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- re:Invent 2016 Summary and Analysis
re:Invent 2016 Summary and Analysis
I’ve been casually following Amazon’s re:Invent Conference announcements and they look quite spectacular. Here’s a quick list of them:
LightSail — A new VPS service that competes with companies like Digital Ocean.
Elastic GPUs — The ability to attach GPUs to any running VM
New F1-branded VMs that are accelerated with FPGAs
Athena — A new tool for querying data that lives in S3
Added Postgres support to their Aurora database engine
Blox — scheduler software for EC2 containers
Lex — A service that makes available the technology underlying Alexa
Looks like I need to add Invent to my annual conference schedule.
Amazon is starting to feel like an R&D lab funded by side projects.
Polly — Text to speech in 47 voices and 24 languages
A new personalized health dashboard for all running AWS services, including custom alerts
AWS Shield — protect your AWS services from DDoS for free, automatically, supposedly able to protect against the vast majority of attacks out there
EC2 Systems Manager — config management of EC2 and on-prem systems
CodeBuild — A new service that automatically compiles developers’ code and runs unit tests on it
AWS Batch — a service for automating batch job deployments
X-Ray — helps developers debug and troubleshoot their code by showing bottlenecks and impacts to users
Amazon Pinpoint — mobile analytics information to see how apps are being used on mobile platforms
AWS Glue — cleans and prepares data for use by other tools
Enhancements to Lamda-based computing
Analysis
I’m most excited by LightSail, Lex, and AWS Shield.
I think LightSail is going to massively eat into Digital Ocean, Linode, and many other similar services. Anyone using AWS at work is likely to want to use them for their personal stuff as well, and it’s nice to have a unified platform to do everything from.
Lex is basically brining their AI play, which has surprised everyone, to the world as services. Super excited to see how that’ll be used.
AWS Shield is fantastic as well. Because it’s free it’s basically going to force everyone else to offer something similar or fall behind. Right now you have to go with someone like CloudFlare, Incapsula, or Akamai—as a separate service—if you want to protect your site from these attacks, and Amazon just said you get it for free if you use them. That’s major. It’s important to note that it only blocks “most” attacks (around 95%), which means these massive attacks we’ve been hearing about in the news will still melt a site protected with AWS Shield. But it’s still valuable if it can stop most small to medium players.
My overall impression of this conference is that:
Amazon is just kind of winning right now.
They seem like an R&D shop more than anything.
I might be adding this to my conference list next year.
What I love most about what they’re doing is the effect it’s going to have on everyone else. They have to adapt or they’ll be crushed.
It’s good for everyone.