AWS re:Invent 2014

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Starting today, you can sign up for an invitation to the preview of the service. Come to our session for an overview of the service and learn how Aurora delivers up to five times the performance of MySQL yet is priced at a fraction of what you'd pay for a commercial database with similar performance and availability.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. In this technical session, we conduct a detailed analysis of the differences among the three types of Amazon EBS block storage: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic. We discuss how to maximize Amazon EBS performance, with a special eye towards low-latency, high-throughput applications like databases. We discuss Amazon EBS encryption and share best practices for Amazon EBS snapshot management. Throughout, we share tips for success.

Amazon EC2 instances give customers a variety of high-bandwidth networking choices. In this session, we discuss how to choose among Amazon EC2 networking technologies and examine how to get the best performance out of Amazon EC2 enhanced networking and cluster networking. We also share best practices and useful tips for success.

Amazon WorkSpaces is an enterprise desktop computing service in the cloud. In this session, we dive deep into configuration, administration, and advanced networking topics for WorkSpaces. We also discuss integration of WorkSpaces to your corporate active directory and best practices for enabling your WorkSpaces to access resources on your corporate intranet.

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances for fault tolerance and load distribution. In this session, we go into detail about Elastic Load Balancing's configuration and day-to-day management, as well as its use in conjunction with Auto Scaling. We explain how to make decisions about the service's many customization choices. We also share best practices and useful tips for success.

Dynamo Streams provides a stream of all the updates done to your DynamoDB table. It is a simple but extremely powerful primitive which will enable developers to easily build solutions like cross-region replication, and to host additional materialized views, for instance an ElasticSearch index, on top of DynamoDB tables. In this session we will dive deep into details of Dynamo Streams, and how customers can leverage Dynamo Streams to build custom solutions and to extend the functionality of DynamoDB. We will give a demo of an example application built on top of Dynamo Streams to demonstrate the power and simplicity of Dynamo Streams.

Security must be at the forefront for any online business. At AWS, security is priority number one. Stephen Schmidt, vice president and chief information officer for AWS, shares his insights into cloud security and how AWS meets our customers' demanding security and compliance requirements, and in many cases helps them improve their security posture. Stephen, with his background with the FBI and his work with AWS customers in the government, space exploration, research, and financial services organizations, shares an industry perspective that's unique and invaluable for today's IT decision makers. At the conclusion of this session, Stephen also provides a brief summary of the other sessions available to you in the security track.

AWS provides a number of tools and processes to help you decide when and how to move audited, regulated, and critical business data to the cloud. In this session, we answer the following questions: when is it time for you to make this significant move? When will you be ready to address industry best practices for control (including third-party audits, access control configurations, incident response, data sovereignty, and encryption). We discuss how some highly regulated AWS customers have addressed the challenges that legacy regulatory requirements present to partners, vendors, and customers in migrating to the AWS Cloud. Finally, we cover general trends we're seeing in several regulated industries leveraging AWS and the trends we're seeing from the regulators themselves who audit and accept AWS control environments.

Do you have multiple AWS accounts that you want to share resources across? Considering an AWS partner offering that requires access to your AWS account? Delegation is your friend! Come learn how you can easily and securely delegate access to users in other AWS accounts, 3rd parties, or even other AWS services using delegation options available in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

If you have ever wondered how best to scope down permissions in your account, this in-depth look at the AWS Access Control Policy language is for you. We start with the basics of the policy language and how to create policies for users and groups. We look at how to use policy variables to simplify policy management. Finally, we cover some common use cases, such as granting a user secure access to an Amazon S3 bucket, allowing an IAM user to manage their own credentials and passwords, and more.