WOW experience at AWS re:invent 2017

Together with a few colleagues of IT solutions, IT services and Ciso we had to opportunity to attend the AWS re:Invent 2017 that took place in Las Vegas last week. With more than 40.000 attendees, more than 500 sessions, 3 key notes, 6 hotel areas and a great end party this is definitely one of the largest Cloud Events. The organization around the event has been done in such a way that developers are the center spot and facilitated to have the best experience. We take you with us in this experience via this blog.

Exciting times are ahead of us

Exciting times are ahead of us. Technology is available for everyone at a fraction of the costs as in the past. With public cloud providers everyone will have access to capabilities which we didn’t have before and constantly new services are becoming available. These services are easily adopted and enable us to deliver valuable solutions to our customers. IT will be more and more the enabler for the business.

What are the main disruptive technologies?

In Werner Vogel’s keynote he looked to the future of technology. The main disruptive technologies are voice interaction, connected devices to the internet that generates valuable data, real-time data processing and insights by deep learning networks. For each company it is real important to think now about how you can lever the opportunities which public cloud will offer you. Especially for banks such as ABN AMRO because we will be challenged by new startups. For example Goldman Sachs changed their IT strategy into moving everything to AWS to enable their strategy fast because of the new services, better risk management and more calculation and compute power. 

There were also a few other important take aways from the keynotes. Security will be a part of your DevOps team and can’t be any responsibility anymore from a separate department. The protection of our customers is the first goal. Werners advice is to encrypt everything, because the tools are there to easily do it. Furthermore we need to test, test and test. Aim as much as possible to break the systems to guarantee continuity and quality to your customers. 

AWS insight re:cap

There were more than 500 content sessions, here we a describe a few, which we think were the most interesting subjects to share with you:

• Real-time dashboard with Amazon Kinesis Analytics and Amazon Rekognition Kinesis is a services which can stream data real-time. The enables us to get data from any source, stream it to Amazon, apply data transformations or smart intelligence like objects recognition, write it to storage and make it visible in a dashboard and that all real-time with a small delay of 1-3 seconds. With these services we are able to give better advice and insights to our customers.
• Progressive web apps in the real world: optimizing your web workflows with AWS mobile hub Nowadays we build web apps and native apps like iOS and Android. Because of the diversity of the platforms the solutions needs to be built on multiple platforms. It's difficult to re-use components. This will impact the speed of delivery but you also needs to attract and develop the developers with a different skill set. In the past native apps came in place to lever performance and the capabilities of smart phones like GPS and camera. From now on it is possible to use these capabilities also with Web Apps with additional support for offline data sync. This enables us to deliver functionality by web apps fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42ouBvpvjBo

• Analytics, Authentication and data with JavaScript: AWS amplify There a many libraries available to include in your code. But there are so many which is difficult to choose and to maintain. AWS amplify is an open source library which delivers the best javascript applications to interact with cloud services. This is done in a way that you as a developer have to write less code and you can focus on writing business functionality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAjf3lyjf8c

• Getting started with Serverless Computing using AWS Lamba Serverless services in AWS provide you with an excellent way to build applications, service backends, process data and much more, without having to worry about managing and patching your instances. Lambda can be used with your own code (Node.js, Java, Python and C#, for now), integrates well with other AWS services, and can for example be easily triggered by a change in an S3 bucket or invoked by the AWS API Gateway. Lambda greatly simplifies the architecture of any organization and saves a lot of money because you only pay for what you use, greatly reducing idle time of instances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbHw14hF7lU

• Cloud-Native App Protection:Wep application security at Pearson and other customers using services like AWS WAF and Shield AWS WAF is designed to help you defend against common web application exploits. AWS WAF provides you with fast incident response, flexible rule language, APIs for automation, and preconfigured protection. For further protection necessary for enterprises such as ABN AMRO, AWS shield advanced offers all the security necessities. It provides additional protection against Large & Sophisticated attacks, provides fast escalation to the AWS DDOS Response team (DRT) to assist with complex cases, AWS WAF for application-layer defense and much more. AWS WAF also provides you with the means to protect instances that have elastic IP addresses, especially helpful if you are using scalable resources.

It was a great and inspiring week. We still process the information and are assessing which developments are interesting for ABN AMRO. But it is clear that exciting times are ahead of us and that technology is accessible for everyone, you only need to adopt it and start with it. We hope that we gave a good insight of what happened at AWS and are very curious about your successes with AWS.

Benjamin Blauw, Gijs van den Hoven, Ben van der Wagt en Ramon Postulart