There was a lot to absorb during the jam packed week in Las Vegas but there were a number of things that I was truly surprised about during the conference..

It was clear that AWS is going after the Enterprise market and are accommodating the on-prem / legacy / old-school way of thinking. This is the first re:Invent that you could really feel the change.

I called it - to me it was obvious that this was going to happen. The signs were all there. This was the direction that the market has been pushing for, and AWS has a reputation of giving the customers what they ask for.

The last announcement that was Andy Jassey made on the keynote on Wednesday - was AWS Outposts.

Here's what AWS Outposts looks like.

Plus in to power and network in your data center.

Use public AWS APIs, specify your subnet to launch locally. pic.twitter.com/gkKe1Q4QxW

— Eric Hammond (@esh) November 28, 2018

Here was the announcement. Usually Jeff Barr (or as of late - someone else on the Technical Evangelist team) have a detailed blog post - on a new product that was just announced.

For AWS Outposts - nada… The only thing that is out there - is the announcement - and a “TBD” product page - https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/

Once the announcement was made - VMware went all out with as much information as they could describing the VMware variant of AWS outposts https://cloud.vmware.com/community/2018/11/28/vmware-cloud-aws-outposts-cloud-managed-sddc-data-center/

Blog posts, interviews, sessions you name it they went all in - for a very good reason - if you ask me. This expands their VMware Cloud on AWS in a substantial way.

And who was missing from this announcement ? AWS.

To me this is puzzling. The one sided coverage of something that is supposed to be a joint venture, means that either - this was a pure publicity announcement - and the product has not yet been finalized - or AWS dropped the ball on this one - big time!!

So what do we know about a this product? It will come in two flavors:

• VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts allows you to use the same VMware control plane and APIs you use to run your infrastructure

• A native variant of AWS Outposts allows you to use the same exact APIs and control plane you use to run in the AWS cloud, but on-premises. 

The AWS native variant of AWS Outposts allows you to use the same exact APIs and control plane you use in the AWS cloud, but on-premises. You will be able to run Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) on Outposts. At launch or in the months after, we plan to add services like RDS, ECS, EKS, SageMaker, EMR.

Not a word has been published since the announcement, of how this is going to work from the perspective of the  “AWS variant” Outposts.

If there is one thing that has left me completely confused from #reInvent - is the @awscloud story of #Outposts. VMware have been pluggin this to death this weak - but besides the announcement - there has hardly been any details about the #AWS side.

— Maish Saidel-Keesing (☁️☁️☁️) (@maishsk) November 30, 2018

I even went as far and asked Jeff Barr - what is the story here. The funny thing is - I actually met him at Starbucks about 15 minutes after I posted the tweet.

So I just had a quick chat with @jeffbarr about this outside Starbucks. Super nice guy!! Hope to hear and see more details about this in the near future. #reInvent

— Maish Saidel-Keesing (☁️☁️☁️) (@maishsk) November 29, 2018

His answer (if my memory serves me correctly) was..

“The team had not yet had the opportunity to go into detail into the new offering, and would be publishing more details about it"

To me Outposts - is the biggest announcement of the whole of re:Invent - if played correctly - it will remove any and all competition that is hoping to provide a Hybrid cloud story - one that enterprises can understand.

You want AWS - you can have it - in the cloud - and also on prem - the same exact experience - this is something that customers have been asking for years for AWS to provide (and also something that AWS have consistently been completely against - because everything and anything should run in AWS - there is no need for on-prem… - until now :) )

And mark my words, once you have an Outpost in almost every single datacenter - the need for Edge locations in each and every country - will be no more...

I guess we will have to wait for the aftermath to die down - and wait to see exactly how this going to work….

And now some of my personal thoughts about this whole topic.

There are a lot of moving parts that AWS will now have to go into - especially regarding the logistics of providing the end service to the customer.

If you remember there was once another product - that provided you with a similar service - yep I am talking about the vBlock - a joint venture from VMware, Cisco and EMC. Which went the way of the dodo. The partnership fell apart for a number of reasons.

Customers loved the solution!! You had a single number to call - for anything and everything related to the deployment. Disk died? Called the support number. Network not working? Call the support number.  vSphere doing some crazy shit? Call the same support number. One neck to throttle, and customers loved it.

And now you have Amazon selling you hardware - or should I rather say leasing you the hardware. You will not own it - you will pay as you go.  I assume that there will be a commitment - of some kind - and you will not be able to order by the hour - the logistics on per hour would be too complicated.

