t want to. Instead, you can check out the sessions and keynotes online, from the privacy and comfort of your home or office. Just checkout the AWS YouTube page or explore the announcements from re:Invent by category here. If you’re looking for just a taste of what’s new, here are a couple of announcements that I found relevant and just plain cool:
Relevant to Frame:
T2 Unlimited Feature: This option lets you avoid running out of CPU credits on the “bursty” T2 instances, by just paying for extra CPU credits on-demand. Stay tuned for this option as a part of the Frame Air and Elastic system types.
Cross-region VPC Peering: In the past, if you wanted to connect VPCs across regions, you had to setup VPN gateways manually. Now, this is a native capability on AWS — great for global deployments.
Hibernation for Spot Instances: With spot instances, you used to run the risk of having very little recourse when an instance got pulled out from under you. Now, you can hibernate the state of your instance before you lose it. While this is nice, we look forward to seeing hibernation for any instance type — definitely a request that we and others have of AWS.
Just plain cool:
Amazon Translate: real time language translation. In geek-speak: “a high-quality neural machine translation service that uses advanced machine learning technologies to provide fast language translation of text-based content and enable the development of applications that provide multilingual user experiences.”
Amazon Comprehend: analyzes text and tells you what it finds, starting with the language (detects from 100 languages). It can identify different types of entities (people, places, brands, products…), key phrases, sentiment (positive, negative, mixed, or neutral), and extract key phrases.
Amazon Rekognition Video: a new video analysis service that brings scalable computer vision analysis to your S3 stored video, as well as, live video streams. You can accurately detect, track, recognize, extract, and moderate thousands of objects, faces, and content from a video.
Amazon Sumerian: an easy way to create VR, AR, and 3D experiences. Includes tools and resources that allow anyone to create and run augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3D applications with ease.
Your move to the cloud
So wrapping up, there’s no question that we’re in the middle of a tremendous move to the cloud. AWS and its competitors, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and others are working hard to capitalize on this massive shift by offering a myriad of tools and services. And, yes, if you’re not considering your strategy to take advantage of the cloud— it’s time to start. But you’re not alone. Your first steps can be faster than you think: just reach out to us or request a demo and we can show you how easy it is to move your Windows workloads to the cloud on Frame, today.
