This is the first AWS Summit that I’ve attended online – I’m used to going across to the eXcel Centre in London Docklands having been on a jam packed DLR train.
The online format worked very well, and although I missed the in-person opportunity to network with peers and friends in the AWS community, although it’s obvious why we’re not there this year.
Werner Vogel’s keynote addressed the current pandemic and the impact on people and businesses. He talked about taking the opportunity to sharpen skills and strengthen core businesses, new skills and optimising AWS architectures.
Solid Foundations was explained as a fundamental theme in building stable, secure and efficient systems and architecting properly from the beginning.
Lessons learned – proof and practice, design reliable and secure systems that can withstand massive throughput increases or withstand disruption. Well Architected and The Builders’ Library were called out specifically as free tools to enable customers of AWS to be successful, which is in turn critical for AWS’ own success.
More people working at home because of the pandemic mean that AWS’ customers demand to scale is at an all time high. Market research (source: http://www.conviva.com/research/covid-19streaming) suggests that the time spent streaming video during the daytime compared between March 3rd-9th and March 17th-23rd has increased by 39% during the day!
In the week of March 30th there has been more than 161 billion minutes of streaming video – compared to less than 70 billion minutes at the same time in 2019 (source: https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/people-are-streaming-twice-as-much-video-during-covid-19-crisis-nielsen).
Werner noted that many of the top streaming providers are all running on AWS and have made quite an achievement by being able to scale up. He didn’t call out directly that AWS had enabled that massive scalability, which obviously it has!
He talked about reducing latency using CloudFront, hosting static content on S3 and routing users to resources nearest them using Route 53, all of which are fundamental and foundational technologies within AWS and have been available for years.
Storage was also discussed in the context of media. A 30 second HD TV commercial can take up to 10TB of storage, a feature film 1 Petabyte+, and the way the cloud can now be an enabler for digital content creators to work efficiently without having to be tied to their compute and storage.
Lots of sessions on everything between getting started, security, serverless were then presented.
Andy Jassy then gave some closing remarks about how AWS has been prioritising work during the Covid 19 crisis.
- Supporting the services that run on AWS that allow us to stay home:
- Netflix
- Hulu
- Disney Plus
- Prime Video
- Fortnite
- Sony Playstation
- Chime
- Zoom – (the vast majority still runs on AWS)
- e-learning platforms like Blackboard and Instructure’s Canvas
Keeping employees safe in the AWS data-centres
- Face coverings
- Testing and lab capability
- Temperature testing
- Social distancing
- PPE
- Building an AWS COVID Data Lake to help researchers
Lots of programmes, meaning Amazon is expecting to spend all $4bn profit in Q2 on the COVID crisis
The conversation then turned to common trip-ups with migrating to the cloud:
- Fighting Gravity – argue that they can do the infrastructure less explosively than they can do in the cloud
- Proud of infrastructure you’ve already built
- Why fix it if it’s broken
- Job risk
- If something is good for business
- Toe dippers without committing due to pressure from above
- Financial bubble making the change
- Amazon’s DNA
- Thinking about EC2 – High volume low margin business
- More EC2 instance families than any other provider, if you land too much capacity you are inefficient, if you land too little you have capacity problems
- It’s an incredibly hard logistical challenge to operate in the right way
- You think about cost, savings and innovation cycles differently – Amazon’s DNA as a retail business has this mindset
Aurora is the fastest growing service in the history of AWS.
For machine learning, 85% of Tensorflow in the cloud runs on AWS.
SageMaker is also being taken up by tens of thousands, and SageMaker Studio is now changing the game for the IDE.
Amazon Connect, the call centre service, launched in 2017 is really helping customers during the COVID crisis. Lots of customers are spinning up contact centres in AWS to help them deal with all of their calls, along with desktops in the cloud with Workspaces and videoconferencing solutions, meaning that customer service operatives can add lots of additional value without necessarily being in the office.
Andy wrapped up by talking about how his own working patterns have changed mainly because of the use of videoconferencing, and how different it is when everyone is remote (and a ‘square’ on the screen) rather than just some people remote on a screen and the rest in the room, and how the playing field is levelled because of that.