This document summarizes key announcements from re:Invent 2016, AWS's annual user conference. The main themes included artificial intelligence, serverless computing, devops, data, and migration tools. Notable product announcements included AWS Batch for batch processing, Aurora for PostgreSQL, Athena for querying data lakes, and X-Ray for debugging distributed applications. The document also discusses AWS's strategy around machine learning and deep learning using MXNet as its primary framework.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Sunil Mallya, Startup Solution Architect
@sunilmallya
2/1/2017
AWS Loft NYC
Best of re:Invent 2016

2. Agenda
My Goal:
Have an interactive
discussion about AWS
product strategy by
diving into re:Invent
announcements.
Agenda
• Attendance Trends
• Core themes
• Features
• Questions

3. 400+ Sessions
32,000 attendees
AWS Re:Invent 2016

4. Themes of re:Invent

5. Themes of re:Invent 2016
Compute / Networking / Storage
Security / Management
Table Stakes

6. Themes of re:Invent 2016
DevOps
Data
Compute / Networking / Storage
Security / Management
Enterprise
Focus
Table Stakes
Migration and
Operations
Enablement

7. Themes of re:Invent 2016
Artificial Intelligence Serverless
DevOps
Data
Compute / Networking / Storage
Security / Management
Big Bets
Enterprise
Focus
Table Stakes
Migration and
Operations
Enablement

8. Artificial Intelligence Serverless
DevOps
Data
Compute / Networking / Storage
Security / Management
Migration and
Operations
Enablement
Listening to
customers and
simplifying
Priority 0

9. Compute Enhancements
New Instances:
T2
R4
I3
C5
P2
F1
Cost reductions:
T2 / M4 / C4
The latest generation in a family is usually cheaper and
has better specs
Elastic GPUs (announced)
• Attach GPU’s like EBS
volumes
• Will be available to all 9
instance families
• Changes the economics of
GPU compute in the cloud

10. Making EC2 easier
VPS on AWS
Predictable pricing model
Instances run in separate VPC
VPC peering to integrate with existing
VPC based resources

11. Batch computing made easy
AWS Batch (preview)
• Fully-managed batch
processing at any scale
• Dynamic resource
provisioning, scaling, spot
fleet integration
• Priority queuing and
scheduling of jobs with
dependencies
Financial Services
Life Sciences
Digital Media
Use Cases

12. Security and Account Management
AWS Shield
• Managed DDoS protection
• Standard and ‘Advanced’
protection
• Advanced protection
includes WAF integration
(CloudFront/ELB)
AWS Organizations (Preview)
• Replacing consolidating
billing
• Provides ability to
• Create accounts
• Invite existing accounts
• Pay a single bill

13. AWS
Big Data
Artificial Intelligence Serverless
DevOps
Data
Compute / Networking / Storage
Security / Management
Migration and
Operations
Enablement

14. Clustered DB Engines
Conventional Big Data Flow on AWS
Data Lake
S3
RedShiftEMR
BI Tools
Data Scientists
ETL

15. Clustered DB Engines
Making big data more attractive on AWS
Amazon Athena
• Serverless query service
that runs on top of S3
• Presto engine (ANSI-
SQL)
• JSON, CSV, Parquet, ORC
• Pay per query
• Fast performance
Data Lake
S3
RedShiftEMR
Athena
BI Tools
Data Scientists
ETL

16. Disrupting ‘enterprise grade’ databases
Aurora for PostgreSQL
(Preview)
• Full Postgres 9.6.1
compatibility
• Aurora benefits:
• Failover time < 30 sec
• 6 copies across 3 AZs
• Single-digit millisecond
replica lag
• At-rest and in-transit
encryption
SQL
Txns
Caching
StoreStore StoreStore
AZ 1 AZ 2
StoreStore
AZ 3
What makes Aurora Special?

