AWS re:Invent 2018 predictions emphasize Lambda, containers

Kurt Marko, consultant

At last year's re:Invent, hundreds of new services and tools were released, such as new compute instances, storage options, additions and improvements to the AI portfolio, along with service expansions to new AWS regions.

This year, I'd like to see the following:

• improvements to Fargate managed container instances, including an easier way to use it with Lambda for long-running, event-driven code;
• multi-region support for Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes container clusters;
• a Nitro system extension of both hardware and hypervisors to more instances, including new bare-metal instances; and
• Sagemaker templates for various use cases, perhaps a graphical UI to assist in model development.

Kurt Marko

AWS has long espoused a public cloud-centric infrastructure strategy, even as its major competitors aggressively announce partnerships to deliver hybrid and multi-cloud enterprise services. I expect AWS to aggressively respond via its VMware partnership, with enhancements that improve interoperability between the two environments. I also wouldn't be surprised to see high-profile announcements with some major SaaS providers, such as Adobe or Salesforce.

Also, I expect AWS to continue its push into on-premises infrastructure with improvements and additions to recent products such as:

• Snowball Edge;
• Greengrass;
• Storage Gateway hardware; and
• a video-surveillance product, similar to a commercial version of DeepLens.

Chris Moyer, technology vice president

Chris Moyer

I think serverless, specifically Lambda, will be among the announcements at re:Invent 2018. Amazon both Go and PowerShell support, and I suspect that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's also a lot of buzz around DynamoDB with serverless, so I expect something specific to come out of that, as well. Maybe it will involve better or simpler integration with Kinesis Data Streams?

Since Amazon Simple Queue Service support just recently came out, I expect AWS to highlight a few key use cases around that, such as failure retry or support for Dead-Letter Queues to directly retry another function. I'm not sure about new services in AI, machine learning or virtual reality, but they'll be highly specialized at this point and probably more likely adaptations of existing services than an entirely new class of service.

Cryptography is also very big, and users have pushed for more security clearances within AWS to expand crypto possibilities. I wouldn't be surprised to hear some sort of announcement about AWS working with more government agencies.

Alan Earls, IT writer

Alan Earls

While there will no doubt be new bells and whistles from AWS over the coming year, the most intriguing possibility from re:Invent 2018 is some kind of innovative bundling. Just as Azure has taken advantage of its installed Microsoft base, so, too, might AWS to bring some kind of wholly new service to the cloud.

What might this be? Maybe it'll power up online marketers, release a business-management-as-a-service tool, or debut complementary endpoint services so companies can get entirely out of the IT business.

George Lawton, IT writer

George Lawton

I expect to see improvements on the Greengrass development environment and security model for more types of enterprise apps beyond traditional IoT.

AWS initially positioned Greengrass as a set of tools focused on IoT use cases. The AWS Greengrass product was Snowball, which was essentially an enterprise service to move data to an AWS data center. But it was also a tool for sporadically connected application servers. At re:Invent 2018, I think AWS will expand Greengrass tools to enable enterprises to build apps that work seamlessly across the Amazon cloud and those sporadically connected offices. These Greengrass edge servers could also reduce latency, and improve the user experience.

David Linthicum

David Linthicum, cloud analyst

It'll be serverless- and container-oriented services that flow out of AWS re:Invent 2018. [Most] users love the serverless features and functions, because they simplify the use of AWS and can actually reduce some costs. I think we'll see an expansion of serverless with AWS, including serverless databases, serverless storage, serverless container management or DevSecOps and serverless capabilities.

Mike Pfeiffer

Mike Pfeiffer, IT architect

I believe we'll see more advancements in AWS Lambda, such as some additional language support and better developer tooling.

I also suspect a fully managed blockchain platform that goes above and beyond the template and partner services that AWS currently offers.