This year, AWS re:Invent witnessed the launch of diverse new wave cloud services and products. Vijay Rayapati, the CEO of Botmetric experienced the event firsthand and we thought it was only appropriate that readers travel through this journey with him. If you’ve missed re:Invent this year, don’t worry, here’s your chance to catch up with all the action and big announcements that happened.
- It’s a Serverless Enterprise In Containers World — A huge focus this re:Invent was placed on containers with the launch of EKS (Managed Kubernetes on AWS) and enhanced ECS. The best among container releases was the Fargate launch that allows you to run containers like ECS and EKS without worrying about cluster management complexity. In addition to that, the launch of Aurora serverless is good for modern workloads as it reduces DB costs and requires less maintenance. AWS Lambda on the other hand, has got lot of enhancements including the much needed 3GB memory, throttle & concurrency support along with Go lang and .NET support. Vijay comments “Over last 4 years, it’s becoming very clear that containers are the new VMs and they bring a lot of goodness to packaging software, run-time dependency management, operate micro services, isolate scalability and manage hyper-scale environments easily”. Botmetric plans to help customers better by applying these new cloud constructs.
- Machine Learning Is The New Programming Model — AWS was slow in bringing ML & AI services to the market compared to its lead in IaaS & PaaS offerings . At this re:Invent, AWS catches up with announcements bundled in ML services such as SageMaker, DeepLens, Comprehend, Rekognition, Translate, and Transcribe along with existing Polly & Lex, etc. Vijay says “Most of us believe that ML is going to be the new programming model to bring intelligence and inference to business applications. We all will write models as we are writing functions today to implement behaviors. The new set of AWS ML services make it easier to build, train, operate, and iterate the AI applications in cloud. AWS services are getting intelligent (Macie, GuardDuty are early indication), and you can expect it to grow a lot further by the next re:Invent.”
- Natural Human Interface To Cloud — This re:Invent, voice was a natural medium for human to human interaction, with great traction around Alexa. CTO and VP of AWS, Werner Vogels stated that, “Digital access to the future would be human-centric.” Vijay added to Werner’s thoughts as he commented that , “It’s clear that voice will be a next natural interface for human to machine interaction, along with the standard UI & API interactions that are already pervasive.” He further talks about Botmetric’s integration with Alexa stating, “We have launched Alexa support for Botmetric in preview and will double-down on it for full integration going forward. The launch of Alexa for Business, will accelerate, the integrations of voice skills in business applications for enterprise use”. AWS Translate and Transcribe can also work well with Alexa integration in business applications.
- IaaS Is Still Key Cloud Foundation — re:Invent 2017 witnessed a great set of enhancements to key IaaS services (compute, storage, databases and networking). The launch of bare metal instances will accelerate adoption to AWS for enterprise workloads. Hibernation support for spot instances to preserve state in EBS is key for many modern workloads. Vijay comment, “ I am very excited about the preview launch of Aurora Multi-Node Master support and DynamoDB global tables. In any application, data layer is the most critical piece and painful component to scale, these two data services along with Neptune will make it much easier to build, deploy, and operate hyper-scale digital applications across multiple cloud regions without fear.” The support for VPC peering across cloud regions makes it easier to architect geo-distributed applications for scalability, BDR, availability, and performance without worrying about networking complexity. The VPC PrivateLink support to consume SaaS workloads without public exposure to entire network is a great thing for a lot of enterprises.
- Cloud Security Made Easy — The launch of GuardDuty for machine learning powered threat detection and vulnerability management will be very useful along with the existing set of security services from AWS. New GuardDuty service continuously monitors your accounts and workloads on AWS for intelligent threat detection at scale with zero account footprint Vijay says, “There was a great emphasis that security is everybody’s job and it’s a everyday job, I couldn’t agree more”. The managed WAF rules support from marketplace sellers like TrendMicro & AlertLogic etc. will be very useful and easy to deploy on AWS load balancers or CloudFront without having to operate complex appliances for most workloads. We don’t need to learn how to write WAF rules anymore and instead trust experts like TrendMicro.
These new key services can be a turning point in the cloud world. Experiment to see what suits your needs and makes cloud management easier. Botmetric is in the initial steps to integrate these services into its platform. “We want to implement as many services as we can to make our customers cloud management journey as easy as possible” Vijay concludes. While Botmetric rocked at booth 329 with Alexa magic and the release of public cloud report we are in a constant endeavor to improve our customer’s experience on cloud as smooth and easy as possible.
