It’s safe to say that re:Invent is back! With over 50,000 attendees this year, AWS’s flagship event is officially back to full capacity following two years of limitations due to the global pandemic. Las Vegas was abuzz, as conference attendees drank in the bright lights, expo hype, tech talks, and sponsored libations.
Cost optimization is top-of-mind
In these challenging economic times, cost optimization is top-of-mind with businesses of all types, sizes, and industries. What a great time to be a vendor that can help you spare employees’ jobs by squeezing a little bit more juice out of your cloud computing limes!
We demo’d VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth to thousands of attendees, educated buyers on FinOps best practices, and shared some of our latest product enhancements with customers – including Anomaly Detection, our new rightsizing engine, and Kubernetes and ECS usage reporting.
The FinOps market is maturing
It’s clear that the market for cloud cost optimization is maturing, as buyers came to us with a foundational understanding of the requirements for optimizing their cloud usage and costs, and asked excellent questions about the capabilities that VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth can deliver. Some of this market maturity can likely be attributed to the work of the FinOps Foundation, and we are thrilled to continue our deep partnership with this organization as a member of the Governing Board and Technical Advisory Council. We are happy to see the efforts of the foundation paying off for vendors, practitioners, and the businesses who adopt FinOps.
This year we were honored to share the stage with the executive director and co-founder of the FinOps Foundation, J.R. Storment, who – together with one of the OG product managers for VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth (Lucas Paratore), and a seasoned FinOps practitioner (Josh Bauman from Electronic Arts) – delivered a standing-room-only breakout session on FinOps principles and the importance of accessing real-time data for cost and usage optimization. We might be biased, but we did hear from a non-biased re:Invent attendee that this was the best breakout session of the week! In case you missed it, you can catch a replay of this session.
VMware Aria made a re:Invent debut
Cost isn’t the only metric that re:Invent attendees are concerned about, and AWS’s Peter DeSantis, who has been described as AWS’s “infrastructure czar,” understood that, as he stood up to deliver the opening keynote with the following words on his first slide: “Elasticity”, “security”, “performance”, “cost”, “availability”, “sustainability.” DeSantis promised that AWS is investing heavily in their infrastructure to unlock innovation in a way that simply cannot be matched on-prem. While customers look to tighten the reigns on spending, AWS knows that delivering technology innovations that drive better customer experiences and business outcomes will be the X factor that keeps them consuming.
VMware also understands the importance of innovative tooling for the modern cloud management era and is here to pick up where AWS leaves off: with support for multiple public and private cloud environments. Enter VMware Aria, a new multi-cloud management portfolio that provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, security configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and applications. VMware Aria was announced at VMware Explore US in August 2022 and made its first re:Invent appearance, showcasing Aria Hub and Graph, a unified management console with federated data from VMware Cloud and public cloud environments. Learn more about the free tier of Aria Hub.
New AWS services
There will be no shortage of blogs over the next few weeks highlighting some of the thousands of new resources and services that AWS delivered this year, but perhaps the best place to find this summary is straight from the horse’s mouth: AWS Blog: Top Announcements of AWS re:Invent 2022. For a more complete rundown of all of the AWS re:Invent 2022 announcements, visit What’s New with AWS: 2022 Archive.
Replays on demand
In case you missed them, you can watch replays of the keynotes and leadership sessions on demand. We look forward to seeing you again at next year’s big event!
