AWS re:Invent 2014

General Manager of Amazon Simple Storage Service, Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, will share our learnings running and growing the AWS storage services. You will hear the interesting ways customers are using S3 and Glacier, learn about the new Amazon features that we launched this year, and how we think about evolving the Storage services.

Join Peter De Santis, Vice President of Amazon Compute Services, and Matt Garman, Vice President of Amazon EC2 as they share a ''behind the scenes'' look at the evolution of compute at AWS. You hear about the drivers behind the innovations we've introduced, and learn how we've scaled our compute services to meet dramatic usage growth.

This session, led by James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer, gives an insider view of some the innovations that help make the AWS cloud unique. He will show examples of AWS networking innovations from the interregional network backbone, through custom routers and networking protocol stack, all the way down to individual servers. He will show examples from AWS server hardware, storage, and power distribution and then, up the stack, in high scale streaming data processing. James will also dive into fundamental database work AWS is delivering to open up scaling and performance limits, reduce costs, and eliminate much of the administrative burden of managing databases. Join this session and walk away with a deeper understanding of the underlying innovations powering the cloud.

Databases are at the heart of IT systems and their operation present unique challenges. Join us for an open discussion with Financial Times and Swami Sivasubramanian, co-creator and builder of DynamoDB and General Manager of AWS NoSQL, to learn about strategies and best practices around managed database solutions: how they can be leveraged to scale along with your business; when the use of managed databases makes sense (and when it doesn't); and how to save money with the different types of database services offered by AWS.

The heart of any service is its availability. Even the coolest game, mobile app, or website is hard to love if users can't rely on it to be available when they need it the most. In this session, we dive deep into how we think about availability of services at AWS and the measures we take to maximize our availability at scale: starting from multi-datacenter services to our deployment methodology, canaries, and fault tolerance in general. In this session, you will get a comprehensive view of how different organizations think about availability and the tradeoffs we make on our way to building highly available services.

An increasingly common form of computing is computation in response to recently occurring events. These might be newly arrived or changed data, such as an uploaded Amazon S3 image file or an update to an Amazon DynamoDB table, or they might be changes in the state of some system or service, such as termination of an EC2 instance. Support for this form of computing requires both a means of efficiently surfacing events as a sequence of change records, as well as frameworks for processing such change logs. This session provides an overview of how AWS intends to facilitate event-driven computing through support for both change logs as well as various means of processing them.

Promotions and product updates can bring a heavy load of traffic to your website all at once. In this session, we cover best practices for being able to handle those traffic spikes easily using Amazon Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon CloudFront. You learn how to configure your site to scale as needed, and how to configure your DNS and CDN settings so that a massive influx in traffic won't keep your site's visitors from having a great experience.

Amazon S3 gives you the ability to serve files from your Amazon S3 buckets. This session shows you how to set up a website with Amazon S3 to serve your static content. We show how you can use open source tools like Jekyll and Octopress to run a blog on your static site. Finally, you see how you can make that site more dynamic using other AWS products and the AWS SDK for JavaScript.

Adding a web caching layer to your website can decrease page load times and increase the number of users each instance can serve. This session helps you understand how to use tools like Varnish to configure and utilize a web caching layer to improve the performance of your website. Learn how to add a web caching layer to your existing website and how to use it most effectively. We also cover tips and tricks for deploying and running a web caching layer in AWS.

Log data contains some of the most valuable raw information you can gather and analyze about your infrastructure and applications. Amid the mess of confusing lines of seemingly random text can be hints about performance, security, flaws in code, user access patterns, and other operational data. Without the proper tools, finding insights in these logs can be like searching for a hay-colored needle in a haystack. In this session you learn what practices and patterns you can easily implement that can help you better understand your log files. You see how you can customize web logs to add more information to them, how to digest logs from around your infrastructure, and how to analyze your log files in near real time.