There are no signs of slowing down for AWS. A total of 65 thousand people made their way to the middle of the desert to learn and engage all things AWS. Considering the size and growth of the conference the event was really well organized and executed. They’ve certainly mitigated for all the horizontal scaling problems, so far at least.

Summary of the notable announcements:

And of course the list continues on and on. There was an astounding amount of announcements overall.

A year of refinement

Arguably, this year is a year of refinement and improvements for AWS. A large share if not all announcements, while still impressive, are about solving very specific edge cases or improving current solutions for users. The new RDS proxy is a managed database connection proxy to help simplify horizontal scaling of Lambda to RDS. Being able to run k8s on Fargate, lets all the existing k8s customers avoid having to manage nodes directly, while not needing to migrate to ECS. The new Nitro Enclaves reduce the attack surface for improved isolation for specific security requirements. The SageMaker announcements are all about improving the process and tooling for people to adopt data science and machine learning. All of these announcements are not revolutionary in themselves, but they do still solve and improve real customer pain points and problems.

Sure, it’s maybe less exciting than some years past when completely new and fundamental services and tools were released. On the other hand, it is even more exciting because it is a clear sign that the services and ecosystem have matured. Their doors are open and they are more than ready for the remaining 97% of the addressable market. As Andy Jassy said in his keynote, currently cloud spend is only 3% of the total $3.7 trillion global IT market. It is clear that AWS is ready for any use case you might have, and the other 97%. The opportunity to migrate to the cloud is more prevalent than it has ever been.

Sessions

With over 3000 sessions throughout the week, it’s inevitable that you feel like you missed out on a lot. That said, the sessions I was able to attend were great overall. I also made it to a couple workshops where the session leaders were able to walk through cloud migration tasks and projects with hands on labs, and actually migrating servers and databases between environments, all within a couple hours! I also attended a few great chalk-talks focused on discussions around the tools, strategies and best practices for approaching cloud migrations. Lots of the audience had great questions and curiosity about the best process and approach, and the session leaders were great at sharing their experiences and best practices that they have learned along their journey with customers. Most people in discussions I had were attending for the first time, but were full of excitement of the potential and opportunity that is ahead of them.

That is all for this year. re:Invent 2020 is 356 days away, see you there!

Phil Rees,
Migration Hacker, tidalmigrations.com