I was in Vegas during the first week of December for AWS re:Invent 2019. This year, the event attracted about 65,000 attendees. A melting pot of experts from Cloud Migration, Application Modernization, Data Analytics, AI and IoT – the event shared exclusive insights on the future roadmap of AWS products.

Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS made a series of announcements during his keynote. The following are some of the top takeaways for Brillio to build advanced capability given the growing focus in the immediate future.

• Instances/Compute

• • Largest in-memory cloud instances for SAP
  • Most powerful CPU instances for M/L and Graphics
  • 100 Gbps connectivity for standard instances
  • Amazon EC2 M6g, R6g, C6g Gravitron 2 Powered ARM Instances
  • Amazon EC2 Inf1 ML Inference Optimized Instances
  • AWS Nitro Enclaves

• Containers

• • AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS (Kubernetes and Modernization)

• New Service announcements – Compute/Networking/ Services

• • AWS Transit Gateway Multicast – one-to-many communication to Transit Gateways
  • AWS Accelerated Site-to-Site VPN
  • AWS Transit Gateway Inter-region Peering
  • AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager

• New Products Announced

• • EC2 Image Builder: A service that makes it easier and faster to build and maintain secure OS images for Windows Server and Amazon Linux 2, using automated build pipelines.
  • Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes: Flexibility of running ML workloads in Amazon EKS and the benefits of Amazon SageMaker, helping simplify the infrastructure management with reduced costs
  • Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry Preview: Schema Registry now makes it simpler to store event structures in a central location, find existing schemas, create or import new schemas, and map them to a variety of code languages for reference.
  • AWS License Manager: An automated license discovery tool for simplified BYOL interface and management experience to help with challenges associated with Microsoft license compliance in the cloud
  • Amazon Transcribe Medical: For healthcare-industry-specific transcription services to simplify healthcare data entry workflows
  • Amazon Bracket: Advance the field of quantum technology by providing a managed service, that gives researchers and scientists a platform to easily develop, test and run quantum algorithms.
  • Nitro-Fueled Computing: The Nitro System is allowing for vast improvements to High-Performance Computing (HPC). Improvements reach 10Pbps of data throughput. The Nitro Controller is needed to manage the immense amount of data used by HPC.
  • Improve Security with Access Analyzer: The IAM Access Analyzer will allow to quickly see overly permissive policies attached to a resource.
  • Amazon Textract: It is an automatic text and data extraction service, designed to simplify and accelerate advanced data extraction processes.

• Modernization Trends

• • Mainframes Migrations
  • AWS Aurora – Available for 1/10th of the cost as against traditional databases like Oracle and SQL Server
  • Windows to Linux – Linux deployments are growing almost 4x the pace of windows in cloud
  • Amazon S3 access points are way cheaper now
  • Amazon Redshift has new capabilities like Lake House, Federated query and Data Lake export
  • Managed Cassandra service
  • Ultrawarm storage option within Amazon Elastic search
  • Amazon Sagemaker – More new services added
  • AWS Wavelength – To move workloads to connectivity zones
  • Amazon Kendra – For connecting internal applications such as Exchange, Jira, Confluence, etc.
  • AWS Control Tower: To automate the set-up of a well-architected multi-account AWS environment with step-by-step process guidance to customize Control Tower and automate the creation of an AWS Landing Zone
  • AWS Outposts: Brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility

There were many other announcements on various subjects. Brillio is focused on migrating SAP Workloads, Application Modernization and Managed Services, Data Lake migrations, Control Tower and Service Catalog, AWS Sage Maker and Lambda/serverless computing. Brillio’s teams took note of all the key points that would make a difference to efficient and consultative selling.

It was indeed a great learning platform for the global cloud community and we look forward to participating again in 2020 AWS re:Invent!