AWS re:Invent 2016

In this session, we’ll look at the AWS services that customers are using to build and deploy Microsoft-based solutions that use technologies like Windows, .NET, SQL Server, and PowerShell. We’ll start by showing you how to build a Windows-based CI/CD pipeline on AWS using AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CloudFormation, and PowerShell using an AWS Quick Start. We’ll also cover best practices for how you can create templates that let you automatically deploy ready-to-use Windows products by leveraging services and tools like AWS CloudFormation, PowerShell, and Git. Woot, an online retailer for electronics, will share how it moved from using a complex mix of custom PowerShell code for its DevOps processes to using services like Amazon EC2 Simple Systems Manager (SSM), AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS Directory Service. This migration eliminated the need for complex PowerShell scripts and reduced the operational complexity of performing operational tasks like renaming servers, joining domains, and securely handling keys.

At Dynatrace, we challenged ourselves to build a virtual team member to help operations teams run large-scale cloud infrastructures. Think J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man, but for operations. We built our cloud infrastructure on Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, and Auto Scaling groups for real-time scalability, Amazon Route 53 for instant customer access, Amazon Echo and Alexa for voice interaction, AWS Lambda for fast prototyping of the human-interaction layer, and Amazon DynamoDB for handling complex conversations. In this session, we will also discuss how we extend the service by using Amazon Machine Learning and AWS IoT to more naturally integrate our virtual assistant into the real world.

To ensure that your application operates in a predictable manner in both your test and production environments, you must vigilantly maintain the configuration of your resources. By leveraging configuration management solutions, Dev and Ops engineers can define the state of their resources across their entire lifecycle. In this session, we will show you how to use AWS OpsWorks, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline to build a reliable and consistent development pipeline that assures your production workloads behave in a predictable manner.

When you run a complex AWS environment with thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, more than half a petabyte of object storage, and support the largest daily newspapers in the UK, you need a world-class cloud management strategy. For companies like News Corp, implementing policies that automate infrastructure schedules, right-size workloads, and manage and modify reservations is critical. As you scale your cloud infrastructure, defining centralized governance rules while enabling decentralized management is key to running an optimized cloud.

Elasticsearch has quickly become the leading open source technology for scaling search and building document services on. Many software providers have come to rely on it to serve the needs of high-performance, production applications.

Chalice is a new Python serverless microframework for AWS. In this session, we'll show how to use it to create serverless REST APIs that use Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda. We'll deploy our first REST API in less than 30 seconds. Several live demos will show how to build on this example to leverage other Chalice capabilities, including advanced URL routing, automatic policy generation, and Swagger exports.

In this session, you will discover how to integrate the AWS developer tools into your development process. We will demonstrate how to leverage AWS services, the .NET SDK, and the Visual Studio Toolkit to simplify and streamline your development processes. This session is targeted at development teams using Microsoft Visual Studio and the Microsoft ecosystem of products. Most of the presentation will be in Visual Studio.

We’ve seen companies like fast-growing startups, large enterprises, and even Amazon.com itself adopt and evolve strategies to optimize their delivery of cloud applications. Some AWS customers perform in-place updates across their servers. Some perform blue-green deployments to newly provisioned servers. In this session, we’ll share the advantages of each approach and talk about the scenarios in which you should choose one over the other. We will also demonstrate how to perform each deployment technique in an agile and reliable manner.

Netflix rapidly deploys services across multiple AWS accounts and regions over 4,000 times a day. We’ve learned many lessons about reliability and efficiency. What’s more, we’ve built sophisticated tooling to facilitate our growing global footprint. In this session, you’ll learn about how Netflix confidently delivers services on a global scale and how, using best practices combined with freely available open source software, you can do the same.

Dynamic applications require dynamic resources and dynamic infrastructure. AWS provides many resources for applications to build highly scaled, highly available, dynamic applications, services, and microservices. However, managing and tracking these resources—and making sure they are operating as expected—is a challenge. In this session, we discuss how to monitor and manage the dynamic resources that make up your applications, and learn how to tell when a resource is causing your application problems. Designed for people already acquainted with basic dynamic resource allocation techniques, such as effectively using Auto Scaling, this session helps you take your resource management to the next level.