Opinion AWS re:Invent is always rich in product launches. Some products are entirely new, while others are updates or enhancements to existing tools. The 2018 event was no exception. In case you missed it, here’s a drive-thru on some of the best products – and one important statement – from this year’s show.

AWS Marketplace for Containers

Announced at the Global Partner Summit keynote, the AWS Marketplace for Containers is the next logical step in the Marketplace ecosystem. Vendors will now be able to offer container solutions for their products, just as they do with AWS EC2 AMIs.

The big takeaway here is just how important containerisation is and how much of a growth we see in the implementation of containerised products and serverless architectures in general. Along with the big announcements around AWS Lambda, this solidifies the push in the industry to adopt serverless models for applications.

AWS Marketplace – Private Marketplace

The AWS Marketplace has added the Private Marketplace to its feature set. You can now have your own marketplace that’s shared across your AWS Organisations. This is neat and all, but I think what’s even more interesting is what it hints at in the background.

It seems to me that to have a well-established marketplace at all, your organisation is going to need to begin its journey on the DevOps trail. This news shows that a good deployment pipeline is really the best way to handle a project, whether for external or internal customers.

Firecracker

This looks really cool. Firecracker is a virtualisation tool that is built specifically for micro VMs and function-based services like Lambda or Fargate. It runs on bare metal… wait, what? I thought we’re trying to move away from our own hosted servers?! That’s true. However, consider all the new IoT products and features that were announced at the conference and you’ll see there’s still a lot of bare metal, both in use and in development. I don’t think Firecracker is meant solely for large server farm type setups, but quite possibly for items in the IoT space.

The serverless / microservice architecture is a strong one, and this allows that to happen in the IoT space. In fact, I’m currently working on installing it onto my kids’ Minecraft microcomputer.

Andy Jassy says what?

In the fireside chat with Andy Jassy in the partner keynote, there were several things I found interesting. But one comment stood out from the rest:

“I hear enterprises, all the time, wanting help thinking about how they can innovate at a faster clip. And, you know, it’s funny, a lot of the enterprise EBC’s I get to be involved in… I’d say roughly half the content of those are enterprises asking me about our offering and how we think about our business and what we have planned in the future, but a good chunk of every one of those conversations are enterprises trying to learn how we move quickly and how we invent quickly, and I think that enterprises realise that in this day and age if you are not reinventing fast and iterating quickly on behalf of your customers, it’s really difficult to be competitive.

“And so I think they want help from you in how to invent faster. Now, part of that is being able to operate on top of the cloud and operate on top of a platform like AWS that has so many services that you can stitch together however you see fit. Some of it also is, how do people think about DevOps? How do people think about organising their teams? You know… what are the right constraints that you have but that still allow people to move quickly.”

He said DevOps! Apparently, larger companies that are looking to change don’t just want fancy tools and new technology. They also need help getting better at affecting change.

That’s absolutely outside the wheelhouse of AWS, and clearly a call-to-action for the partner community.

Read more: AWS looks to redefine hybrid cloud at re:Invent 2018 – plus make big moves in blockchain

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