AWS re:Invent 2019 Highlights
My week and 5 key takeaways from the keynotes
I attended my second AWS re:Invent last week. This means I had some experience. Soon I realized I was like a “senior” engineer with a year of experience — so I knew it all 😁.
AWS re:Invent was hard, maybe harder than last year. It was a tiresome five really long days. But all worth it thanks to all the amazing folks I got to hangout with and the amazing show that AWS put in!
Before we start thinking about re:Invent 2020 (oh yeah, it is less than 355 days away!), I wanted to get this blog post out and share my takeaways from the event. But first, let me write a little bit about my week.
This year I didn’t have any official booth duty at the Atlassian booth. But, I tried to be there for about an hour or two everyday because it a great place to get really good feedback from customers and learn from them.
I like the fact that I can spend my time on meeting with old and new friends. That is why I attended after day parties everyday — I was able to adopt to the timezone fast but obviously I can’t do it right now. I wrote this at 3-5am in İstanbul time — which is okey in Vegas time!
Speaking of meeting with friends, I had an interview published in one of the biggest newspapers in Turkey and I was part of a video created by a famous Youtuber (all in Turkish because I only get to hangout with Turkish media in Vegas 😅).
I also got the change to give a dev chat talk in an AWS Hero lead track about on-call. It is not recorded (hence slides not reviewed yay! 😬). Here are some pics from the dev chat area and slides here.
Of course, sessions. I attended a couple of them. I wrote the hero guide for DevOps so I knew what I wanted to see. But I want to keep this short so I’ll only share my favorite. My favorite was Marc Brooker’s talk on resilience at Amazon. You can watch it here. I enjoyed live tweting it as well.
I’ve also live tweeted Andy Jassy’s keynote and Werner Vogel’s keynote. I’ll be referring to the announcements made in these talks in the takeaways section.
Seems like some work but no fun in Vegas.. hmm… that is of course not true :) I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends from Devopsdays events and Thundra team. I enjoyed the after parties especially the hero dinner and #ServerlessForEveryone party. As always, re:Play was awesome. And at the end of the week, I went to see my first Vegas show: Kà by Cirque du soleil. A lot of people recommended Kà to me but I guess no words is enough to describe that show. WOW!
Let’s get serious a bit and start talking about my 5 key takeaways from re:Invent 2019. At the end of the post, you can see the links to all re:Invent announcements and videos.
The future of enterprise IT is hybrid, not multi-cloud
Public cloud is still small part of the whole IT world. AWS is aware of this. They already lead in their space. They even have most MS workloads and Kubernetes installations on their platform. But now, they want a piece of what people have in their data centers, where a lot of money is. So, they announced AWS Outpost GA. This may be the future of enterprise IT. I’m excited about the possibilities here.
Innovation on resilience and performance is what keeps AWS ahead
A lot of people (including me) was expecting Werner Vogel to announce some new features and products — and talk a little bit more about Lambda. That is aside, he talked about a lot of things that we don’t usually see but just assume they exist. He talked a lot about AWS Nitro System and how it changes everything. He mentioned how their infrastructure (along with the product variety) is just way better than any other competition with some seriously impressive data.
Serverless is bigger than AWS Lambda
There were some important Lambda related announcements (like provisioned concurrency and RDS proxy) before re:Invent but AWS Lambda got less attention than previous years on keynote stages. Yet, especially Fargate (with EKS) got a lot of them. I think part of it was because AWS wanted to communicate Serverless as a mindset as Ben Kehoe puts it. But more importantly, it was because Fargate and EKS is growing really fast — I mean really. So they want to support that potential and see where this goes rather than focusing an area that AWS already won. (But still would be good to see more talk around Lambda on keynote stage — just saying :))
Machine learning just got a lot easier — this time AWS means it!
AWS had 17 announcements about Machine Learning and AI in total. A lot of them are announced on the keynote stage. They are talking with customers and it is clear that they made ML a lot easier for a lot of companies. And the new AWS Machine Learning Embark program goes even further because AWS wants to help you build your next ML stuff together. Not what I expected at this scale but all these shows the potential and how serious AWS is with ML.
Educating customers is key in unleashing cloud’s potential
That is why AWS wants to get involved and share their learnings with the customers. Amazon Builders’ Library was the only announcement in Werner’s keynote. This is a sign for how big of deal this thing is. I’m sure we’ll see more of this soon at an increasing pace along with some great AWS Well-Architected content. Partners and educators are already invaluable but their importance is getting bigger and bigger as the cloud gets more flexible — and complex.
Now, the event is over… but actually it is just starting for us. We (the community) along with the AWS crew have a lot to learn. That is why I already started talking about the announcements in local meetups in Ankara and İstanbul. These will be good learning opportunities for me too 🙂.
As promised, if you want to see what is new, take a look at this link. And, if you want to see your favorite breakout session, visit here.
Until next year (remember it is only in 355 days), keep reinventing!
Cheers, Serhat (https://twitter.com/srhtcn)
