ESG Blogs

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:

Security has been a pillar of the Day 1 keynote in each of the four AWS re:Invents I’ve attended, with new partners and services rolled out to assuage concerns that the cloud isn’t secure and to convey that AWS takes security very, very seriously. Not this year. Security was a modest part of the Day 2 keynote. As a security analyst, I couldn’t help but feel a bit bummed out, but I get it—there’s a bigger context here: the maturity of cloud adoption and its role in contemporary business models.

The seminal cloud computing event, AWS re:Invent is coming up and cybersecurity is likely to once again be front and center with Amazon, vendors, and customers all discussing best practices for securing cloud and hybrid cloud environments. At the same time, some cybersecurity vendors will be sharing how they leverage the agility and ubiquity of the cloud as a delivery platform to offer security-as-a-service.

VMware announced a VMware Cloud on AWS solution (still as a Technology Preview). I want to examine what this means, as some aspects are similar to what’s already available, and the implications of the new parts.

The ability to run VMware Cloud off-premises isn’t new, and VMware itself has a vCloud Air offering, and a vCloud Air Network provided by its partners.  We also saw a preview of VMware Cross-Cloud architecture at VMworld that offers services across multiple clouds.

Therefore, let’s look at key areas of an VMware Cloud on AWS offering and dissect them one by one to see where alternatives exist and where there may be unique benefits in the long term.