Road to AWS re:Invent - Every day is Someone’s Cyber Monday
First, at Harness, we want to wish you a great holiday season. Like the Christmas decorations waiting in stores to be on display after the Halloween candy is put away, Amazon Web Service’s biggest event, AWS re:Invent is upon us.Harness will be at re:Invent this year along with an estimated over 65,000 of your closest cloud friends in Las Vegas. Harness was recently featured on AWS’s Startup Blog and we could not be more excited to see all the developments that one of the leaders in the public cloud has to offer. For many of us, before AWS, web-scale was one to be dreaded.
Don’t be afraid of Web-Scale
Amazon Web Services can be credited with bringing elastic scale platforms to the mainstream. From the humble beginnings of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006, Amazon Web Services put public cloud on the map. Only days apart, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the two biggest days in retail. They’re what make “web-scale” a requirement for leading eCommerce organizations. Prior to accessibility of elastic infrastructure, IT operations teams months in advance map, plan and prepare for the rush. It’s capacity planning at its finest. Capacity planning certainly still occurs with the advent of AWS, but the lead time to acquire new hardware is significantly reduced as we chart out our capacity planning in Auto Scaling Groups. Even if you are not in eCommerce, moving workloads to the public cloud could be a very prudent move.
Every day is a builder’s Cyber Monday
You don’t have to be in eCommerce to experience a Cyber Monday event. Major traffic spikes can occur for anyone such as a security attack or a runaway product success. More intrinsically than handling traffic events with elastic infrastructure is agility and time to market. Last year at re:Invent 2018, during AWS CEO’s Andy Jassy’s Keynote, Andy referred to software engineers not as “developers” but as “builders”. Like anything jarring, the internet was ablaze with discussion. Andy does have some salient points were software engineers of today can assemble items quickly to build functionality. On AWS, you can certainly create infrastructure and applications without writing a single line of code. With such encapsulation of application and infrastructure ecosystem, Amazon is marching on towards providing every layer of your stack.
What to expect at re:Invent?
The trend that surprised me throughout the year was public cloud vendor’s investment in the last frontier, your data center. Amazon Outposts, along with Azure Stack and Google Anthos. I have not heard many stories about transformations with those platforms since they all are so new. Janakiram MSV has a pretty impressive and granular list on Forbes on his wishlist. Will have to wait to see what gets stage time at re:Invent. There has been a flurry of news on the What’s New with AWS site with almost every AWS Service posting about updates ahead of re:Invent. My expectation for re:Invent is for AWS to continue to tackle areas of the developer ecosystem. Echoing announcements from KubeCon, even your most trusted Integrated Development Environments [IDE] are headed to the cloud. In-browser IDEs are becoming popular and AWS certainly as “the operating system of the internet” wants to capture as much mindshare as possible. Technology moves quickly and even Amazon Web Services themselves have to play a constant game of catch up with many announcements ahead of re:Invent taunting new support such as Lambda’s JAVA 11 announcement. Like years gone by, there is no shortage of impressive sessions lined up for re:Invent 2019. Make sure to go through the session list prior to attending and register so you don’t have to wait in the standby [literally stand] lines. Though if you find yourself standing in line too much, come visit your buds at Harness.
Harness at re:Invent
Harness will be out at force at re:Invent this year. We have a long history with Amazon Web Services inside our product and you can wire your AWS infrastructure and beyond with Harness. We have a pair of events that we hope to catch you at. We have lunch with our founder Jyoti at my favorite restaurant, Javier's, on December 3rd at noon. If you are still hungry/thirsty we have our restaurant crawl on Dec 3rd starting off at Cañonita at 6 pm. Stop by the booth 2833 in the Venetian and come say hi / catch a demo to see what all the magic of Harness is about! See you in Vegas,-Ravi