But speaking of logistics - if there is a company that commit to having a 4 hour delivery time on a failed piece of hardware - it is Amazon - with their global presence. They have  the logistical capability to ensure delivery of practically anything in their inventory to anywhere in the world - in the shortest amount of time.

But there are still many unknowns... here are  a few that come to mind:

• Will this come with a networking component? I assume it will - what will that network component be? Software? Hardware?
• By providing you (the customer) with the same experience and AWS hardware - are they risking exposure of how AWS works getting out? I assume that this will be covered in TOS and NDA that you sign as part of the upcoming service.
• I assume there will be redundant network connectivity requirements in order for this to work - I will also go out on a limb and say that a Direct Connect link will be a requirement as well. This means that it will be only be suitable for a certain piece of AWS's customers. Perhaps redundant VPN's might be suitable as well.
• What happens if/when the AWS endpoints are not available?  How if at all can the instances and the workloads on the Outpost be managed?
• How self-service  will the offering be? I assume it will only be a node-by-node expansion - or per 1/4 rack. you will not be able to add more disks on your own, more RAM on your own etc. This makes sense.

In short - since this was announced at re:Invent 10 days ago - and that AWS have already stated this will not be available before H2 2019 - I do not expect that we will see anything before October/November 2019 (but that is just my hunch).

At the moment - there is a lot more to this announcement than meets the eye....

I am now on a plane on my way back home, on a really long flight from SFO to TLV (13.5 hours) so now is a good time to re-cap and reflect on what happened last week at re:Invent.
I think that this will be a set of posts - because there are a number of topics that I would like to address - and some of them deserve their own dedicated insight.

The first and foremost post I would like to go into - is the overall impression about of the conference.

 
AWS made a significant number of changes as compared to last years event. And overall - I found the event to be amazing!!

 
If you ask me - last year’s event was not user friendly, for a number of reasons.

• Tracks were located in a single venue. That meant going between topics was not really possible.
• Transport - the shuttles had a route - along a number of of the venues. The shuttles took a great deal of time.
• Lines in the sessions were bad - they were really bad - people were lining up for hours before, without any real indication if they were going to get into a session.
• The mobile app - was pretty much useless - and was not at all helpful.
• The amount of repeats were not enough, and overflow sessions were also scarce.

This year AWS fixed all of the above.

• Tracks were not restricted to a single venue, you could get ML, serverless, Storage and networking - were not only in one venue - but in multiple venues, that meant you did not need to bounce around between the venues.
• The shuttles were point to point. No more round trips. This was brililant to save time - but on the other hand - there were a number of times where there were 3-5 people on a shuttle at times, not really an efficient way to spend money - it was kind not elastic in any way - and not well utilized from a cost perspective.
• The mobile app - was much better, still slow as hell - but there was more functionality. Such as when will the sessions be repeated, what sessions have open seats right now, how much time it will take to get from one venue to the other - in real-time.
• There were many more overflows… The amount of repeats were by large - more than we had last year - which meant you had an option to choose..

The lines this year for sessions - were better - much, much better!! No more lines of 500 people wrapping round the whole of the Venetian to get into a session. No more disgruntled attendees - who were not able to get into a session after having waited for an hour in line.

Lines for buses were much shorter - no more “routes” - but point to point - which was very well managed and funneled throughout the event.

You were not allowed to line up for a session more than an hour in advance. Now this solved most of the long line problems, but was not always enforced (take the DeepRacer sessions for example)

For me the overall impression was amazing. I think that I was only turned away from a single session throughout the whole event - and that was a builder session - which I was not registered to.  I managed to get into any session I wanted, not only frontal sessions, but also workshops as well.

AWS pride themselves on being fanatical about their customers, they listen to what their customers want, they listen to their feedback and they want to make thing better, they want to solve our problems. The feedback that I heard from attendees from last year was that it was a in plain words - a train wreck - because of all the reasons above.

If you ask me - they addressed all of the feedback points, and fixed almost all of them.

And for that I take my hat off to the event team - and say Bravo, that is a job well done.

Next posts will go into some more details about the announcements and some of the sessions.

I am not an expert, and I only went to re:Invent for the first time last year, but I have been to a quite a number of conferences over the years.

So here come my thoughts about making the most of the crazy week in Vegas.

The (regular) sessions

Contrary to what you might think, going to sessions where you have a speaker (or speakers) up on stage going through a slide deck, or a panel of speakers talking about a subject - is where you should be, is not a good use of your time.

