AWS re:Invent 2016

In this session, we will review ways to manage the lifecycle of your dev, test, and production infrastructure using CloudFormation. Learn how to architect your infrastructure through loosely coupled stacks using cross-stack references, tightly coupled nested stacks and other best practices. Learn how to use CloudFormation to provision and manage a continuous deployment pipeline for your infrastructure-as-code. Automate deployment of new development environments as your infrastructure evolves, promote your new architecture for testing, and deploy changes to production.

When you're one of the top sports media sites on the internet, you deal with scale like no other. Bleacher Report and its Team Stream app enable millions of users to access their own personalized view of sports. In this session, we'll talk about how we broke up the monolith into microservices and how Elastic Beanstalk empowered us to move quickly. Learn how a small Ops team provided a world-class build/release pipeline by standing on the shoulder of giants (AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Jenkins, and Docker). This session is designed for those who want to get up and running as quickly as possible, but are uncompromising in their ownership of infrastructure. We'll discuss the reasoning behind our switch from fully managing our own infrastructure to a managed service, including some advanced customizations made possible through AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk configuration files (.ebextensions).

Analyzing and debugging production distributed applications built using a service-oriented or microservices architecture is a challenging task. In this session, we will introduce AWS X-Ray, a new service that makes it easier to identify performance bottlenecks and errors, pinpoint issues to specific service(s) in your application, identify the impact of issues on users of your application, and visualize a request call graph and service call graph for your applications. We will show interactive demos, and code samples for the demo will be available to all session attendees.

In this session, we’ll show how customers can use management tools to standardize the creation of AWS resources and then govern these resources through the lifecycle. By using AWS CloudFormation and AWS Service Catalog to provision resources at scale, AWS Config to audit any changes to the configuration of these resources, Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the health of these resources, and AWS CloudTrail to audit who or what made API calls to these resources, customers can automate and scale the administration of their infrastructure on AWS. They can even go one step further and automate compliance checking and remediation by using AWS Config rules and Amazon CloudWatch Events. We will demo how this is possible by looking at some common use cases.

Building scalable automation tools that work across heterogeneous application environments is challenging and can inhibit enterprise cloud migration efforts. Learn how the DevOps team at Infor, one of the world’s leading ISVs, manages dozens of enterprise applications built with a variety of technologies and application architectures. In addition to Infor’s approach to deployment and management automation, this session will cover the core tools they’ve developed on top of native AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS Lambda.

Adam Jacob, the CTO of Chef, will walk through what a DevOps Culture really means, explaining the most important concepts through examples and stories from the trenches. We'll talk about how to build empowered organizations, design delightful products, run effective operations, and more.

As incumbent enterprises move to the cloud, questions arise how transform the legacy IT culture to maximize the agility and flexibility AWS provides. Speed and dexterity must be implemented in a consistent manner, minimizing the impact to the organizational structure, but taking into account the existing skill sets and knowledge base. With AWS Service Catalog, you can manage commonly deployed AWS CloudFormation template versions, enable controlled self-provisioning, and leverage those same products in your automated deployment pipelines to AWS. In this session, developers, operations leads, architects, and IT managers learn how to leverage AWS Service Catalog and AWS CloudFormation to transform IT culture to maximize the agility, flexibility, and value that the AWS platform provides. Additionally, John Wiley & Sons, a 200-year-old enterprise, demonstrates how AWS Professional Services helped them balance the velocity achieved by moving to AWS with a structured governance model to deploy their cloud infrastructure and application code.

Learn how to leverage new workflow management tools to simplify complex data pipelines and ETL jobs spanning multiple systems. In this technical deep dive from Treasure Data, company founder and chief architect walks through the codebase of DigDag, our recently open-sourced workflow management project. He shows how workflows can break large, error-prone SQL statements into smaller blocks that are easier to maintain and reuse. He also demonstrates how a system using ‘last good’ checkpoints can save hours of computation when restarting failed jobs and how to use standard version control systems like Github to automate data lifecycle management across Amazon S3, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Aurora. Finally, you see a few examples where SQL-as-pipeline-code gives data scientists both the right level of ownership over production processes and a comfortable abstraction from the underlying execution engines. This session is sponsored by Treasure Data.

Understanding the internals of the AWS CLI will make you a more effective user. This talk provides a deep dive into the architecture, debugging techniques, advanced usage patterns, and some of its more advanced features. We recommend this talk for people who are already familiar with the AWS CLI because the topics will be advanced. By the end of the talk, audience members will have a deeper understanding of the AWS CLI, allowing them to tackle current or future applications from a different perspective.

Continuous delivery makes teams more agile and quickens the pace of innovation. Too often, though, teams adopt continuous delivery without putting the right safety mechanisms in place. In this talk, we'll transform a simple but typical software release process into one that is safe. We'll use DevOps techniques like continuous integration, a variety of non-production testing stages, rollbacks, machine redundancy, Availability Zone redundancy, canary deployments, canary tests, and dashboards. We'll use AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeDeploy, Amazon CloudWatch alarms and dashboards, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.