Keynote
The second ‘real’ Re:Invent day started with a keynote from Werner Vogels (did you notice his Alice in Chains t-shirt?) and another batch of announcements.
A full overview of all the new services can be found via https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/, but we noticed a few trends:
Trend 1: Serverless architecture
The announcement of the ECS Registry and the new ECS CLI with Docker Compose support shows that AWS wants to support customers with the containerisation of their apps, however, when Werner said “No server is as good as no server“, we knew the direction his keynote was heading.
“No server is easier to manage then NO server”, @werner#reinvent pic.twitter.com/LKccX3svd9
— Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca) October 8, 2015
So we got a lot of improvements for Lambda (we found even more new features in the blog posts): Python support, versioning of functions, scheduled jobs (bye bye cron jobs), … and new ways to use them with Mobile Devices and IoT devices.
Trend 2: Enabling developpers
Aside from launching all these awesome services, AWS is also putting more focus on getting people started with them. The first example of this was the AWS Mobile Hub, which allows developers to create a sample application with a few clicks (batteries included). We’ve tried this out and we are impressed. It took more time to download the Android SDK than to create an app with Facebook Authentication (backed by AWS Cognito), Mobile Analytics (including tracking of monetisation and custom events) and even functions running in the cloud (with Lambda).
The IoT announcement also fits into this category. No need to figure out how to make (embedded) devices communicate in a reliable and scalable manner, just let AWS do the heavy lifting.
Sessions
There are a lot of breakout sessions, and it’s not possible to attend them all, but there are already a few sessions on youtube and we will catch up with all the sessions we missed once they’re online.
Networking
Re:Invent is more than a bunch of announcements, it is also the perfect place to meet with vendors; clients and other AWS users. There is a big Expo Hall, but we also took our own advice and made appointments to have some private meetings with partners &customers, so we could discuss our use cases more in depth. More informal networking was possible at the Re:Play party, were they even containerised the party:
Amazon containerized the party! #replay #reinvent pic.twitter.com/I7iFgJD9l7
— Mahesh Ramchandani (@m_sharp) October 9, 2015