There are currently 2358 sessions and activities listed on the portal (a good portion of them are repeats - but hell that is a lot of content)

Almost all of the sessions (I will get back this in a few minutes) are recorded and therefore can be consumed after the event - in the car, on the bus or train - or even in the air during your travels.

Here is a podcast feed (http://aws-reinvent-audio.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/2017/2017.html) for all 2017 sessions for your listening pleasure.

That is why you can spend your time better elsewhere.

The Builder / Chalk Talk / Workshop sessions

Here is where I would spend my time. The cost of re:Invent (if you paid the full price) is $1,800 for 4.5 days (Friday is a short day). These are the sessions that will not be recorded and where I will probably get the most benefit
(and here are some of my interests). The value I receive is from doing things that I learn from, not by being a passive listener, but by actively participating in a discussion or an activity.

Chalk talks

This is similar to getting a design session and time with an AWS expert in their field and diving deep into a specific subject. Most of the sessions are level 300/400 - which meant they are advanced and highly technical. The rooms are small - usually no more than 50-100 people and the participants there are usually people that are looking for a very specific answers about the journey they have embarked on - or are about to.

ARC210-R - SaaS Jumpstart: A Primer for Launching Your SaaS Journey
ARC213-R - Architecting for the Cloud
ARC216 - SaaS Operations: The Foundation of SaaS Agility
ARC301 - Cost Optimization Tooling
ARC306 - Breaking up the Monolith
ARC310-R - From One to Many: Diving Deeper into Evolving VPC Design
ARC317-R - Reliability of the Cloud: How AWS Achieves High Availability
ARC325 - SaaS Analytics and Metrics: Capturing and Surfacing the Data That's Fundamental to Your Success
ARC326-R1 - Migrating Single-Tenant Applications to Multi-Tenant SaaS
ARC408 - Under the Hood of Amazon Route 53

Builder Sessions

Looking for some personal time with an SA on a specific topic, and even better - you get to build the solution at hand with the guidance from the expert on-hand. Pure learning experience.

ANT402-R - Securing Your Amazon Elasticsearch Service Domain
ARC415-R - Building Multi-Region Persistence with MySQL

Workshops

Again - a hands-on learning experience - 2-3 hours of sitting down on a specific topic getting my hands dirty...

ARC404 - Designing for Operability: Getting the Last Nines in Five-Nines Availability
ARC315-R1 - Hands-On: Building a Multi-Region Active-Active Solution
ARC327-R1 - Hands-on SaaS: Constructing a Multi-Tenant Solution on AWS
ARC403 - Resiliency Testing: Verify That Your System Is as Reliable as You Think
CMP403-R1 - Running Amazon EKS Workloads on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
DEV303-R2 - Instrumenting Kubernetes for Observability Using AWS X-Ray and Amazon CloudWatch
DEV306-R - Monitoring for Operational Outcomes and Application Insights: Best Practices
GPSWS402 - Continuous Compliance for Modern Application Pipelines
GPSWS407 - Automated Solution for Deploying AWS Landing Zone
NET410 - Workshop: Deep Dive on Container Networking at Scale on Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, & Amazon EC2
SEC331-R1 - Find All the Threats: AWS Threat Detection and Remediation
SEC337-R - Build a Vulnerability Management Program Using AWS for AWS

Hackathons

Want to geek out and build something, play a game or solve a whodunnit quest? This is where I will get my game on.  Some are for fun, some are for fame, and others just for plain doing some good.

Giving back

Being at re:Invent is something that is fun, and usually something that can involve consumption of many things. Food, alcohol, entertainment and even your hard earned cash. Me being me - I prioritize giving back to others  as part of my daily life. Spending a week at a conference only receiving is not something I am comfortable with.
So as a result I will be spending some of my time  here https://reinvent.awsevents.com/play/giving-back

The BackPack for Kids program provides bags of nutritious, single-serving, ready-to-eat food items each Friday to children who might otherwise go without during weekends and long breaks from school. Come by the Venetian Sands Foyer to get involved and help put together a backpack or two! Learn more about Three Square here.

Keynotes

Event though the keynotes can be consumed from a live stream - there is something about sitting in a room (or a huge hall) with a boatload of people - where Andy Jassy goes up on stage and bombards you with all the new features that are coming (some that will only be available sometime in the future). But still it is quite mesmerizing and if you have not been in one of these keynotes - I would suggest you go. It is quite an experience.

