General Announcements and Themes
Serverless
They'll also announce several new services that are purely serverless in nature. These services will be around: 1. making serverless more secure, 2. making serverless faster and easier to deploy and test (including a HUGE K8s announcement, 3. serverless monitoring.
I think I nailed this one pretty good. From the widely expected ECS for K8s, to the new Aurora Serverless database, there was a lot to take in on the serverless front. However, I think there is still a large hole around security and monitoring for serverless. It's not that you can't use tools like X-ray and AWS WAF to solve those problems, but I feel like more could be done here.
Security
Security is only going to get hotter over the next few years, and AWS doesn't want you to think about security. So I expect to see more services (or at least more features for WAF and Inspector) to help make security super easy. In the spirit of serverless computing, all of these will be fully managed services and many of them will not even require action on the part of users.
I was spot on with this one, and so was AWS. Watchdog is going to be a super helpful product, and is as easy as it comes. A few button clicks and you have this massive new security system in place. I'll be interested to see how well they build the interface. Those with minimal security understanding will need to be able to grasp watch watchdog does and does not do for them. It also needs to be crazy easy to understand what actions to take when an event is detected.
Data analytics
I considered machine learning, but I think that's next year. I do expect to see some very targeted announcements in the poly/rekognition/lex family announced last year, but I think those will mostly be very specific ML tools. Next year I expect to see some broad ML announcements designed to make custom deep learning models super easy, but I just don't think that's been solved yet. So this year will focus back on analytics. Specifically, using serverless computing to process and analyze data super easily. Among other things, this will involve some new connector services that will help pull together various AWS services more easily. Expect at least a few of these to be lambda branded.
Well, I missed the target badly on this one, but I'm glad I did. AWS overshot my expectations, plain and simple. SageMaker is not only the coolest named service of all time, but looks to be a HUGE step up in making ML accessible to the masses.
Specific Announcements
Ok, so I'll probably only get 1-2 of these, but here's what I'm expecting/hoping to see:
New instances types
Specifically, it's time for an M5 instance type and a Machine Learning specific instance type. Wildcard, maybe a new instance family with fast interconnects specifically targeting super computer users, but I don't think so yet.
Yes M5, no ML specific. Not fast interconnect yet, but we did get bare metal and a new P class instance.
New Security Services
A new IDS NAT gateway option
A virus scanning something...
So sad there is still no AWS IDS :(
Serverless
A managed kubernetes. Maybe as a ECS branded thing, but probably it's own thing.
A way to run lambda on your data more directly.... Not exactly sure here, but maybe a lambda tie in with one of the big data offereings? Redshift maybe.
Meh, it was a stretch.
Blockchain
It's hot, and I can't imagine AWS will miss this train. Expect a blockchain service that is fully managed.
Maybe my biggest surprise. AWS is missing this train for now.
Bare Metal
After doing some reading last night, I came across an article by James Hamilton about Oracles pipe dream of competing in the cloud with 1/10th the average investment. In the comments, he talked a bit about bare metal in the cloud. Given his comments, I think we'll see this soon. Maybe not this week, but certainly by next year. This is basically a service which lets you run your own hypervisor on AWS hardware. It's the opposite of what AWS wants to do, but would greatly speed cloud migrations for many companies that currently run on VMWare and similar hypervisor systems.
Yup
Multi-Region Aurora
We NEED a multi-region RDBMS. I don't expect to see this outside Aurora, but I do think we'll see a multi-region option coming to Aurora very soon. What's not clear is how you overcome the speed of light issues. How do you ensure 100% data retention while still having millisecond commit time? My left field prediction is that we will see other database systems (redshift, dynamo, kinesis) also go multi-region.
Well, apparently the speed of light is a problem still ;). However, multi-region multi-master Dynamo is pretty amazing stuff. It became more clear to me at re:invent that this just can't be done with Guaranteed consistency models. But multi-region read-replicas for Aurora is a pretty good step.
Other random stuff
- Yup, 5 venues was a mess, but I don't think it's going to get better
- I only rode the buses one day, but it was ugly, and I hear it didn't get a lot better
- The party was actually not as bad as I expected. They expanded to 3 tents, but it was still pretty crowded. They did a good job breaking things out between the tents too.
- Werner failed me. WORST KEYNOTE EVER!
- No MLB this year. The NFL came instead! :) Glad to see them finally catching up with this.
- Well, we have a new certification, but it makes no sense to me. There was really no need for a "freshman" certification. I think it de-values the entire cert system. As a side note, AWS is getting TOO BIG for general certs though. It may be time to specialize them more into areas like Compute, Data, Network, Serverless/container, etc.
- No checking gift, but lots more random giveaways. Overall, I got a pair of buttons, a deeplense, a 10" fire tablet, an echo+ with lightbulb, and some sort of internet button thing that I can't find any documentation on.
- The hoodies had NO blue on them, and were certainly not better quality :(
- There were some printer giveaways
- Netflix had some cool new stickers
- Tuesday night was actually a lot better than I expected. Still not as good as James Hamilton, but pretty great nonetheless.
