AWS re:Invent 2016

To keep pace with today’s hybrid IT landscape, enterprises have to innovate faster while ensuring compatibility with legacy IT systems. They also need to reduce costs and increase business value through responsive infrastructure backed by flexible, intelligent, and context-aware agile IT processes. To do this, they need service assurance in four distinct areas:

In this session, we provide programmatic guidance on building tools and applications to detect and manage fraud and unusual activity specific to financial services institutions. Payment fraud is an ongoing concern for merchants and credit card issuers alike and these activities impact all industries, but are specifically detrimental to Financial Services. We provide a step-by-step walkthrough of a reference solution to detect and address credit card fraud in real time by using Apache Apex and Amazon Machine Learning capabilities. We also outline different resource and performance optimization options and how to work data security into the fraud detection workflow.

Modern financial services organizations rely heavily on technology and automated systems to run business-as-usual. However, if this technology were interrupted by natural disasters or other events, there could be a devastating impact on investors and market participants, and in turn your reputational brand. In this session, we provide a step-by-step disaster recovery solution employed by a major exchange. This solution leverages Amazon EC2 Container Service to provide Docker containers, Weave Net to support a multicast overlay network that enables high volume multicast feeds in a cloud environment, and AWS CloudFormation for the ability to easily create and manage AWS assets. The session also covers the importance of redundancy (not just operationally, but for SEC compliance reasons as well) and how financial services organizations can increase geographical diversification of their primary and disaster recovery data centers. We dive deep into each major component of the solution.

Continuous Delivery can be challenging, especially for enterprises that deal with strict compliance requirements like those in the financial services sector. AWS and Stelligent frequently work together with many large Financial Services Enterprises to help incorporate their capabilities securely on the Cloud. From security of the source code used to trigger builds, to the insertion of strict business controls at run time, and out to the continuous inspection of the running infrastructure to ensure compliance, we are helping to build capabilities that are enabling them to run their business faster and safer on AWS.

In this session, we explain how Financial Services organizations can leverage AWS grid computing capabilities to perform large-scale calculations for risk management purposes. Numerous financial services companies face the same basic challenge: modeling multiple scenarios with different risk factors simultaneously or in quick succession in order to make informed decisions that maximize gains and minimize financial loss. Some examples of these workloads include Monte Carlo simulations, price model validation and back-testing, and risk calculations for hedging and capital optimization strategies. We provide programmatic guidance around what AWS services to use when running a grid computing cluster that requires thousands of cores and specific industry use cases and key benefits around speed and costs that the AWS platform, auto-scaling capabilities, and various compute services can help achieve.

In this session, learn about efforts to diversify IT, from programs in high schools all the way up to diversity among top-level executives. Regardless of where you are in your career, this session dives deep to speak to you about the changing tech landscape. Through successes and failures, speakers candidly discuss how everyone can help in changing the ratio to attract a more diverse workforce and create a culture of inclusion. Bring your questions, network with peers, and be inspired by both women and men making an impact in non-profit, enterprise and government sectors.

In November 2015, Capital Games launched a mobile game accompanying a major feature film release. The back end of the game is hosted in AWS and uses big data services like Amazon Kinesis, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and AWS Data Pipeline. Capital Games will describe some of their challenges on their initial setup and usage of Amazon Redshift and Amazon EMR. They will then go over their engagement with AWS Partner 47lining and talk about specific best practices regarding solution architecture, data transformation pipelines, and system maintenance using AWS big data services. Attendees of this session should expect a candid view of the process to implementing a big data solution. From problem statement identification to visualizing data, with an in-depth look at the technical challenges and hurdles along the way.

As systems and user bases grow, a once abundant resource can become scarce. While scaling out PlayStation services to millions of users at over a 100,000 requests/second, network throughput became a precious resource to optimize for. Alex and Dustin talk about how the microservices that power Playstation achieved low latency interactions while conserving on precious network bandwidth. These services powered by Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon DynamoDB benefitted from soft-state optimizations, a pattern that is used in complex interactions such as searching through a user’s social graph in sub 100 ms, or a user’s game library in 7 ms. As a developer utilizing Amazon Web services, you will discover new patterns and implementations which will better utilize your network, instances, and load balancers in order to deliver personalized experiences to millions of users while saving costs.

This session focuses on the cloud-connected features of Amazon Lumberyard. We introduce Amazon GameLift core concepts, complete a step-by-step walkthrough of deploying a multiplayer game to the cloud, and demonstrate how to rapidly scale a game based on player demand. We also cover Amazon Lumberyard’s Cloud Canvas, which empowers developers to leverage services such as databases, data storage, and methods to execute game logic within AWS without needing to configure or maintain servers. Finally we discuss integrating Twitch to your Lumberyard game with Twitch ChatPlay and JoinIn.

This session covers how the data team at Riot Games utilizes ECS to consolidate and improve disparate deployment and hosting strategies across a wide range of applications deployed via Docker containers. The team will share how cluster management and container orchestration through ECS enables the team to quickly adopt and evolve shared service hosting solutions as Riot continues its journey towards becoming a multi-game studio.