During the recent AWS Re:Invent conference social media was excited about everything AWS. While I did not attend the event in person I did make sure I set aside time for the keynotes and spent time reviewing all of the social hype. Amazon AWS is a product set I have been watching and learning about for some time now. There is definitely a strong following within this community, in fact is one that is Apple-like. However, as I have been researching and learning their toolsets I can completely understand why.
What Amazon has taken the time to do in the space is progressive from a cloud perspective. In my observations I feel that what they are doing from a technology and security perspective is advanced in comparison to some of their competition. The culture is clearly forward thinking, high quality, and they are listening to the needs of the enterprise with their product development.
The Keynotes
During the event keynotes during AWS:Reinvent made several things clear.
- Affordability – With organizations shifting their onsite strategies to cloud in the next 3-5 years this also impacts the budgets. What one organization would spend to design, maintain, and implement their onsite infrastructure becomes a shift to operational budgets instead. Some feel that when they look at cloud it is expensive, but if you weigh the cost of implementing, maintaining, scaling and architecting your localized datacenter hardware the pricing will likely save you money in the long run.
- Speed and Agility – When companies virtualized their servers, and even their workstations the deployment time from using physical servers and workstation was reduced drastically. With the right cloud platform this speed and agility is even more largely recognized when virtualizing systems. Now I have seen claims that thousands of servers can be brought online in a matter of minutes. Likely due to the scalable architecture on the backend, but honestly I would really like to see this before I would believe it.
- Transforming Tech – After working in this industry for the past 20 years there is one guarantee that technology will continue to transform. I remember the days when have 256KB of memory in a workstation was impressive. The test of time has shown that our desire to incorporate technology in our lives to create efficiency in our busy personal and professional lives. Transforming technology will continue for years to come, guaranteed. Embrace the constant change, and you too will begin to see the business value if you do not already.
- 99.999% uptime in the cloud? – During the keynotes a company came on stage to share their AWS story, and they feel that with the AWS offering this is the level of uptime they achieve. This is impressive considering most other cloud options claim 99.9% is the limit. I would really like to learn more about the enterprise level uptime achievement.
So much more
There really was so much more covered that has me truly excited to leverage this technology. Amazon is innovating, and pushing technology in a way that the area of cloud needs to provide our businesses the highest quality solutions for our needs.