The Certification Lounge

As Corey Quinn just wrote a few days ago

it's a $100 lounge pass with a very odd entrance questionnaire

If you have an AWS certification - go to the lounge - it is a place to get away from the other 49,000 others in the hallways and the constant buzz around you.

The Expo

Do not under any circumstances miss going to the Expo floor. To really make proper use of the floor - I would say you will need a good 6-8 hours of your schedule (don't do it one shot though). Go to the vendors, especially the smaller ones that don't have the huge booths. Look at your competition, speak to people, make yourself known. Yes you will be bombarded after the show with sales calls - but all it takes is a simple "Sorry not interested anymore" and most vendors will leave you be.

Social media

I don't think I could get by without following what is going on in Twitter.
I have a search column dedicated for re:Invent (already for the past month)



I will also be checking the og-aws Slack channel to co-ordinate snark about the announcements and on-goings at the event and also some face to face meetings with some of the people that I only have met through their avatars.

(And as always the great set of posts at the Guide of Guides is invaluable.)

See you all in 2 weeks!

Most vendors that perceive themselves as a market leader will have a major annual event (some will even have multiple events in different geographical locations).

re:Invent is coming - and the frenzy of releases that will build up to the event is just around the corner.

I have always had in the back of my mind that all the products announced at re:Invent are great for the press releases and the small digs at other vendors, but sometimes it takes a while until we actually get what was announced on stage in front of ~20,000 people and the rest of the world.

And I went out to look for some data. It is obvious that not everything that we heard about on stage was baked and ready for production use.

Here are some examples from last years re:Invent

re:Invent 2017

EKS (188 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-elastic-container-service-for-kubernetes/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-eks-now-generally-available/ (June 5, 2018)

 
Bare Metal (170 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-bare-metal-instances-with-direct-access-to-hardware/
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/05/announcing-general-availability-of-amazon-ec2-bare-metal-instances/ (May 17, 2018)

 
Serverless App repo (83 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-serverless-app-repo/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-aws-serverless-application-repository/ (Feb 21, 2018)

 
Neptune (183 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/amazon-neptune-fast-reliable-graph-database-built-for-the-cloud/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-neptune-generally-available/ (May 30, 2018)

 
Aurora Multi-master (Still not released)

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/sign-up-for-the-preview-of-amazon-aurora-multi-master/
Yet to be released (Oct 14, 2018)

 
Aurora Serverless (254 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-amazon-aurora-serverless/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aurora-serverless-ga/ (Aug 9, 2018)

 
IOT 1-click (169 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/aws-iot-one-click-now-in-preview/
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/05/aws-iot-1-click-generally-available/ (May 16, 2018)

 
Translate (127 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-translate-real-time-text-language-translation/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-translate-now-generally-available/ (Apr 4, 2018)

 
Transcribe (127 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-transcribe-scalable-and-accurate-automatic-speech-recognition/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-transcribe-now-generally-available/ (Apr 4, 2018)

 
Appsync (137 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-appsync/
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/04/aws-appsync-now-ga/ (Apr 13, 2018)

 
S3 Select (126 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/s3-glacier-select/
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/04/amazon-s3-select-is-now-generally-available/ (Apr 3, 2018)

re:Invent 2016

Lex (141 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-lex-build-conversational-voice-text-interfaces/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-lex-now-generally-available/ (Apr 19, 2017)

 
PostgreSQL for Aurora (329 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-update-postgresql-compatibility/ 
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-amazon-aurora-with-postgresql-compatibility/ (Oct 24, 2017)

 
GreenGrass (190 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-greengrass-ubiquitous-real-world-computing/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-greengrass-run-aws-lambda-functions-on-connected-devices/ (Jun 07, 2017)

 
X-Ray (140 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-x-ray-see-inside-of-your-distributed-application/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-x-ray-update-general-availability-including-lambda-integration/ (Apr 19, 2017)

 
Batch (36 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-batch-run-batch-computing-jobs-on-aws/
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/01/aws-batch-now-generally-available/ (Jan 5, 2017)

 
Lambda Edge (229 days)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-lambda-at-the-edge/
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/07/lambda-at-edge-now-generally-available/ (Jul 17, 2017)

 
At a glance it looks like the average amount of time from the list above was about 5 months.

Now don’t get me wrong. For all of the above items that were not actually available at re:Invent - I would estimate that there were the same number of products (if not more) that were available (at least in a limited number of regions) the same day they were announced. Above and beyond - the problems that AWS is trying solve and really complex - and a almost all of them have never been done before - so please AWS take your time in developing the game changing technology that you have been giving to the world.