17. Benchmark

18. Migrating data…
Storage Gateway
Enhancements
• POSIX compliant on-prem
NFS
• Automatically stores data
onto S3
• Automatically caches
Snowball Edge
• 100 TB Capacity
• S3/NFS Compliant
End/Mountpoints
• Clustering mode
• Lambda functions on-board

19. Migrating data… literally by the ton
AWS Snowmobile
• 45 Feet Long
• 100 PB of Capacity
• 256-bit KMS Managed
encryption
• Rich chain-of-custody
options
• $0.005 / GB per month

20. Shrinking
migration
barriers
Artificial Intelligence Serverless
DevOps
Data
Compute / Networking / Storage
Security / Management
Migration and
Operations
Enablement

21. VMware on AWS (Preview)
Fully managed VMware environment
on the AWS Cloud
Includes the VMware technologies
customers are currently running on-
premises
Combines the enterprise features of
VMware with the elasticity and security
of AWS
Components of VMWare Cloud on AWS

22. Configuration Management
Amazon EC2 Systems
Manager
• Tools for configuration
management of EC2 and on-
premises systems
• OS configuration
• Ad-hoc configuration
changes
• Run scheduled
administrative tasks
AWS OpsWorks for Chef
Automate
• Fully managed Chef server and a
suite of automation tools
• Compatible Chef cookbooks from
the Chef community
• Auto scaling groups for instance
registration and bootstrapping

23. Continuous Delivery
AWS CodeBuild
Fully managed build service that compiles
source code, runs tests, and produces
software packages that are ready to deploy

24. State Machines and ETL
AWS Step Functions
• Successor to Amazon
Simple Workflow Service
• Amazon States Language
Specification
• Lambda and ‘Activity’ Tasks
• States:
AWS Glue(pre-announced)
• Successor to AWS Data
Pipeline
• Fully managed ETL
• Source detection and
transform suggestions
• Built-in integration with
• Any JDBC-compliant
driver

25. DEMO

26. Custom Scheduling Framework
• Enhanced CloudWatch events for
ECS state changes
• Container instances
• Tasks
• Allows for custom scheduling
• Cluster-state-service and
daemon-scheduler
ECS CLI
• For development
Containers
https://github.com/blox
• Tools and utilities to allow
extensibility of the EC2 Container
Service to better support emerging
requirements

27. Pioneer tax cuts
Artificial Intelligence Serverless
DevOps
Data
Compute / Networking / Storage
Security / Management
Migration and
Operations
Enablement

28. Serverless Improvements
X-Ray (preview)
• Debug and trace end-to-end
requests in distributed apps
• Graphical topology of services
• Agent and API based integration
(Java/Node/.Net)
• Pricing will most likely be for trace
storage and retrieval
Serverless Application
Models
• Declarative CloudFormation
syntax for Serverless
• AWS::Serverless Primitives
• Lambda Functions
• DynamoDB Tables
• API Gateway
• (Swagger support)
• Infrastructure as code

29. X-Ray Screenshots

30. X-Ray Screenshots

31. X-Ray Screenshots

32. X-Ray Screenshots

33. Other Notable Improvements
Lambda@Edge (preview)
Greengrass (limited preview)
Dead Letter Queue
C# Support

34. Widening the AI
spectrum on
AWS
Artificial Intelligence Serverless
DevOps
Data
Compute / Networking / Storage
Security / Management
Migration and
Operations
Enablement

35. On one end of the spectrum:
AI Enabled Services

36. AI Enabled Services
Polly
• Natural sounding
speech
• Accurate text
processing
• SSML support
• 24 Languages, 47
voices
Lex
• Build Intelligent
chatbots
• Powered by same
technology as
Alexa
• Deploy to multiple
platforms
Rekognition
• Search, Verify and
Organize images
at scale
• Face Analysis,
Face Compare,
Face Recognition,
Object & Scene
detection

37. DEMO

38. At the other end of the
spectrum:
‘DIY’
Deep Learning

39. DIY Deep Learning

40. AWS has picked its AI racehorse
MXNet (Mixed Network Models)
Programmability
Python, JS, R, Matlab
Portability
1000-layer network can fit inside 4GB
Performance
88% efficiency scaling up to 256 GPUs

41. What about the middle of the
spectrum?

42. Wrapping up…
Artificial Intelligence Serverless
DevOps
Data
Compute / Networking / Storage
Security / Management
Big Bets
Enterprise
Focus
Table Stakes
Migration and
Operations
Enablement

43. Thank you!
smallya@amazon.com