ReInvent 2013: Day 2 Keynote

I didn’t cover the day 1 keynote, but fortunately it can be found here. The day 2 keynote was a lot more technical and interesting though. Here are my notes from it:

First, we began by talking about how aws plans its projects.

Before any project is started, and teams are in the brainstorming phase. A few key things are always done.

• Meeting minutes
• FAQ
• Figure out the ux
• Before any code is written

“2 Pizza Teams”: Small autonomous teams that had roadmap ownership with decoupled lauch schedules.

Get the functionality in the hands of customers as soon as possible. It may be feature limited, but it’s in the hands of customers so that they can get feedback as soon as possible. Iterate iterate iterate based on feedback. Different from the old guard where everything is engineering driven and it is unnecessarily complex.

Netflix platform….

Netflix is on stage and we’re taking about the Netflix cloud prizes and talking about the enhancements to the different tools…looks pretty cool, and will need to check them out. There are 14 chaos monkey “tests” to run now instead of just 1 from before.

Werner is back is breaking down the different facets that AWS focuses on:

• Performance- measure everything; put performance data in log files that can be mined.
• Security
• Reliability
• Cost
• Scalability

Illya sukhar CEO from Parse is on stage now (platform for mobile apps)
-parse data: store data; it’s 5 lines of code instead of a bunch of code.
-push notification

Parse started with 1 aws instance
From 0-180,000 apps

180,000 collections in mongodb; shows differences between pre and post piops

Security

IAM and IAM roles to set boundaries on who can access what.
How to do this from a db perspective?
Apparently you can have fine grained access controls on dynamodb instead of writing your own code.
Each data block is encrypted in redshift
Cost:
Talking about how customers are using the spot instances to save $.

Scalability:
We transfer usecase, who take care of transferring large files.

Airbnb on stage with mike curtis, VP of engineering
-350k hosts around the world
-4 millions guests (jan 2013)
-9 million guests today.

Host of aws services
1k ec2 instances
Million RDS rows
50tb for photos in s3

“The ops team at Airbnb is with a 5 person ops team.”

Helps devote resources to the real problem.

Dropcam came on stage after that to talk about how they use the AWS platform. Nothing too crazy, but interestingly more inbound videos are sent to dropcam than YouTube!

They keynote ended with an Amazon Kinesis demo (and a deadmau5 announcement for the replay party), which on the outside looks like a streaming API and different ways to process data on the backend. A prototype of streaming data from twitter and performing analytics was shown to demonstrate the service.

Announcements

• RDS for PostgreSQL
• New instance types-i2 for much better io performance
• Dynamo db- global secondary indexes!!
• Federation with saml 2.0 for IAM
• Amazon RDS- cross region read replicas!
• G2 instances for media and video intensive application
• C3 instances are new with fastest processors- 2.8 gig intel e5 v2
• Amazon kinesis- real time processing, fully managed. It looks like this will help you solve issues of scalability when you’re trying to build realtime streaming applications. It integrates with storage and processing services.

Incase you want to watch it, the day 2 keynote is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Waq8Y6s1Cjs

And also, the day 1 keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISQbdZ7WWc