A Partner's Perspective on AWS Summit Chicago 2017

By Vendor

Some of the brightest minds in the cloud computing industry converged for the AWS Summit Chicago 2017 to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. This year’s event drew more than 11,000 attendees and featured 40 technical sessions over two days. In typical AWS fashion, the Summit unveiled many key service innovations to help partners and customers further harness the AWS platform. A central theme of this year’s Summit focused on how customers can optimize the power of data and analytics on the AWS platform.

Adrian Cockcroft, VP Cloud Architecture Strategy, AWS and Dr. Matt Wood, General Manager, Artificial Intelligence, AWS, took the stage for the keynote address to discuss digital transformation through data on AWS. Cockcroft noted the growing list of AWS advanced features and microservices, characterizing them as “superpowers” due to their PB scale analytics.

These features include Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Redshift, which allow customers to harness data and analytics to transform their businesses. During the keynote, Adrian revealed Redshift Spectrum, which provides the ability to query on extensive data sets of exabytes, or a billion gigabytes, on S3.

Meanwhile, AWS has addressed the challenge of scale by utilizing the elastic capacity of AWS to create a center of gravity for machine learning. This engine helps drive innovation for Amazon’s retail business, which has crossover benefits with AWS such as the Amazon Alexa service, which runs on AWS, or Amazon Rekognition, which detects and interprets object, scene, and facial analysis and provides deep learning.

AWS also launched some significant service enhancements at this Summit. As enterprises move workloads into the cloud, IT organizations are required to manage an increasing number of cloud resources. AWS continues to expand its suite of tools to support this lifecycle management and upgrade automation for cross-account controls to address the complexity of managing multiple accounts.

CloudFormation StackSets is a new feature that allows users to provision a common set of AWS resources across multiple accounts and regions with a single CloudFormation template. Previously, users needed custom scripts and tools or manual processes to provision or update. StackSets enables users to create, update and delete stacks across multiple accounts and regions.

Dashboard, a new AWS Config feature, was launched to provide a summarized view of resources recorded in an account. Users can view the type and configuration history of resources and quickly spot resources that aren’t compliant with their Config rules in each region.

Digital transformation through the cloud has become more than an ideology – it’s a reality. The AWS Summit in Chicago provided opportunities for customers and partners to expand their understanding of how the AWS platform enables digital transformations to meet business goals. As an APN Premier Consulting Partner, Datapipe looks forward to many new innovations to come.

About the Author

As Datapipe’s Director of Product Management, David Lucky has unique insight into the latest product developments for private, public, and hybrid cloud platforms and a keen understanding of industry trends and their impact on business development.