ESG Blogs

As a cybersecurity industry analyst, I am admittedly guilty of being myopic in looking for security to be the leading act in the keynote at major industry events. Such was the case at AWS re:Invents of the past when security was front and center starting with a discussion about the shared responsibility security model, the foundation of any cloud security program. That started to change in the last few years with security playing more of a supporting role in Andy Jassy's and Werner Vogels' keynotes. To be clear - it’s not that AWS is now being dismissive of security by any stretch, it’s simply that security is no longer an impediment to the adoption of public cloud platforms, at least those operated and secured by major CPS such as AWS, who has always treated security as job #1. AWS no longer needs to convince the market the cloud is secure, the conversation is now about how to meet your part of the shared responsibility model.

With what has become the dominant IT event of the calendar, AWS re:Invent keeps customers and partners excited and competitors on their toes with new announcements. But what should we expect from AWS at the show this year? I have a new video blog, discussing what I think will be the two keys areas for AWS, Cloud Services and Hybrid. Please watch the video below for my thoughts and predictions for AWS re:Invent 2018.

AWS re:Invent is a premier event, and ESG always makes it a priority to attend. The event captures an audience of IT decision makers and business leaders who are hungry to learn and discover where Amazon is planning to shake up or enhance IT and business strategies. At the event this year, I’ll be paying close attention to Amazon Workspaces.

The most exciting announcement during AWS re:Invent for cloud computing infrastructure foundation was Fargate. There were a slew of new announcements and I don't want to de-emphasize the other ones too much, but this one was the most interesting to me.

First, a bit of background. There's lot of confusion on VMs, containers, and functions. Here are the differences:

The key thing is that the VMs allow a server to run as one big piece (OS + whatever apps are installed), containers allow applications (which includes providing microservices, but no OS, but the underlying system beneath the container layer provides the Linux interface) to run, and serverless is a place to run code (or functions). Each stage enables slicing a workload into smaller pieces.

At AWS re:Invent 2017, AWS continued to show the domination it has over the public cloud market. During Andy Jassy's keynote, he talked about AWS now having an $18 billion run rate with 42% growth. That's impressive in both the size and the continued growth at that size, which should be a bone chilling statistic for competitors. It extends beyond financials, with AWS showing share numbers to be over 44% of the market and more than the next 12 competitors combined.

Man, talk about the proverbial firehose. AWS re:Invent 2017 proved to be a wide open torrent of announcements from AWS and the partner ecosystem alike, making recap blogs such as this a bit of a mission impossible. For starters, AWS’s security announcements included:

This year was my first re:Invent and it was an impressive event. There were over forty-three thousand people in attendance and the show occupied a number of hotels along the Vegas strip. It wasn’t just that there were a lot of people there, it was that there were a lot of people who wanted to be there – after attending hundreds of trade shows and user group events you get to know the difference. There was a buzz and excitement at the show that reminded me of early VMworld and TechEd shows. Sessions were sold out and queues were long as people waited for the doors to open. All the attendees I spoke to had specific reasons for attending; many were in the process of moving to a cloud first strategy and were there to learn.

I attended a session at AWS re:Invent titled “Planning for your advanced AWS networking architectures” that was held by Matt Lehwess and Nick Matthews, who were rightfully dressed as networking wizards.

Without going into the details of the presentation, I have a few “meta” comments:

It’s so easy to set up networking in a public clouds (you set up VPCs and elastic load balancers without the need to purchase and configure hardware) that we are tempted to experiment with different architectures to see what happens.

However, one needs to still plan appropriately. There are several issues that cannot be ignored.

AWS, as an established public cloud leader, can afford to rest on its laurels, but with competitors sprinting behind it, it is not slowing down in any way. During the Global Partner Summit at the re:Invent trade show, there were numerous announcements, including the Networking Competency for AWS Partners and the availability of PrivateLink for customer and partner network services.

Are there any patterns I see?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) re:Invent is a large show. So large, in fact, that it won't fit into one venue. While not a crazy event like some consumer-oriented technology shows in Las Vegas, it has a key enterprise-oriented cloud show forum for understanding the scope of cloud computing solutions and integrated solutions from partners. While Microsoft has its main Ignite conference and splits off developers into Build, and Google has different conferences focused on cloud or developers, in this case, AWS puts it all in one venue. What do we expect here? Here's my snarky answer: