Day 2 at re:Invent is wrapping up, and what a crazy day it was. The day started with the first of the two big keynote announcements. Andy Jassy, the SVP who heads AWS, was the standard speaker for the kickoff re:Invent keynote. Andy was actually the person who drove the business plan that launched AWS, taking it from a concept to the the broad services available today. The keynote was given in an enormous warehouse-like space with over 13K seats.

Some key things Andy said include:

  • AWS has 1 million active customers.
  • AWS has the highest revenue growth rate of any multi-billion tech business (>40%). Note: he used AWS instead of Amazon as the comparison, fueling more social media speculation AWS will be spun out of Amazon.
  • Mentioned Boston-based Acquia on multiple occasions. Local Pega also has a slide and mention.
  • “Cloud has become the new normal”
  • He tangentially mentioned competitors in making a case for why AWS has the best cloud.
  • AWS on track to produce almost two times the features in 2014 that they did in 2013.

He also announced several new services:

  • CodeDeploy - developer service for deploying code to servers (my company uses Chef for this)
  • CodePipeline (2015) - developer service for continuous integration (my company uses Solano for this)
  • CodeCommit (2015) - developer service for managing source code (my company uses GitHub for this)
  • AWS Key Management - management service for keys (important to enterprise)
  • AWS Config - configuration / change management service, sort of like another CloudTrail-like data pump that delivers great information on change.
  • AWS Service Catalog (2015) - ability for IT to define a service catalog for their organization and have line of business launch IT-approved / configured infrastructure.
  • AWS Aurora - Enterprise-grade relational database with MySql compatibility. Direct competitor to Oracle. As one person said on floor: “AWS declared war on Oracle… again”.

He also had few keynote speakers from Major League Baseball, Intuit and Healthcare Informatics. MLB demo was one of the best done at a re:Invent. Intuit talk was not very engaging. Healthcare talk was interesting but not great (note to self: telling everyone in audience 1 of 2 of them will get cancer in their lifetime is not a great opener). About 15-20 minutes before it was over, everyone started streaming out to head to their first sessions.

The day’s sessions were great, with the docker session being one of the most well attended. Everyone talking about the expected announcement of a container service. Lots of other rumors circulating as well, from new instance type families to new storage services. I ended the day with a stop by the Pub Crawl and dinner with one of our customers.

The big question ruminating through my head all day was how will customers balance the tradeoff between the power of platform services (e.g. Arora, Kinesis, DynamoDB) and the vendor lockin that comes with these services. One technologist I know suggested the future will likely require portability decisions on a per function / role basis. I'll cover this topic in more detail in a future blog post, but definitely a topic that will be confronting enterprises as they accelerate their adoption.

Overall another great day at re:Invent.

Related posts: Day 1 at re:Invent, Day 3 at re:Invent