So take a look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)
No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):
Want to read on?
Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:
The battle for load wages on – All IaaS players need to attract load to their cloud in order to achieve and maintain scale. This was also obvious at reinvent as AWS made several moves to get more load to AWS. The prime targets in this race are the SaaS players, as a partnership with a SaaS player gives access to a lot of conform, standard and repeatable load. Even better the SaaS player will advertise and help move its customers over. So that AWS wanted to have Workday is no surprise. That Workday picked AWS for production loads was a little more, given the recent decision to run development and test loads on IBM Cloud (read here). Earlier this year AWS got commitments from Salesforce (see here) and SAP for BW4HANA (see here). The next lower priority to get load is to have enterprises build their next generation applications on the vendor’s platform and AWS provided a number (see below) of new services to make it attractive to build these. The prime ones are around BigData and Machine Learning – and AWS announced Amazon Athena (query S3 with SQL) and AWS Glue (ETL and more), Amazon AI, Rekognition, Polly and Lex). And once they are built you need to make it easy to operate on the platform, it needs to be secure (AWS Shield), and efficient (Amazon Lightsail, EC2 Systems Manager, AWS CodeBuild, X-Ray and Batch). And customers want to get more value out of their code (AWS Snowball Edge – runs AWS Lambda) and use more of their skills (adding C# to AWS Lambda, adding PostGreSQL to Aurora). But a limitation can be the data movement, so the catchy announcement was the AWS Snowmobile, a container that can move up to 200 PB from on premises to cloud. All are valid offers and arguments for enterprises to use AWS as their IaaS.
Ease of use and consumption – With the growth of AWS – now at over 3.5k+ capabilities – if you add all the innovations up from the start) has become a complex system. Education was prominent as was certification. We are always fans of valid and hard certification tests, as they help enterprises to know which consultant / programmer can do what. But at the core it is about software based improvements and what stood out to me were AWS X-Ray, AWS CodeBuild and the enablement of CI and CD processes in AWS.
AWS doubles down on AWS Lambda – Since its announcement, AWS Lambda has been an interesting and differentiating way for building code in AWS, bring the code to the data, only pay when used etc. AWS Lambda as a language and platform become now more prominent as AWS uses Lambda as well to move code from AWS outside the connected cloud environment, e.g. on the new AWS Snowball Edge. Somebody deserves more than paycheck and bonus of adding the light weight application server to S3, which in my guess is the platform for all of this. This is good news for enterprises, as AWS proprietary code build on AWS Lambda can go more places.
My picks – Very hard to pick the Top announcements for each day, maybe AWS (and me) need to think of different categories (e.g. developer, CIO, data scientist, DevOps etc.) – but here you go: For Day #1 for me it is Athena – being able to query data in S3 with well-known SQL is a win win. More data gets accessible with the #1 query language. And given that S3 is one of the major attractions of AWS, a key move by the vendor. For Day #2 it is AWS Glue: Every year AWS tries to take a piece of traditional IT spend and offer an alternative – it was Amazon Workspaces 3 years ago, Amazon Aurora 2 years ago and Amazon QuickSight last year – now it is AWS Glue – an ETL and more to get data moved, enriched, etc. to give users more time to do what matters: Analytics.
On the concern side, AWS was not able to deliver a major ‘All in’ customer to the two keynotes, admittedly GE is a tough act to follow, but I would have expected to see more public traction. Instead we had repeat keynote presenters, e.g. FINRA. Nothing wrong with this, good to see an update. The event was well visited from an international perspective, but apart from ENEL, I didn’t recall non-North American customers presenting. Maybe AWS keeps them stocked for the many regional AWS Summits that happen throughout the year. But these are minor concerns compared to who AWS wants to keep operating: Operating models are different when you are the web serviced division of an online retailer with a few 100Ms in revenue (as AWS was 5-6 years ago), experimenting with services and seeing what ‘sticks’ (CTO Vogels back then) – vs. being a 10B+ key IT infrastructure provider. I asked CEO Jassy about this and his answer was clear – AWS will not slow down. And while 1000 new capabilities will be manageable it will be 1500 (extrapolation from me here) next year, and close to 3500 in 2 years, if AWS keeps pace. At some point AWS will have to package, simplify, provide version to its offering – maybe the start will be separate conferences as the Sands Convention Center was at times over the limits of its capacity.
But for now, all is well for AWS, it needs to catch up in some areas like e.g. Machine Learning and it was interesting to see how AWS execs positioned this, but that was bound to happen. And frankly is not expected by enterprises either, leading in all aspects of next generation applications is no longer realistic given the wide range of products and services offered. And AWS has achieved what it wanted to get done since a long time, be the platform that cannot be ignored and must be evaluated when enterprises make cloud infrastructure decision. Stay tuned for more.
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).
