Yesterday was Amazon’s AWS Summit New York, where over 11,000 attendees and 125+ APN partners came together for a full day of learning, collaboration, and networking. Security was a common theme across many of the days breakout sessions, and was certainly a focus during Dr. Werner Vogels (VP and CTO) keynote presentation. Machine learning and AI found their way into many of the day’s sessions, specifically around making big data work smarter, not harder for your applications and business needs.
Cloud management was at the forefront of this year’s show, where attendees were challenged with finding a way to better manage their cloud infrastructure and services. Businesses early in their AWS cloud journey were focused on learning ways to better manage migration and early spend, where more mature AWS customers said managing security and compliance was their biggest challenge for the upcoming year. That being said, learning to build governance and automation policies to help manage one’s cloud environment ‘hands-free’ resonated with AWS users, regardless of where they were at in their cloud journey.
Dr. Werner Vogels keynote was centered around what he considers the five pillars of modern applications:
- Modern apps are applications first, not infrastructure first
- Modern apps are serverless
- Modern apps automate everything
- Modern apps make security everyone’s job
- Modern apps allow you to extract the most value from your data
While Vogels recognizes that monolith applications are unlikely to disappear for good (there are still monolithic apps today that should avoid being descontructed and rebuilt into microservices), applications in the next-gen of cloud will—on a whole—continue to be smaller, more specialized, and built with security and scalability in mind.
And despite what you might think, it’s not just small technology startups that are leading the charge with microservices and serverless. Vogels says enterprises are actually now some of the biggest and most innovative users of serverless and Lamda (he highlighted Capital One as one such enterprise leading the charge).
A major focus during Vogels keynote was security (he was even sporting a black t-shirt with the words ‘encrypt everything’ splashed across the front). In his eyes, the world of security needs to drastically change—there should no longer be a separate security team within a business because security responsibility falls on everyone. Everyone becomes the ‘security team’. From engineers and development to finance and business operations, from production and testing to staging and live environments, security needs to be ingrained in every function of the CI/CD pipeline. That, Vogels says, is the only way businesses can continue to innovate rapidly while maintaining world class security.
One of Vogels favorite quotes (I was quite the fan myself) goes, “Dance like no one’s watching, encrypt like everyone is.”
Other key themes from the keynote include a look at how AWS is improving its support for blockchain services, the rapid adoption of AWS Lake Formation (and what that means for the future of data analytics), and the growth of Amazon RedShift, which AWS equates to the listening to customers needs and improving the platform to solve said challenges.
Other big announcements:
- Amazon Event Bridge: a serverless event bus for ingesting and processing across AWS services and SaaS applications. This solution removes friction when writing point-to-point integrations.
- Amazon SageMaker Managed Spot Training: this solution optimizes the cost of training machine learning models using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, saving up to 80% on training costs.
What role does AWS play in next-gen cloud? According to Vogels, AWS users should only be writing business logic in the future, nothing else. Everything from security, to availability, to automation should and will be hosted on AWS. Future innovation is focused on streamlining the experience for AWS users, so innovation, agility, and growing one’s business in the marketplace can stay top of mind.
