AWS re:Invent 2016

Regularly, customers at AWS assign resources to create solutions that address common problems shared between businesses of all sizes. Often, this results in taking resources away from products or services that truly differentiate the business in the marketplace. The Solutions Builder team at AWS focuses on developing and publishing a catalog of repeatable, standardized solutions that can be rapidly deployed by customers to overcome common business challenges. In this session, the Solutions Builder team will share ready to use solutions that make it easy for anyone to create a transit VPC, centralized logging, a data lake, scheduling for Amazon EC2, and VPN monitoring. Along the way, the team reveals the architectural tenets and best practices they follow for the development of these solutions. In the end, customers are introduced to a catalog of freely available solutions with a peek into the architectural approaches used by an internal team at AWS.

Salesforce is one of the most innovative enterprise software companies in the world, delivering 3 major releases a year with hundreds of features in each release. In this session, come learn how we enable thousands of engineers within Salesforce to utilize a flexible development environment to deliver these innovations to our customers faster. We show you how we enable engineers at Salesforce to test not only individual services they are developing but also large scale service integrations. Also learn how we can achieve setup of a representative production environment in minutes and teardown in seconds, using AWS.

Over the last few years, we have seen a dramatic increase in the use of open source projects as the mainstay of architectures in both startups and enterprises. Many of our customers and partners also run their own open source programs and contribute key technologies to the industry as a whole (see DCS201). At AWS we engage with open source projects in a number of ways. We contribute bug fixes and enhancements to popular projects including our work with the Hadoop ecosystem (see BDM401), Chromium (see BAP305) and (obviously) Boto. We have our own standalone projects including the security library s2n (see NET405) and machine learning project MXnet (see MAC401). We also have services that make open source easier to use like ECS for Docker (see CON316), and RDS for MySQL and PostgreSQL (see DAT305). In this session you will learn about our existing open source work across AWS, and our next steps.

AWS provides a broad array of services, tools, and constructs that can be used to design, operate, and deliver SaaS applications. In this session, Tod Golding, the AWS Partner Solutions Architect, shares the wisdom and lessons learned from working with dozens of customers and partners building SaaS solutions on AWS. We discuss key architectural strategies and patterns that are used to deliver multi-tenant SaaS models on AWS and dive into the full spectrum of SaaS design and architecture considerations, including tenant isolation models, tenant identity management, serverless SaaS, and multi-tenant storage strategies. This session connects the dots between general SaaS best practices and what it means to realize these patterns on AWS, weighing the architectural tradeoffs of each model and assessing its influence on the agility, manageability, and cost profile of your SaaS solution.

As more customers adopt Amazon VPC architectures, the features and flexibility of the service are squaring off against evolving design requirements. This session follows this evolution of a single regional VPC into a multi-VPC, multi-region design with diverse connectivity into on-premises systems and infrastructure. Along the way, we investigate creative customer solutions for scaling and securing outbound VPC traffic, securing private access to Amazon S3, managing multi-tenant VPCs, integrating existing customer networks through AWS Direct Connect, and building a full VPC mesh network across global regions.

IT is evolving from a cost center to a source of continuous innovation for business. At the heart of this transition are modern, revenue-generating applications, based on dynamic architectures that constantly evolve to keep pace with end-customer demands. This dynamic application environment requires a new, comprehensive approach to traditional monitoring – one based on real-time, end-to-end visibility and analytics across the entire application lifecycle and stack, instead of monitoring by piecemeal. This presentation highlights practical advice on how developers and operators can leverage data and analytics to glean critical information about their modern applications. In this session, we will cover the types of data important for today’s modern applications. We’ll discuss visibility and analytics into data sources such as AWS services (e.g., Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Lambda, VPC Flow Logs, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, etc.), development tool chain, and custom metrics, and describe how to use analytics to understand business performance and behaviors. We discuss a comprehensive approach to monitoring, troubleshooting, and customer usage insights, provide examples of effective data analytics to improve software quality, and describe an end-to-end customer use case that highlights how analytics applies to the modern app lifecycle and stack.

Gilt, a global e-commerce company, implemented a sophisticated microservices architecture on AWS to handle millions of customers visiting their site at noon every day. The microservices architecture pattern enables independent service scaling, faster deployments, better fault isolation, and graceful degradation. In this session, Emerson Loureiro, Sr. Software Engineer at Gilt, will share Gilt's experiences and lessons learned during their evolution from a single monolithic Rails application in a traditional data center to more than 300 Scala/Java microservices deployed in the cloud. Derek Chiles, AWS Solutions Architect, will review best practices and recommended architectures for deploying microservices on AWS.

How does McGraw-Hill Education use the AWS platform to scale and reliably receive 10,000 learning events per second? How do we provide near-real-time reporting and event-driven analytics for hundreds of thousands of concurrent learners in a reliable, secure, and auditable manner that is cost effective? MHE designed and implemented a robust solution that integrates AWS API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon DynamoDB, HDFS, Amazon EMR, Amazopn EC2, and other technologies to deliver this cloud-native platform across the US and soon the world. This session describes the challenges we faced, architecture considerations, how we gained confidence for a successful production roll-out, and the behind-the-scenes lessons we learned.

Hear Geneia's design principles for using multiple technologies like Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling in end-to-end solutions to meet regulatory requirements. Explore how to meet HIPAA regulations by using native cloud services like Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS volumes, encryption services, and monitoring features in addition to third-party tools to ensure end-to-end data protection, privacy, and security for protected health information (PHI) data hosted in the AWS Cloud. Learn how Geneia leveraged multiregion and multizone backup and disaster recovery solutions to address the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements. Discover how automated build, deployment, provisioning, and virtual workstations in the cloud enabled Geneia's developers and data scientists to quickly provision resources and work from any location, expediting the onboarding of customers, getting to market faster, and capturing bigger market share in healthcare analytics while minimizing costs. Session sponsored by Cognizant.

Learn how AWS processes millions of records per second to support accurate metering across AWS and our customers. This session shows how we migrated from traditional frameworks to AWS managed services to support a large processing pipeline. You will gain insights on how we used AWS services to build a reliable, scalable, and fast processing system using Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, and Amazon EMR. Along the way we dive deep into use cases that deal with scaling and accuracy constraints. Attend this session to see AWS’s end-to-end solution that supports metering at AWS.