The battle for load wages on – All IaaS players need to attract load to their cloud in order to achieve and maintain scale. This was also obvious at reinvent as AWS made several moves to get more load to AWS. The prime targets in this race are the SaaS players, as a partnership with a SaaS player gives access to a lot of conform, standard and repeatable load. Even better the SaaS player will advertise and help move its customers over. So that AWS wanted to have Workday is no surprise. That Workday picked AWS for production loads was a little more, given the recent decision to run development and test loads on IBM Cloud (read here). Earlier this year AWS got commitments from Salesforce (see here) and SAP for BW4HANA (see here). The next lower priority to get load is to have enterprises build their next generation applications on the vendor’s platform and AWS provided a number (see below) of new services to make it attractive to build these. The prime ones are around BigData and Machine Learning – and AWS announced Amazon Athena (query S3 with SQL) and AWS Glue (ETL and more), Amazon AI, Rekognition, Polly and Lex). And once they are built you need to make it easy to operate on the platform, it needs to be secure (AWS Shield), and efficient (Amazon Lightsail, EC2 Systems Manager, AWS CodeBuild, X-Ray and Batch). And customers want to get more value out of their code (AWS Snowball Edge – runs AWS Lambda) and use more of their skills (adding C# to AWS Lambda, adding PostGreSQL to Aurora). But a limitation can be the data movement, so the catchy announcement was the AWS Snowmobile, a container that can move up to 200 PB from on premises to cloud. All are valid offers and arguments for enterprises to use AWS as their IaaS.
 |
| All reInvent 2016 announcements |
Ease of use and consumption – With the growth of AWS – now at over 3.5k+ capabilities – if you add all the innovations up from the start) has become a complex system. Education was prominent as was certification. We are always fans of valid and hard certification tests, as they help enterprises to know which consultant / programmer can do what. But at the core it is about software based improvements and what stood out to me were AWS X-Ray, AWS CodeBuild and the enablement of CI and CD processes in AWS.
 |
| All of AWS in 1 slide |
AWS doubles down on AWS Lambda – Since its announcement, AWS Lambda has been an interesting and differentiating way for building code in AWS, bring the code to the data, only pay when used etc. AWS Lambda as a language and platform become now more prominent as AWS uses Lambda as well to move code from AWS outside the connected cloud environment, e.g. on the new AWS Snowball Edge. Somebody deserves more than paycheck and bonus of adding the light weight application server to S3, which in my guess is the platform for all of this. This is good news for enterprises, as AWS proprietary code build on AWS Lambda can go more places.
 |
| Vogels walks by AWS Athena |
My picks – Very hard to pick the Top announcements for each day, maybe AWS (and me) need to think of different categories (e.g. developer, CIO, data scientist, DevOps etc.) – but here you go: For Day #1 for me it is Athena – being able to query data in S3 with well-known SQL is a win win. More data gets accessible with the #1 query language. And given that S3 is one of the major attractions of AWS, a key move by the vendor. For Day #2 it is AWS Glue: Every year AWS tries to take a piece of traditional IT spend and offer an alternative – it was Amazon Workspaces 3 years ago, Amazon Aurora 2 years ago and Amazon QuickSight last year – now it is AWS Glue – an ETL and more to get data moved, enriched, etc. to give users more time to do what matters: Analytics.
 |
| Vogels announces AWS Glue |
MyPOV
AWS growth keeps going strong, frankly at an amazing rate. By now it has attracted every services player (it has signed up over 10k partners in 12 months), has been evaluated by all major ISVs, is the default platform for most startups, and few enterprises are not running one piece of automation or the other on the platform. And growth both in functionality as well as business does not seem to slow down, not even showing a sign of weakness. Au contraire, the number of new capabilities YoY has increased by almost 50% - from a base of 700 to 1000. This is all good progress and sailing by AWS, making it the clear market leader for IaaS and the PaaS related services on top of it. And new use cases, like e.g. IoT was presented in the keynote with Italian energy giant ENEL, continuing the tradition that keynote speakers for IoT come from European enterprises. And AWS is growing up, with a separate partner program, region, country specific events at reinvent, even the stream was subtitle in 4 languages.On the concern side, AWS was not able to deliver a major ‘All in’ customer to the two keynotes, admittedly GE is a tough act to follow, but I would have expected to see more public traction. Instead we had repeat keynote presenters, e.g. FINRA. Nothing wrong with this, good to see an update. The event was well visited from an international perspective, but apart from ENEL, I didn’t recall non-North American customers presenting. Maybe AWS keeps them stocked for the many regional AWS Summits that happen throughout the year. But these are minor concerns compared to who AWS wants to keep operating: Operating models are different when you are the web serviced division of an online retailer with a few 100Ms in revenue (as AWS was 5-6 years ago), experimenting with services and seeing what ‘sticks’ (CTO Vogels back then) – vs. being a 10B+ key IT infrastructure provider. I asked CEO Jassy about this and his answer was clear – AWS will not slow down. And while 1000 new capabilities will be manageable it will be 1500 (extrapolation from me here) next year, and close to 3500 in 2 years, if AWS keeps pace. At some point AWS will have to package, simplify, provide version to its offering – maybe the start will be separate conferences as the Sands Convention Center was at times over the limits of its capacity.
But for now, all is well for AWS, it needs to catch up in some areas like e.g. Machine Learning and it was interesting to see how AWS execs positioned this, but that was bound to happen. And frankly is not expected by enterprises either, leading in all aspects of next generation applications is no longer realistic given the wide range of products and services offered. And AWS has achieved what it wanted to get done since a long time, be the platform that cannot be ignored and must be evaluated when enterprises make cloud infrastructure decision. Stay tuned for more.
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.
