AWS re:Invent 2016

The way humans interact with machines is at a turning point, and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is at the center of the transformation. Learn how Amazon is using machine learning and cloud computing to fuel innovation in AI, making Amazon Alexa smarter every day. Alexa VP and Head Scientist Rohit Prasad presents the state of the union Alexa and Recent Advances in Conversational AIn for Alexa. He addresses Alexa's advances in spoken language understanding and machine learning, and shares Amazon's thoughts about building the next generation of user experiences.

Want to learn how to Alexa-power your home? Join Brookfield Residential CIO and EVP Tom Wynnyk and Senior Solutions Architect Nathan Grice, for Alexa Smart Home for an overview of building the next generation of integrated smart homes using Alexa to create voice-first experiences. Understand the technologies used and how to best expose voice experiences to users through Alexa. Paul and Nathan cover the difference between custom Alexa skills and Smart Home Skill API skills, and build a home automation control from the ground up using Alexa and AWS IoT.

Cloud computing gives you a number of advantages, such as the ability to scale your web application or website on demand. If you have a new web application and want to use cloud computing, you might be asking yourself, 'Where do I start?' Join us in this session to understand best practices for scaling your resources from zero to millions of users. We show you how to best combine different AWS services, how to make smarter decisions for architecting your application, and how to scale your infrastructure in the cloud.

Accenture Cloud Platform helps customers manage public and private enterprise cloud resources effectively and securely. In this session, learn how we designed and built new core platform capabilities using a serverless, microservices-based architecture that is based on AWS services such as AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway. During our journey, we discovered a number of key benefits, including a dramatic increase in developer velocity, a reduction (to almost zero) of reliance on other teams, reduced costs, greater resilience, and scalability. We describe the (wild) successes we’ve had and the challenges we’ve overcome to create an AWS serverless architecture at scale. Session sponsored by Accenture.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework enables customers to understand best practices around security, reliability, performance, and cost optimization when building systems on AWS. This approach helps customers make informed decisions and weigh the pros and cons of application design patterns for the cloud. In this session, you'll learn how National Instruments used the Well-Architected Framework to follow AWS guidelines and best practices. By developing a strategy based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, National Instruments was able to triple the number of applications running in the cloud without additional head count, significantly increase the frequency of code deployments, and reduce deployment times from two weeks to a single day. As a result, National Instruments was able to deliver a more scalable, dynamic, and resilient LabVIEW platform with agility.

Building and evolving a pervasive, global service requires a multi-disciplined approach that balances requirements with service availability, latency, data replication, compute capacity, and efficiency. In this session, we’ll follow the Netflix journey of failure, innovation, and ubiquity. We'll review the many facets of globalization and then delve deep into the architectural patterns that enable seamless, multi-region traffic management; reliable, fast data propagation; and efficient service infrastructure. The patterns presented will be broadly applicable to internet services with global aspirations.

This presentation provides a comparison of three modern architecture patterns that startups are building their business around. It includes a realistic analysis of cost, team management, and security implications of each approach. It covers Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon ECS, Docker, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon CloudFront, as well as Docker.

When your business is counting on the performance of your cloud solutions, having relevant and timely insights into events impacting your AWS resources is essential. AWS Personal Health Dashboard serves as the primary destination for you to receive personalized information related to your AWS infrastructure, guiding your through scheduled changes, and accelerating the troubleshooting of issues impacting your AWS resources. The service, powered by AWS Health APIs, integrates with your in-house event management systems, and can be programmatically configured to proactively get the right information into the right hands at the right time. The service is integrated with Splunk App for AWS to enhance Splunk’s dashboards, reports and alerts to deliver real-time visibility into your environment.

AWS provides many services to assist customers with their journey to the cloud. Hybrid solutions offer customers a way to continue leveraging existing investments on-premises, while expanding their footprint into the public cloud. This session covers the different technologies available to support hybrid architectures on AWS. We discuss common patterns and anti-patterns for solving enterprise workloads across a hybrid environment.

In today’s world, technology changes at a breakneck speed. What was new this morning is outdated at lunch. Working in the AWS Cloud is no different. Every week, AWS announces new features or improvements to current products. As AWS technologists, we must assimilate these new technologies and make decisions to adopt, reject, or defer. These decisions can be overwhelming: we tend to either reject everything and become stagnant, or adopt everything and never get our project out the door. In this session we will discuss the attitude of iteration. The attitude of iteration allows us to face the challenges of change without overwhelming our technical teams with a constant tug-o-war between implementation and improvement. Whether you’re an architect, engineer, developer, or AWS newbie, prepare to laugh, cry, and commiserate as we talk about overcoming these challenges.