AWS re:Invent 2015 – Day 3 @Las Vegas
The Day 3 started with keynotes from Dr. Werner Vogels (Chief Technology Officer) with astounding product announcements and customer stories from Netflix, Airbnb, Parse etc. AWS seemed leaned towards Internet of Things and presented excellent use cases where AWS can be utilized for IoT. Now once again AWS has proved they are leading the world of cloud computing. Here are few highlights of new services and features.
- Amazon EC2 X1 Instances
- T2.Nano
- Amazon EC2 Container Registry
- AWS Lambda Supports Python
- AWS Mobile Hub
- AWS IoT
After Keynote, our focus was breakout sessions. We rescheduled and jumped on the sessions as per our use cases and upcoming requirements. Honestly, it was really magnificent as some of them were from the recent announcement and sessions were jammed packed.
AWS IAM Federation Options: From Roles to SAML to Custom Identity Broker In this session, we focused on how IAM offers a continuum of interfaces and configuration option such as SAML, LDAP etc. This also included the example of actual customers implementation.
Deep Dive: AWS Direct Connect and VPNs: This session described the features of AWS direct connect and VPNs.After we learned how to configure public and private virtual interfaces, configure the router, use VPN backup and use of VPN CloudHub to provide secures communication between sites.
Introduction to AWS Database Migration Service: Here we learned about the new AWS Database Migration Service, Which can help us to migrate the database with minimal downtime from on-premises and Ec2 machines to Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora.Moreover, we also learned about new AWS Schema Conversion Tool that can save our development time when migrating our Oracle and SQL server database schema to their MySQL, MariaDB equivalents.
AWS Cloud Formation Best Practices: This session introduced on how to work with CloudFormation Designer using which you can see relationships between all of your cluster resources. It got an auto-tagged feature so cost/budget can be viewed in cost explorer. Template view gives you everything if not visible on Designer view. Few new services have been added under CloudFormation.
TurboCharge your Continuous Delivery Pipeline using Containers: It described best practices for containers in continuous delivery solutions and the tool-sets to implement them. Gave exposure on Docker composes and ECS CLI. A session took us through the steps that are involved in delivery: Source, Build, Test and Deploy and what all tools can be utilized for them. How CodePipeline can be utilized and integrated with major DevOps tools. Also explained about CloudBees: Docker-build-and-publish-plugin and CloudBees: Jenkins-ECS-Plugin for Jenkins.
Strategies for Protecting Data Using Encryption in AWS: The key takeaways from this session was how to protect your data on AWS using KMS (KeyManagementService), CloudHSM. Detailed about how maintaining an encrypted key hierarchy can be a pain and how it can be solved using KMS. Server-side encryption (AWS – KMS) was chosen over Client-side (3rd Party) encryption for easy management and less overhead.
AWS Directory Service Deep Dive: This session explained how AWS Directory service can be used for a new Setup and with an existing On-premise Setup. Simple-AD & AD-Connector were explained in detail which can help achieving it. Provided easy scripts to make a Linux machine join to the domain. Also showed how WorkSpaces & WorkDocs can work with SSO with it. How Federation can be managed with it.
Introducing Amazon Inspector – Security Insight into your Application Deployment: This was the new service which AWS launched in the event itself so people were excited about it. So, the thing was AI is a service which gives you a security overview of your application. It monitors the server/service with Network/Authentication/OS/PCI/Application best practices and also checks for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. A daemon must be running on your instance to send this data to AWS to analyze and report.
After attending the sessions, AWS had organized the most happening event AWS re:Play bigger than ever. The party had music performance, free food, drinks and tons of activity like drones, video games and more!!
