AWS re:Invent - Day 1 - Live from Las Vegas

A sneak peek at how AWS is advancing its cloud technologies to enable startups and multi-nationals in leveraging cloud to drive their business.

The current weather in Las Vegas is warm and sunny but for the palatial hotel, The Venetian it is all cloudy! With Amazon kicking off its annual conference, AWS re:Invent for the second consecutive year, the venue is buzzing with attendees, partners and the AWS staff. Over 8000 IT professionals are expected to be here to learn about AWS.

The event has more than 200 sessions delivered by 400 speakers! With multiple tracks, hands-on-labs, certification exam testing center and the partner booths, it’s certainly not easy to decide where to go. If this is not enough, the casino located next door is equally tempting for the attendees to try their hand at those colorful slot machines.

AWS is leading the pack in terms of cloud innovation and customer adoption. While startups have embraced them wholeheartedly, Amazon has got some work to do in the enterprise space. That seems to be the theme of the conference this year.

I had the opportunity to attend the analyst track where the leaders from AWS briefed us on the current state of AWS followed by some of the new services getting added to the stack.

As of November 1^st, AWS had over 200 updates to its services, which speaks volumes about its fast paced innovation. Amazon S3, one of the first service to be launched in 2006, stores a Trillion objects and the API traffic peaks at 1.5 millions calls per second. The interesting anecdote is that AWS adds enough new server capacity every day to support Amazon’s global infrastructure same as when it was a $7B business. Customers are using AWS for a variety of scenarios including running their development and test environments, extending on-premise applications to cloud, building new apps for cloud and new cloud applications that talk back to the on-premise systems. Every Samsung Smart TV customer indirectly uses the AWS cloud as the Smart TV Hub is powered by AWS. Shell, the oil and gas company is using AWS for running their development and test while Unilever migrated 500 web applications to AWS. According to Adam Selipsky, VP at AWS, enterprise customers are adopting AWS because of its security, compliance and operational excellence. Amazon is also investing heavily in worldwide field sales team to get more feet on the street. Every leader who spoke to the analysts emphasized on the laser focus on customer than the competition and this strategy seems to be working in favor of AWS. They are leaving the competition miles behind with the constant innovation.

The new services are under NDA that prevents me from disclosing but over the next 2 days, these services will be announced and made public. So, do watch out this space for the live updates on the announcements.

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