AWS Re:Invent 2015

AWS was an amazing conference.  All of my notes of the events I went to are here. (Scroll down to read the README.md file)

Just some quick overall thoughts:

1.  Compared to Cisco, AWS really skips out on the food and entertainment.  I mean, come on, we had Aerosmith at Cisco Live and AWS gives us what?  I can’t even remember the name.  Doesn’t really matter, cause I went home that night anyway.

2.  This should be a longer event.  There were too many sessions I wanted to attend.  I was fortunate enough to attend an IoT bootcamp and that could have easily gone another day if they would have added some analysis.  I wish it would have.

3.  The announcements never stopped.  I lost count around 20, but there were a ton of new features and services.  Take Amazon snowball:  $200 to send 50TB into AWS.  Best comment on that?  Costs $1500 to move it out.  (50,000 * $0.03)

4.  The biggest surprise to me was hearing the amount of customers that use the Cisco CSR1000v.  It’s not my product to know, so I don’t feel bad saying this.  I didn’t think there were so many users of it!  Wow.  The use case was “Transitive Routing”.  Imagine having 3 VPCs.  One of them is externally connected.  Placing one pair of CSR 1000vs in that externally connected VPC allows for the other VPCs to communicate to each other using BGP internally.  Pretty cool.

5.  Everyone is in trouble.  When Amazon QuickSight was announced I thought:  Wow, if you’re into analytics in the cloud you are in trouble. I don’t know which companies may have been effected by that, but I suspect they are the tip of the iceberg.  Take New Relic for example.  Right now they are doing really well for admin analytics.  How long before AWS puts a service to do that?

6.  What I was wondering about is if they were ever going to announce some sort of on-prem solution. The closest they got to that was Amazon Snowball, bless their hearts.  It probably doesn’t make sense for them to complicate things with that and leads to more capability of intellectual property getting loose.  After all, these are linux machines, and if a managed service happened on prem, that would be easy to get into.

7.  Look out Oracle!  Woah, that was some serious swinging.  And Oracle, you have a lot to worry about.  First of all, nobody I talk to really likes you.  People have nostalgic feelings for Sun but I’ve not really talked to people that like Oracle.  Perhaps that’s because I don’t talk to database administrators as much.  But guess what?  Nobody really likes them either.  So you have a hated product ran by hated people.  Probably won’t take long for people to dump that when refresh season comes up.

8.  Lambda.  Last year, AWS introduced Lambda.  I don’t think people still really get how important Lambda is.  Its the glue that makes a serverless architecture in AWS work.  “The easiest server to manage is no server” said Werner Vogels.  This is the real future of the cloud.  Like my previous post on getting rid of the operating system said;  managing operating systems is the last mile.  VMS are a thing of the past.  Even containers are less exciting when you think about a serverless architecture.  Just a place to execute code and APIs to do all the work.  Database, storage, streaming, any service you want is just an API.  Where AWS lambda fails in my book is that its limited to only AWS services.  Imagine if this were available to extend to any cloud service.  That to me would be the real Intercloud Cisco dreams about. As more cloud APIs develop, extending Lambda to an “API Store” is something more people would find value in.  Amazon probably wouldn’t because it means people using non-AWS services.  But this is where I would be investing if I were trying to compete against AWS.  Nothing else seems to be working.

Anyway, that’s my take.  What did you think?