Amazon Web Services Re:Invent Report

Following my previous article for my trip to Re:Invent...

"T-Shirt" Project: Success!

Successfully delivered to Jeff Barr. Notice my face: I usually don't look so silly... I was nervous! :)

Jeff Barr, AWS

Carlos Conde was very difficult to locate at the event: He's and important man. But "the creator" deserves a t-shirt and a special version one.

Carlos Conde, AWS

It took some courage to give my present to Adrian Cockcroft. He's like a star! :)

Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix

Bring ideas and find out about future plans: Success!

Anil Hinduja, CloudFront

Tom Rizzo, EC2 AWS

AWS Training Team

I had a good chat with the Training Team and there are VERY interesting news about Certification. I'm pretty sure we will have and official announcement in the following weeks. We'll wait for that.


News:

Zadara Storage: A surprisingly and interesting approach to provide high-end storage for EC2 Instances. They've managed to have space at AWS Data Centers to install there SAN Disks Arrays and they're willing to connected them to your EC2 Instances using Direct Connect. This connection method is used to connect your office or your on premise infrastructure to your VPC but in this case they connect storage through iSCSI or NFS. The price of the service is per hours basis and you get full access to the admin tool to define your volumes and parameters like RAID configuration. With a solution like that, there is no limit for the kind of application to run on EC2. Even the more I/O demanding ones. We are talking here about non virtualized storage. The old fashioned SAN array. Currently is only available at US-East Region but with plans to expand to other regions.
Besides technical and commercial considerations, this product/service says a lot of how open is AWS when it comes to giving tools to their costumers. Is hard for me to imagine others companies letting in a competitor into their buildings. Well done!

New EC2 Instance Types: A "Cluster High Memory" instance with 240 GB RAM and two 120GB SSD disks. A "High Storage" instance 117 GB RAM and 24 hard drives (48 TB total). I only can say: Awesome! According with the EC2 Team, this internal storage will be managed as the any other kind of Instance Storage and therefore is: Ephemeral. Using their words: "It will be amazing to see how you (the costumers) create new ways to use this storage". I couldn't agree more.

AWS Marketplace is not just a place to sell AMIs. Thanks to the talk of Craig Carl I've got a wider perspective of AWS Marketplace. We should see it like a tool to sell anything your are able to create in Amazon Web Services cloud. Not just an AMI with an application stack in, but a dynamic configuration set. A configuration that adapt to the consumer needs gathering information automatically of interacting with the user.
And a new concept of product just emerged: A Marketplace application could be something else than an application. I'll try to explain it with an example: You could create an application to access some information. The information is what the costumer wants (no the application itself). As long the application is running, the costumer is accessing to the information and therefore is billed (and you get your cut). When the contract expires, the application shuts down and the deal ceases. Commercial or infrastructure costs on your side (the provider) = zero. Awesome.
I my opinion, a new job role has been created: "Marketplace application stack developer".

An EC2 Spot Instance can be automatically terminated at any given minute. We knew that they can be terminated without previous warning when a "On Demand User" needs the resources you're using but we didn't know when it could happen.

"AMI" could be spelled as "A.M.I." or can be pronounced as /æˈmɪ/


And some more pictures: