AWS re:Invent Keynote Day 1 Takeaways

Sadly I couldn’t attend this year, but heck that’s what the Internet is for.  Here’s the interesting bits from the AWS re:Invent Day 1 keynote (livestreamed here). Loads of interesting stuff.

1. AWS is growing revenue >40% YOY, far outstripping other large IT companies – EC2 use grew 99% YOY and S3 usage 137%, they have 1M active customers now. (Microsoft cloud services report 128% YOY growth as well.)
2. New product announcement for Aurora – new commercial-grade database engine – fully MySQL compatible but 5x the performance, available through Amazon RDS, 1/10 the cost of the commercial DB engines (starts at 29 cents an hour, ~$210/mo). Can do 6M inserts/second and 30M selects/second. Highly durable (11 9’s), crash recovery in seconds with no data loss. Nice!
3. SLDC stuff!
   1. CodeDeploy (was internal tool called Apollo), a new code-deployment system that lets you do rolling updates, rollbacks, and tracks deployment health. This works for all languages and is free. They use it internally for 95 deploys/hour on their own stuff.
   2. In early 2015 will come some more software lifecycle management services – first is CodePipeline for continuous integration and deployment (also used internally)
   3. Second is CodeCommit as a managed code repository that can colocate with where you’re going to deploy and has no size limits of repos or files. These “integrate with” github, jenkins, chef, etc. though it’s not clear how they don’t cannibalize them.
4. Security stuff! Big push to be able to say “we easily surpass the security you can do on premise.”
   1. FISMA, ITAR, FIPS, FedRAMP, HIPAA, ISO 9001
   2. Current encryption approach is either “let Amazon manage keys” or use their CloudHSM hosted key thing, both of which are still a pain. As a result they’re launching AWS Key Management Service as a HA service that manages keys, provides one-click encryption and transparent key rotation.
   3. AWS Config is a new-gen agile CMDB with full visibility into all your AWS resources. You can query it and see relationships and show scope of a config change. Streams all config changes out to you.
   4. A new-gen service catalog called AWS Service Catalog available early 2015. Create and share product portfolios, let internal people launch them, tracking and compliance.
5. Enterprise Cloud Adoption Patterns
   1. Often the first wave of moving into the cloud for enterprises is moving dev and test environments to run in AWS for flexibility and spin up/down for cost savings and  brand new apps, custom written for the cloud
   2. Second wave is web sites and digital transformation (media, corp sites, ecomm) and analytics, since mass processing and sharing is cheap in the cloud – data warehouses (like pfizer’s). And mobile app back ends – phone, tablet, gps, more.
   3. Third wave is business critical applications.  Macmillan and Hoya run their SAP in AWS. Conde Nast runs HR and Legal there.
   4. New wave – you’re starting to see entire datacenter migration and consolidation as DCs come up for lease (Hess, Conde Nast, NewsCorp). SunCorp. Time Inc., GPT, Nippon Express moving “all in” to AWS – many ISVs as well. The CIA moved to AWS and now Intuit is doing so now as well.
   5. Intuit moved their “TurboTax AnswerXchange” app there to deal with tax time peaks last year and the scales fell from their eyes when they did so – 6x cost cut, setup 1/5 of the time, faster development. They started doing more and realized the global datacenters, ease of integration with acquisitions, and dev recruiting benefits. They have 33 services on AWS now, and have moved mint.com there. They have decided to move everything else there now. Funny how once companies start looking at how much they accomplish instead of just the monthly cost the “cloud is more expensive at scale” argument gets dropped like a flaming bag of poo.
6. Hybrid cloud
   1. Various stuff like directory service (AD in the cloud) and identity federation and storage gateway and SystemCenter and vCenter integration already exist to power mixed shops
   2. Johnson & Johnson went on for a while about their use of AWS.  They are planning a 25,000 seat deployment of Workspaces (virtual desktop offering, like Citrix).

Whew, that’s the quick notes version.  Aurora is obviously of interest – a lot of the fretting over whether to use mySQL or RDS I’ve seen will get settled by this – it was just ‘well, run the same thing yourself or have them do it…” and now it’s “have them run something insanely better”. But the SDLC tools are also interesting – they made noise about how these “work with!” ansible, jenkins, git, etc. but that seems mildly disingenuous, without any more looking into it yet they sound more like direct competition for them. But the config and service catalog could be great extensions – yay for simple composable services, not huge painful “BSM/ITMOM suites”.

Feel free and share your thoughts on the announcements in the comments section!