AWS Re:Invent 2019

Last week I had the pleasure of attending AWS Re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas. It was an excellent opportunity to connect with like-minded AWS-oriented customers/partners, a brilliant opportunity to re-connect with my colleagues back in @FujitsuUK and a great way to get the global Fujitsu AWS team together, including my new home team @FujitsuOceania.

The event was as surreal as you’d expect from Las Vegas, with 65,000 attendees, water bottles, hoodies, compostable lunch boxes, chicken wing eating, ping pong tournaments and plenty of afterhours fun! Clearly letting 65,000 AWS geeks loose in Vegas is a calculated risk, but one which paid off again in 2019.

All of the sights & experiences that Las Vegas has to offer, and you can spot the AWS delegates a mile off. Partly because of the matching blue hoodies, but more for the fact that they are more excited by free stickers and pin badges, than anything else in the city!

The Warm Up

Focussing back on the real content of the event, there were a few announcements from AWS in the preamble before the main keynote. The one which caught my eye, is seemingly dull at first glance, the EC2 Image Builder. Yes, EC2 isn’t the sexiest AWS service, but it is one which lots of customers are deeply dependent on, and so improvements in security and management are important. This new service makes it easier and faster to build and maintain secure images. And any simplification in the creation, patching, testing, distribution, and sharing of Linux or Windows Server images, is a good thing in my book!

The Keynote

Finally, onto the main event, which for me kick-started on Tuesday morning for Andy Jassy’s keynote. Again, the surreal feeling continued, the warm up act DJ, banging out EDM beats was David Solomon… CEO of Goldman Sachs!

Andy started with four key messages for the audience, all focussed around successful #transformation:

1.      Senior leadership team conviction and alignment

2.      Top-down aggressive goals

3.      Train your builders

4.      Don’t let paralysis stop you before you start

Multi-Cloud transformation is a massive theme for the Fujitsu team this year and although it is nearly impossible to pick a favourite, all 4 of Andy’s essential points, I have to admit that number 2 sticks with me. Aggressive goals are the key to success and by setting those goals, you can centre your organisation on the top down challenges set by an aggressive future vision.

Following this, I was a little surprised to see Andy focus so much on instances, I’m more used to a focus on cloud native, data driven business models at these types of events, but at the end of the day, instances drive much of that eco-system anyway. AWS has clearly been spending a significant amount of time and energy on innovation of everything from their hypervisor (AWS Nitro) and their chip tech, which was completed with new instance announcements for ARM-based and inferential chips.

Next came containers, and holy trinity of ECS + EKS + Fargate, again cements the AWS focus on customer centricity… however you want to slice your containers, AWS has an answer for you. I am sure that the new announcement of having K8s support in Fargate is going to be hugely popular over the next year or two.

The next section had only one standout for me, which was the announcement of UltraWarm as the new storage tier for Elasticsearch, which I only flagged in my notes because of it’s uncharacteristically unimaginative name. It sounds more like an advert for thermal clothing than an AWS service! I’m looking forward to “AWS Luke” making an appearance in 2020!

The main event of the keynote was undoubtedly the Machine Learning & AI section. The announcements for SageMaker were never ending and extremely impressive.

• Want a web based IDE? Take SageMaker Studio
• Need more notebook flexibility? Try SageMaker Notebooks
• Ever needed to tune, configure and improve your experiments automatically? Give SageMaker Experiments a try
• Ever had bugs? Try SageMaker Debugger
• Struggle with concept drift? Use SageMaker Model Monitor
• Want a computer to do everything for you? Why not use SageMaker Autopilot
• Frustrated with your developers? Give use CodeGuru a whirl!

It was awesome, and frightening all at the same time, to see the advances and scope that these announcements bring to AWS’s ML capabilities. The application to the developer world, was particularly interesting, having grappled with developer quality before, this sounded like a step towards a silver bullet!

The end section of the keynote continued as a blur and to be honest, This post wasn’t designed to be a list of all announcements at Re:Invent, so I’ll keep it short. The other highlights for me were in the form of Amazon Fraud Detector, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, Local Zones and Wavelength. Head over to the AWS site for more details.

The one which didn’t quite seem to hit home for me was Amazon Kendra, which brings ML to enterprise search. However, I see this as closer to the home ground of Microsoft, so it’ll be interesting to see how it stacks up against Microsoft’s Search.

A Plethora of Partners

Later on in the week, came the partner keynote, delivered by Doug Yeum, who came across as extremely committed to the success of the partner community and the continuing evolution of it. Hopefully that will start with a 100% rebuild of the partner portal!

Avis has undergone a transformation with AWS and now provides a more flexible service to deliver better customer mobility experiences. The BP story was also impressive in terms of impact and scale, I especially liked the reciprocal arrangement between AWS and BP for renewable power. 

Also during the partner keynote, there was an excellent announcement for start-ups. The introduction of the AWS Global Startup Program will help start-ups to scale and succeed by leveraging increased AWS support and resources. This will surely increase AWS’s position as a go-to for start-ups, and it seems like a savy investment for the time when these start-ups reach enterprise scale.

Towards the end of the partner keynote, there was a section on the Strategic Collaboration Agreements, which AWS has with some of its most committed partners. The partners who are investing heavily in AWS skills, services and IP to bring to market. Fujitsu was listed in this section and was named earlier in the keynote, as the significant investment made by Fujitsu globally in AWS services has reached new levels over the last 24 months. This has resulted in new services, capabilities and awesome Customer solutions, which are helping to support new and disrupted routes to market.

I’m hugely proud of the Fujitsu-AWS team for accomplishing this new level of restacked partnership in 2019 and I’m extremely excited for what we achieve together in 2020.

Back to the Future

Travelling between Australia and the US is new for me, so excuse my joy at the novelty of time travel! Before Re:Invent, I left Melbourne at 12:00 Saturday lunchtime, and arrived in Las Vegas at 12:00 Saturday lunchtime! It felt like I was in Star Trek, until I remembered the connection through LAX!

On the return leg, however, I needed to go back to the future. Leaving the US on Friday, I landed in Melbourne on Sunday morning… which was quite simply odd!

And there you have it, my first reinvent, some key note goodies and a little bit of novelty time travel!