2nd Watch is always buzzing before AWS re:Invent as we get ready for a great conference full of breakout sessions, boot camps, certifications, keynotes and – you can count on it – some big AWS announcements. As a Platinum sponsor we are committed to the success of the conference and enjoy having the opportunity to connect with clients and prospective clients. We are also excited to hear what new services and features AWS will be launching to make the public cloud better, faster and easier to adopt. Here are the three areas where we expect AWS to make some announcements:
1. Services and Features to Drive Further Enterprise Adoption
Cloud adoption has moved beyond the startups towards Enterprise adoption. The majority of Fortune 500 companies have adopted the cloud in some form or another with more and more moving to a cloud-first approach. There is still a very large portion of enterprise workloads that live in datacenters and colocation facilities. AWS will continue to add services to enable customers to run these workloads in the cloud. In the past we have seen AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and other services that enable governance and security. We expect this to continue and will be watching out for services that provide the governance and security that Enterprises need.
2. Software Development Life Cycle Services
AWS has released a number of tools that make it easier for developers and operations people to manage the software development and deployment process. CodeCommit, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy can be included in CloudFormation templates to enable Infrastructure as Code to include the tools necessary to enable development teams. This is a trend we expect to continue with AWS doing more in this space. The API-native services and features of AWS have always made it popular with folks who write code. We expect this trend to continue and for AWS to further enable developers with new services and tools.
3. Beyond AWS
We were excited to see AWS reach beyond themselves to offer Amazon Linux as a container image. Previously the tools and services that ran outside of the cloud enabled customers to bring workloads to the cloud. Those include AWS Application Discovery Service, Amazon Storage Gateway, AWS Snowball, and AWS Database Migration Service. These services and tools all exist to enable customers to come to the cloud. Offering their operating system as a Linux Container makes it possible for customers to run container services across clouds, both public and private. We expect this trend to continue and for AWS to release more services that allow customers to leverage their AWS investment while still enabling previous investments in on-premise infrastructure or other clouds.
4. AWS re:Play Party
The end-of-show party is always a good time, and we encourage you not to miss it. After a week of talking to peers and digesting a lot of technology, it is fun to let loose, play some video games, and listen to some loud electronic music. We will not try to make a prediction on the headliner, but it will probably be a big-name in the EDM scene. We’d love to see Aoki throw a cake at some re:Invent party goers, but we will have to wait until December 1st to find out who is performing along with everyone else.
-Chris Nolan, Director of Products
