As usual, AWS re:Invent 2015 was outstanding, and it was amazing to see how the conference has grown over the past four years, from around 5,000 to nearly 20,000 attendees. With more and more companies interested in leveraging the cloud’s benefits, there is no doubt that the cloud will continue to disrupt enterprise IT. And the first vendor they will reach out to in most cases is Amazon. We had a wonderful time at the conference, thoroughly enjoyed the keynote speakers and breakout sessions and got lots of traction with new customers for our EC2 backup solution. As we headed home, we discussed the three main takeaways from the conference and thought we’d share them with you here. As usual, AWS re:Invent 2015 was outstanding, and it was amazing to see how the conference has grown over the past four years, from around 5,000 to nearly 20,000 attendees. With more and more companies interested in leveraging the cloud’s benefits, there is no doubt that the cloud will continue to disrupt enterprise IT. And the first vendor they will reach out to in most cases is Amazon. We had a wonderful time at the conference, thoroughly enjoyed the keynote speakers and breakout sessions and got lots of traction with new customers for our EC2 backup solution. As we headed home, we discussed the three main takeaways from the conference and thought we’d share them with you here.
1. Ease of migration to the cloud
An important theme throughout the conference was easing the challenging task of migrating data between environments. IT leaders today recognize the fact that transitions without the right tools and technology might end up costing more than the potential benefits they hold. In an effort to further facilitate their cloud adoption, AWS introduced several services to facilitate the move of data into AWS. Perhaps the most interesting ones were the AWS Database Migration Service and the Schema Conversion Tool. Both services target migration from proprietary commercial database engines such as IBM DB2 and Oracle, to AWS-supported engines such as MySQL and Aurora (for Oracle migrations). Another service worth mentioning here is AWS Snowball. Migrating enterprise data assets over the web or even over a dedicated peer to peer connection (i.e., AWS Direct Connect) might not be enough. AWS Snowball utilizes a purpose built appliance that lets you store hundreds of terabytes of data and then shipped back to AWS via FedEx or UPS. All data stored on this appliance is, of course, encrypted and t also validates the stored data to make sure it will be readable by AWS storage.
2 . AWS is moving up the cloud stack
One of the major, and in our opinion strategic, announcements at this year’s re:Invent was QuickSight. Starting at $9/user, your company’s business users can put their “end user” hands on a modern BI tool. The new BI tool automatically tracks and discovers all AWS account data stores including S3, RDS, DynamoDB, etc. It automatically learns the data types and relationships and then the data is aggregated and prepared for the “Spice” analysis engine. Spice lets users run SQL queries that can be visualized by third party vendors such as Domo, Qlick and Tableau. The QuickSight announcement enabled the leading cloud infrastructure vendor to take a bite out of the world of enterprise IT. According to Andy Jassy, with QuickSight, Amazon can compete with common BI tools such as IBM Cognos. With their VDI product and the Enterprise email service, AWS is moving up the stack, changing enterprise IT landscape step-by-step.
3. AWS enterprise grade
The first day keynote led by Andy Jassy, focused on enterprises, and had CapitalOne and GE talk about data center consolidation and moving significant parts of their infrastructure to AWS. AWS recognizes the hybrid cloud (at least for now), following enterprise needs, and will help GE leave “company crown jewels” on-premises. While past re:Invent themes revolved around startups, this year clearly shifted focus to enterprises. The takeaways mentioned above are important on their own, but also relate to migration and the need to support a large amount of data that currently mostly still resides within large traditional enterprises. Learn about how the cloud became enterprises’ new normal.
How was re:Invent for us?
It was great! We spent most of our time pitching our backup and DR solution for Amazon EC2 to Tier-1 MSPs and large enterprises. We took advantage of the important opportunity to meet our many customers and users face to face and were happy to get their great feedback and valuable insights. We learned, we pitched and we are proud to be part of this emerging market. With the traction and growth we experience, we now know that AWS re:Invent 2016 will be ever bigger that before and cannot wait! We welcome you to learn more about N2WS Backup & Recovery – our enterprise-class backup and DR solution for Amazon EC2. The product is sold on AWS Marketplace and is currently the top-selling Backup and DR solution for AWS based on the native Amazon snapshot service.
