AWS re:Invent 2014

When your infrastructure scales, you need to have the tooling and knowledge to support that scale. Chef is one of the commonly used tools for deploying and managing all kinds of infrastructure at any scale.

In this session, we focus on how you can get your existing infrastructure robustly represented in Chef. We dive deep on all the specifics that make deploying with Chef on AWS easy: authentication management, versioning, recipe testing, and leveraging AWS resources in your recipes. Whether you're building new infrastructure with no existing operations management software or deploying existing Chef recipes into AWS, this session will outline all the tips and tricks you need to be a master Chef in the cloud.

Amazon made the transition to a service-oriented architecture over a decade ago. That move drove major changes to the way we release updates to our applications and services. We learned many lessons over those years, and we used that experience to refine our internal tools as well as the services that we make available to our customers. In this session, we share that learning with you, and demonstrate how to optimize for agility and reliability in your own deployment process.

Container technology, particularly Docker, is all the rage these days. At AWS, our customers have been running Linux containers at scale for several years, and we are increasingly seeing customers adopt Docker, especially as they build loosely coupled distributed applications. However, to do so they have to run their own cluster management solutions, deal with configuration management, and manage their containers and associated metadata. We believe that those capabilities should be a core building block technology, just like EC2. Today, we are announcing the preview of Amazon EC2 Container Service, a new AWS service that makes is easy to run and manage Docker-enabled distributed applications using powerful APIs that allow you to launch and stop containers, get complete cluster state information, and manage linked containers. In this session we will discuss why we built the EC2 Container Service, some of the core concepts, and walk you through how you can use the service for your applications.

This session details Coca-Cola's effort to migrate hundreds of applications from on-premises to AWS. The focus is on migration best practices, security considerations, helpful tools, automation, and business processes used to complete the effort. Key AWS technologies highlighted will be AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon VPC, AWS CloudFormation, and the AWS APIs.

This session includes demos and code samples. Participants should walk away with a clear understanding of how AWS Elastic Beanstalk compares to andquot;platform as a service,andquot; and why it was chosen to meet strict standards for security and business intelligence.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a number of simple and flexible interfaces for developing and deploying your applications. Follow Thinknear's rapid growth from inception to acquisition, scaling from a few dozen requests per hour to billions of requests served each day with AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Thinknear engineers demonstrate how they extended the AWS Elastic Beanstalk platform to scale to billions of requests while meeting response times below 100 ms, discuss tradeoffs they made in the process, and what did and did not work for their mobile ad bidding business.

Working with big volumes of data is a complicated task, but it's even harder if you have to do everything in real time and try to figure it all out yourself. This session will use practical examples to discuss architectural best practices and lessons learned when solving real-time social media analytics, sentiment analysis, and data visualization decision-making problems with AWS. Learn how you can leverage AWS services like Amazon RDS, AWS CloudFormation, Auto Scaling, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, and Amazon Elastic MapReduce to perform highly performant, reliable, real-time big data analytics while saving time, effort, and money. Gain insight from two years of real-time analytics successes and failures so you don't have to go down this path on your own.

Today, many enterprises' data centers are at capacity, and these data centers are looking to expand their infrastructure footprint using the cloud. By leveraging a hybrid architecture, enterprises can expand their capabilities while maintaining some or all of their existing management tools. This session will go into detail on managing your AWS infrastructure with the AWS Management Portal for vCenter, integrating the AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center for monitoring your AWS resources, and possible future System Center and vCenter AWS cloud management features and functionality.

In this session, we will walk through the fundamentals of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). First, we will cover build-out and design fundamentals for VPC, including picking your IP space, subnetting, routing, security, NAT, and much more. We will then transition into different approaches and use cases for optionally connecting your VPC to your physical data center with VPN or AWS Direct Connect. This mid-level architecture discussion is aimed at architects, network administrators, and technology decision-makers interested in understanding the building blocks AWS makes available with VPC and how you can connect this with your offices and current data center footprint.

Application requirements have changed dramatically in recent years, requiring millisecond or even microsecond response times and 100 percent uptime. This change has led to a new wave of andquot;reactive applicationsandquot; with architectures that are event-driven, scalable, resilient, and responsive. In this session, we present the blueprint for building reactive applications on AWS. We compare reactive architecture to the classic n-tier architecture and discuss how it is cost-efficient and easy to implement using AWS. Next, we walk through how to design, build, deploy, and run reactive applications in the AWS cloud, delivering highly responsive user experiences with a real-time feel. This architecture uses Amazon EC2 instances to implement server push to broadcast events to application clients; AWS messaging (Amazon SQS/SNS); Amazon SWF to decouple system components; Amazon DynamoDB to minimize contention; and Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Availability Zones, Amazon VPC, and Amazon Route 53 to make reactive applications scalable and resilient.

Whether you're a startup getting to profitability or an enterprise optimizing spend, it pays to run cost-efficient architectures on AWS. Building on last year's popular foundation of how to reduce waste and fine-tune your AWS spending, this session reviews a wide range of cost planning, monitoring, and optimization strategies, featuring real-world experience from AWS customer Adobe Systems. With the massive growth of subscribers to Adobe's Creative Cloud, Adobe's footprint in AWS continues to expand. We will discuss the techniques used to optimize and manage costs, while maximizing performance and improving resiliency. We'll cover effectively combining EC2 On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot instances to handle different use cases, leveraging auto scaling to match capacity to workload, choosing the most optimal instance type through load testing, taking advantage of multi-AZ support, and using CloudWatch to monitor usage and automatically shutting off resources when not in use. Other techniques we'll discuss include taking advantage of tiered storage and caching, offloading content to Amazon CloudFront to reduce back-end load, and getting rid of your back end entirely, by leveraging AWS high-level services. We will also showcase simple tools to help track and manage costs, including the AWS Cost Explorer, Billing Alerts, and Trusted Advisor. This session will be your pocket guide for running cost effectively in the Amazon cloud.