AWS re:Invent 2014

In 2013, leading global energy company, Hess Corporation announced it was exiting its downstream businesses to focus on a higher growth portfolio of Exploration and Production (EandP) assets. With obligations to deliver functioning and operational IT infrastructure to the buyers and little time for redesign, Hess leveraged AWS to establish a repeatable, cloud escrow model which enabled them to rapidly migrate a large and diverse application inventory.

This session provides the technical aspects and unique insights into enterprise cloud adoption challenges and how Hess and Nimbo were able to successfully overcome them by relying on the flexibility and scale of AWS.

For governments, the cloud offers not only cost savings and agility, but the opportunity to develop breakthroughs in research, accelerate economic development and innovation, and enable andquot;the always-up, always-onandquot; infrastructure necessary to support critical missions. National and local governments are coping with the dual challenges of constrained budgets and human resources along with strict information security regimes. Many agencies and organizations are attracted to web services rather than on premises hardware, both for the cost benefits and for agility they offer.

This session provides an overview of the use cases ranging from offloading simple websites to running parallel test environments to migrating major enterprise production applications to the cloud-all of them balancing security and compliance with economy and access. Examples from FINRA, UCAS, the government of Singapore, and the US Department of Health and Human Services highlight the significant transformative impact of cloud architectures including Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudFront and Amazon DynamoDB. Learn the practical strategies being deployed by governments worldwide to break down innovation barriers and tackle mission-critical operations with the cloud.

With AWS, you can reduce capital costs, lower your overall bill, and match your expense to your usage. This session describes how to calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) for deploying solutions on AWS vs. on-premises or at a colocation facility, as well as how to address common pitfalls in building a TCO analysis. The session presents and models customer examples.

This session is a deep dive into techniques used by successful customers who optimized their use of AWS. Learn tricks and hear tips you can implement right away to reduce waste, choose the most efficient instance, and fine-tune your spending; often with improved performance and a better end-customer experience. We showcase innovative approaches and demonstrate easily applicable methods to save you time and money with Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and a host of other services.

This session helps you deploy and manage your first AWS resources using a combination of AWS and VMware tools. In this session, you get an overview of the similarities and differences between AWS and VMware, common tools that you can use to leverage your existing VMware experience when getting started with AWS, and a walkthrough of how you can create and manage your first AWS resources. This session also provides several tips and tricks from AWS customers on what to focus on and what to avoid when getting started managing a hybrid environment. We conclude by showcasing some innovative approaches that we have seen for building hybrid AWS/VMware architectures.

Most enterprises struggle with the delicate balance of enabling agility and innovation while ensuring proper compliance and corporate governance. In this session, we share lessons learned in identifying, consolidating, and governing AWS accounts across an enterprise while still allowing autonomy and innovation. We walk through the different ways enterprises manage their AWS accounts: governed, trusted, and rogue, the lessons learned in transitioning account types, and the benefits of each. Additionally, we share best practices for optimizing and controlling your AWS costs, managing security and user roles, and improving overall program management.

Taking a andquot;cloud firstandquot; approach requires a different approach than you probably had to consider for your initial few workloads in the cloud. You'll be diving into the deep end of hybrid environments, and that means taking a broad view of your IT strategy, architecture, and organizational design.

Through our experience in helping enterprises navigate this change, AWS has developed the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) to assist with planning, creating, managing, and supporting the shift. In this session, we cover how the CAF offers practical guidance and comprehensive guidelines to enterprise organizations, particularly around roles, governance, and efficiency.

Public cloud IaaS services continue to be the hottest segment of the cloud market with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure gaining all the attention. Almost all customers are currently evaluating, selecting or deploying major IaaS services. In this session, Gartner lays out recommended evaluation criteria for IaaS providers and objectively evaluates how AWS and Azure stack up against one another. The following key questions will be answered in this session:

What is the recommended evaluation criteria for IaaS providers?

How do AWS and Azure compare to one another?

What does the future hold for the public IaaS provider market?

The public cloud IaaS and PaaS markets are moving at a tremendous speed, and delivering innovative, differentiated services at rapidly-decreasing costs. Yet many IT organizations nevertheless believe that they would prefer to build a private cloud, or have one custom-built for them. Furthermore, the desires of IT Operations and Application Development often clash. Buyers must not only choose a solution that meets their current needs, but figure out how to meet their future needs, too. We'll discuss how to determine a strategy and source the capabilities you need.

Hybrid Infrastructure Integration is an approach to connect on-premises IT resources with AWS and bridge processes, services, and technologies used in common enterprise customer environments. This session addresses connectivity patterns, security controls, account governance, and operations monitoring approaches successfully implemented in enterprise engagements. Infrastructure architects and IT professionals can get an overview of various integration types, approaches, methodologies, and common service patterns, helping them to better understand and overcome typical challenges in hybrid enterprise environments.