So when Andy Jassy and Werner Vogels get up on stage at the end of November, and announce whatever wonderful stuff they are going to announce - we should all take into account that it could take anything from 1 day to almost a year until we can actually use it in all the AWS regions that we are consuming today.

How can this / does this affect you? I can give an example from the EKS announcement. We were actively looking at a kubernetes deployment on AWS and were contemplating whether we should deploy our own or wait for the managed solution that was announced at re:Invent.

Since we did not have an official release date - we decided to roll our own - and not wait for some some unknown time in the future.

It is nice to know what is coming. You will need to evaluate how long you can wait - are you ready to go with a version one product (that could / will probably have a good number of limitations) or come up with a contingency plan to solve your issues.

I hardly mix my professional and personal life here on this blog. I will every now and again throw in some thoughts and feelings from my personal beliefs into my blog posts, when appropriate.

The last time I did a Jewish perspective on a technical conference was VMworld 2014 in San Francisco - VMworld - from a Religious Jewish Orthodox Perspective. It was really interesting to see the comments in the blog post and also the feedback I received on Twitter - which lead me to realization that people are completely unaware of the challenges others face because of the their religious beliefs and faith, and explaining these in a public forum - goes a really long way to help them understand

I was quite surprised that when I reached out the re:Invent team to ask about Kosher food at the event - the answer was that there was none. When I was at VMworld in Vegas (a good number of years ago) there was kosher food as one of the options (I don’t really understand why this was not a possibility at this event). It was actually quite amazing to see some of the looks from the people when I walked past all the lines straight to the “special meals” section without having to wait in line, and more than once.

Sometimes eating Kosher does have its perks.

Back to re:Invent (from the FAQ)

Basically - that means no kosher food throughout the day, which kind of sucks. The good thing about food in the US is that a good portion of the larger product manufacturers already are certified kosher - the most common being the OU. So I assume that some snacks and most of the drinks will not a problem.

So that means for me - bringing my own lunch. Dinner will be in one of the Kosher restaurants in the surrounding neighborhoods. I have never eaten at any of these so I cannot vouch for the quality of their food or their service.

There is also a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at the Venetian / Palazzo that might have a few kosher items during the day, personally I would not bet on it being a good option for lunch.

Here is a list of Kosher restaurants in Las Vegas (and information I took from Google Maps)

• Ace of Steaks (5825 W Sahara Ave Unit M. - +1 702-899-4223). Open till 23.00 Sun.-Thurs.
  It is about a 17 minute drive from the Venetian
• Anise Tapas and Grill (3100 S Durango Dr. - +1 702-586-4088). Open till 22.00 Sun-.Thurs.
  It is about a 20 minute drive from the Venetian
• King Solomon’s Table (4561 W Flamingo Rd. - +1 725-244-4034). Open till 22.00 Sun.-Thurs.
  It is about a 10 minute drive from the Venetian
• Haifa Restaurant (900 E Karen Ave # H102 - +1 702-940-8000). Open till 21.00 Sun.-Thurs.
  It is about a 11 minute drive from the Venetian
• Jerusalem Grill & Bar (4825 W Flamingo Rd. Suite 10 - +1 702-341-5555).
  Open till 22.30 Sun.-Thurs. It is about a 11 minute drive from the Venetian.
• Sababa Grille & Restaurant (3220 South Durango Dr. - +1 702-547-5556). Op
  It is about a 20 minute drive from the Venetian
• Shawarma Vegas (2521 S Fort Apache Rd. - +1 702-703-7700). Open till 21.00 Sun.-Thurs.
  It is about a 25 minute drive from the Venetian
• Simon & Joe’s (3720 W Tropicana Ave. - +1 702-759-0333). Open till 21.30 Sun.-Thurs.
  It is about a 10 minute drive from the Venetian.

Kosher Supermarkets (these are much further out - but have a good Kosher selection)

• Albertson's Market (2550 S. Fort Apache). 25 Minute drive from the Venetian.
• Smith's Food and Drug Store (2211 N. Rampart Blvd.) 25 Minute drive from the Venetian
  

Last but not least.

Eating alone sucks - it really does. I know for a fact that there will be a good number of people who eat only Kosher at re:Invent - but no real way to contact one another while at the event.

I have opened up a WhatsApp group - where you can feel free to ask if someone would like to go out for a kosher dinner on one of the evenings.

Please feel free to join in and share this information with whomever you feel it might useful.

Click on the link below to join the group and join someone for dinner.

See you all in Vegas next week!!