By Chris Williams

This was my very first AWS re:Invent conference and there are so many things to talk about!

I’m going to briefly talk about the new services that have were announced, but I’m not going to do a deep dive on any one of them… the reason being that (a) there is going to be MUCH more coming out on the services in the future & anything I say here will probably be incorrect and (b) you can go straight to the source... so I’ll link where appropriate, and (c) there were so many new services that I’m only going to hit on the big ones that I have better than passing knowledge of anyway 

• Amazon Sumerian 
  • Create and run VR, AR, and 3D applications without requiring specialized programming or 3D expertise.
• Alexa for Business
  • Start meetings, shared devices, use for conference calls, create private skills for your business… the sky’s the limit with this & I’m excited to see where it goes.
• Amazon ECS for Kubernetes (EKS)
  • This has been a long time coming.  Most of the Docker instances on EC2 were managed by K8s anyway.
• New EC2 instances:
  • M5
  • H1
  • T2 Unlimited
• Lambda
  • function weighting
  • doubling of max mem capacity from 1,536MB to 3,008MB
  • Per function concurrency/throttle
  • enhanced console experience
  • Additional CloudTrail Logging options
• Amazon Time Sync Service (NTP)
• AWS Serverless Application Repository
  • … Just signed up for the preview – can someone do WordPress please!?  
• AWS Server Migration Service for Hyper-V
• Aurora
  • Multi-Master – scale write nodes across multiple AZs increasing scalability and availability
  • Serverless – A new serverless mode that will save time and money by automatically adjusting database capacity to match application needs
• DynamoDB
  • On-Demand Backup
  • Global Tables – Fully managed, multi-region, multi-master.
• AWS Cloud9
  • It is a browser-based IDE where you can write/run/debug.  As long as you have a web browser… you have access to your code to work and share.  I haven’t tried it yet but it sounds very cool.
• IoT
  • AWS IoT Device Defender – managed service to secure IoT devices, something that was desperately needed!
  • AWS IoT Device Management – manage/monitor/organize/onboard your fleet of IoT devices
• Machine Learning (or as I call it the Skynet initiative…)
  • DeepLens – Skynet eyeball, but I still WANT ONE
  • Comprehend – “analyzes text and tells you what it finds, starting with the language, from Afrikans to Yoruba, with 98 more in between. It can identify different types of entities (people, places, brands, products, and so forth), key phrases, sentiment (positive, negative, mixed, or neutral), and extract key phrases, all from text in English or Spanish. Finally, Comprehend‘s topic modeling service extracts topics from large sets of documents for analysis or topic-based grouping.” … not super creepy at all…
  • Rekognition Video – Rekognition, but for video now
  • SageMaker
  • Translate – a neural machine translation service that uses advanced machine learning technologies to provide fast language translation of text-based content
  • Transcribe – add speech to text capability to your apps!

There were many more announcements.  If you want the whole comprehensive list please go here: https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/

Alternatively, if you are on the road I recommend listening to the AWS Podcast & the AWS Tech Chat, both are excellent.

Something else to keep in mind:

I suggest you go to as many hackathons, chalk talks, hands-on labs, and workshops that you can. Basically, anything that isn’t being recorded that you can watch later that you want to do, go do that. I met some really excellent people at the 1 hackathon that I attended. Next year I will try to hit at least 2. In terms of getting the most value out of my time, Hackathons, the Expo hall (here’s my interview with Linux Academy!), and simply walking up and talking to people were my top 3.

My hackathon team thanks to Calvin’s 360 camera… which I am now ordering  

Team Nakatomi in the house #reinvent #awsjamsessions – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

All in all, I had a great time. Sure the conference had some issues that needed tweaking, but I learned more, came away with more energy and excitement than I have from a conference in a long time. Now I need to rest up on the couch with #ITKitty, Kim, and a giant iced coffee 

Thanks for checking out my AWS re:Invent re:Cap 2017!