AWS re:Invent 2015 – Day 2 @Las Vegas

Day 2 here in Vegas @ re-Invent started with an unimpeachable energy of 19000 ninjas with Keynotes of  Andy Jassy (SVP, Web Services @ Amazon). In 120 minutes, he gave the insight of new AWS growth metrics and made 12 announcements which include new services and features.

New Services and Features Announcements

(source: https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/)

1. Amazon Quick Sight
2. Amazon Kinesis Firehose
3. Amazon Elasticsearch Service
4. Amazon Kinesis Streams Extended Retention
5. AWS Database Migration Service
6. Amazon RDS for MariaDB
7. Amazon Aurora Now Available in AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region
8. AWS Import/Export Snowball
9. AWS WAF
10. Amazon Inspector
11.  Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts
12. AWS Config Rules

After keynotes, we rushed towards the breakout sessions. However, there were more than 60+ sessions and it was strenuous.  So, we decided to attend following sessions which seemed best for our knowledge and use cases:

Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Schema Design, Indexing, JSON, Search, and More: In this incredible session, we learned about fully managed NoSQL database service for application that need consistent,single-digit millisecond latency at scale.

AWS CodeDeploy: Automating Your Software Deployments: In this session we focused no key process, How it works, where it fits in our release process and some deployments strategies to get started.

Amazon Elastic File System: Unleash EFS: In this session, we learned to identify appropriate for use with EFS and its performance and security model.

From local Docker Development to Production Deployments: In this fantastic session we learned to run multi-container applications with Docker compose. After that, we focused on how to deploy  and scale container to a cluster with Docker Swarm.

Developing a Roadmap to AWS for 7,700 Systems and 5 Global Data Centers: This session was lead by VIACOM about how they migrated 1000 applications and 7000 systems from 4 Data Centres to AWS from OpenStack and Physical servers. Their successful journey was an outcome of 8-9 major Cloud readiness assessment they did before this migration and a perfect roadmap.

Reliable Design and Deployment of Security and Compliance:  This session introduced a concept of Security By Design (SbD), Golden environment (AWS Goldbase) and AWS Config Rules using which any system on AWS can achieve Security and Compliance. SbD is being considered as the Next Big Thing in Governance, Risk and Compliance.

Defending against DDoS:  The goal of this session was to tell about Common attacks, their Mitigations and proposed architecture which will by default have mitigation capabilities. Common attacks included Volumetric attacks (Network layer), State Exhaustion (Transport layer) and Application layer attacks. AWS architecture is already resilient by design for such attacks. Shared Responsibility model also makes the customer use of Resilient architecture design.

Then comes re:Invent Central where we are expected to be entertained, educated and engaged. There were multiple sponsors available on their booth with their specific activities, solutions, innovation in cloud which work with or on AWS platform. Few of the product companies which we liked were:

a. Mongolab: MongoDB database-as-a-service. Just like RDS for Mongo which can help migrate your existing AWS MongoDB deployment seamlessly. They charge by RAM storage and offer a 500MB never ending Mongo service package. Supports auto-sharding for horizontal scaling.

b. Evident.io: Cloud Infrastructure Security for AWS. Its like Trusted Advisor but with 1200 deep checks whose source is AWS whitepaper. It claims to be Agentless and Proxyless which gives Risk Prioritization and Assessment.

c. FortyCloud: Cloud Network Firewall for AWS. Since AWS does not have any firewall services, this brings SaaS that runs on your VPC and enhances security capabilities by adding components like user-VPN, Network Access policies, 2-Factor authentication, multi-region connectivity and firewall policy orchestration.

d. Redislabs: Offering in-memory NoSQL database services. Runs as a Cluster on your Infra as well as on Cloud as a service. It offers seamless scaling (sharding), zero downtime upgrades, high availability.

e. ParkMyCloud: Helps identifying AWS Idle EC2 instances and can stop-start them automatically. With ec2-describe, ec2-start, ec2-stop permission, you can schedule on/off times for non-production workloads.

Pub crawl: Lets this image explains about Pub Crawl party.

(Source: Twitter)