General Announcements and Themes
So, let's be straight here, it's really hard to accurately predict the exact new services that will be offered. I'm still going to try, but lest I look completely incompetent, I'm going to start with some more general predictions.
Serverless
Serverless computing will be a HUGE theme again this year. AWS has been working to figure out exactly how lambda can play over the last 2 years, and I think they've got the architecture pretty much figured out. Expect this year to be the year that they declare serverless ready for prime time. As part of that, not only will they showcase how at least one major company is doing something amazing with serverless, but 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.
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.
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.
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.
New Security Services
A new IDS NAT gateway option
A virus scanning something...
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.
Blockchain
It's hot, and I can't imagine AWS will miss this train. Expect a blockchain service that is fully managed.
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.
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.
Other random stuff
- The new format with 5 venues is going to stink
- I've got Monday at the Aria, Tue-Thur I'm in the park at Jam sessions (these are great). Nonetheless, I still expect it to be a giant nightmare.
- The buss system will be a mess (I'm cheating a bit on this one, my first bus ride this AM stunk)
- The party is going to be too crowded to enjoy. The first year they moved outside was pretty good, but last year the tents were just not big enough. I loved that they put the games in one tent and the music in the other, but with the larger crowd, they'll need at least 3 tents this year to even have a chance.
- Werner will outdo himself again. The snowmobile was just amazing last year. Don't get me wrong, I didn't hear a soul say "I'm so glad they have that now", and I imagine they've got dozens of customers total for that thing, but the wow factor was great. It was the buzz of the rest of the day. I expect them to find a way to do something more amazing this year.
- MLB will be back. Every year they seem to include MLB in one of their keynotes. I'm not a baseball fan, but these guys are doing amazing stuff with technology.
- They'll introduce another specialty exam. Last year they tried analytics, security, and networking, and two of the three were a success. This year I think they'll introduce a serverless exam.
- Last year we all got a dot at checkin. This year it will be a pair of echo buttons.
- The hoodies will be better than last year, and have more blue on them.
- At least one vendor will be giving away a 3d printer
- Netflix will have new stickers
- The Tuesday night speaker will not be as cool as James Hamilton. Seriously, go watch this. I don't care who you are, you can't top that.
No comments:
Post a Comment