AWS Summit widens net with services for containers, devs
AWS' latest crop of tools monitors container clusters on its services and simplifies developers' use of preferred IDEs and languages, backed by an emphasis on security.
NEW YORK -- AWS pledges to maintain its torrid pace of product and services innovations and continue to expand the breadth of both to meet customer needs.
"You decide how to build software, not us," said Werner Vogels, Amazon vice president and CTO, in a keynote at the AWS Summit NYC event. "So, we need to give you a really big toolbox so you can get the tools you need."
But AWS, which holds a healthy lead over Microsoft and Google in the cloud market, also wants to serve as an automation engine for customers, Vogels added.
"I strongly believe that in the future … you will only write business logic," he said. "Focus on building your application, drop it somewhere and we will make it secure and highly available for you."
Parade of new AWS services continues
Vogels sprinkled a series of news announcements throughout his keynote, two of which centered on containers. First, Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights, a service that provides container-level monitoring, is now in preview for monitoring clusters in Amazon Elastic Container Service and Amazon Fargate, in addition to Amazon EKS and Kubernetes. In addition, AWS for Fluent Bit, which serves as a centralized environment for container logging, is now generally available, he said.
Serverless compute also got some attention with the release of Amazon EventBridge, a serverless event bus to take in and process data across AWS' own services and SaaS applications. AWS customers currently do this with a lot of custom code, so "the goal for us was to provide a much simpler programming model," Vogels said. Initial SaaS partners for EventBridge include Zendesk, OneLogin and Symantec.
Focus on building your application, drop it somewhere and we will make it secure and highly available for you.
Werner VogelsCTO, AWS
AWS minds the past, with eye on the future
Most customers are moving away from the concept of a monolithic application, "but there are still lots of monoliths out there," such as SAP ERP implementations that won't go away anytime soon, Vogels said.
But IT shops with a cloud-first mindset focus on newer architectural patterns, such as microservices. AWS wants to serve both types of applications with a full range of instance types, containers and serverless functionality, Vogels said.
He cited customers such as McDonald's, which has built a home-delivery system with Amazon Elastic Container Service. It can take up to 20,000 orders per second and is integrated with partners such as Uber Eats, Vogels said.
Vogels ceded the stage for a time to Steve Randich, executive vice president and CIO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a nonprofit group that seeks to keep brokerage firms fair and honest.
FINRA moved wholesale to AWS and its systems now ingest up to 155 billion market events in a single day -- double what it was three years ago. "When we hit these peaks, we don't even know them operationally because the infrastructure is so elastic," Randich said.
FINRA has designed the AWS-hosted apps to run across multiple availability zones. "Essentially, our disaster recovery is tested daily in this regard," he said.
AWS' ode to developers
Developers have long been a crucial component of AWS' customer base, and the company has built out a string of tool sets aimed to meet a broad set of languages and integrated development environments (IDEs). These include AWS Cloud9, IntelliJ, Python, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
VS Code is Microsoft's lighter-weight, browser-based IDE, which has seen strong initial uptake. All the different languages in VS Code are now generally available, Vogels said to audience applause.
Additionally, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is now generally available with support for TypeScript and Python. AWS CDK makes it easier for developers to use high-level construct to define cloud infrastructure in code, said Martin Beeby, AWS principal developer evangelist, in a demo.
AWS seeks to keep the cloud secure
Vogels also used part of his AWS Summit talk to reiterate AWS' views on security, as he did at the recent AWS re:Inforce conference dedicated to cloud security.
"There is no line in the sand that says, 'This is good-enough security,'" he said, citing newer techniques such as automated reasoning as key advancements.
Werner Vogels, CTO of AWS, on stage at the AWS Summit in New York.
Classic security precautions have become practically obsolete, he added. "If firewalls were the way to protect our systems, then we'd still have moats [around buildings]," Vogels said. Most attack patterns AWS sees are not brute-force front-door efforts, but rather spear-phishing and other techniques: "There's always an idiot that clicks that link," he said.
The full spectrum of IT, from operations to engineering to compliance, must be mindful of security, Vogels said. This is true within DevOps practices such as CI/CD from both an external and internal level, he said. The first involves matters such as identity access management and hardened servers, while the latter brings in techniques including artifact validation and static code analysis.
AWS Summit draws veteran customers and newcomers
The event at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center drew thousands of attendees with a wide range of cloud experience, from FINRA to fledgling startups.
"The analytics are very interesting to me, and how I can translate that into a set of services for the clients I'm starting to work with," said Donald O'Toole, owner of CeltTools LLC, a two-person startup based in Brooklyn. He retired from IBM in 2018 after 35 years.
AWS customer Timehop offers a mobile application oriented around "digital nostalgia," which pulls together users' photographs from various sources such as Facebook and Google Photos, said CTO Dmitry Traytel.
A few years ago, Timehop found itself in a place familiar to many startups: Low on venture capital and with no viable monetization strategy. The company created its own advertising server on top of AWS, dubbed Nimbus, rather than rely on third-party products. Once a user session starts, the system conducts an auction for multiple prominent mobile ad networks, which results in the best possible price for its ad inventory.
"Nimbus let us pivot to a different category," Traytel said.
