AWS re:Invent 2016

At Atlassian, we create popular software tools to help every team unleash their full potential. We use our issue tracking tool JIRA to handle customer support issues from around the globe. As the business grew, we decided to move from a single server instance of JIRA to our JIRA Data Center product on AWS infrastructure to increase reliability, scale, and security. JIRA Data Center's requirement to use a shared file system caused us to try several in-house and third-party solutions prior to the availability of Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). We chose EFS for its performance, ease of use, automatic scaling, and out-of-the-box distribution capabilities. In this session, we discuss how Atlassian uses EFS to run JIRA Data Center. Topics include the technical architecture, how and why we chose EFS, our recommendations, and the lessons learned along the way.

At Monsanto, we build and use technologies that support our data and also BI efforts that facilitate intelligent, data-driven decisions. In the past year, we've embarked on large-scale efforts to modernize our geospatial platform and improve our analytic processing capabilities by building out new cloud and open-source based services. We found using Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) gave us the flexibility and performance we were seeking while saving us significant time, effort, and cost. In this session, we discuss how Monsanto uses the Amazon EFS service to run our large scaling geospatial data sets such as raster, and to perform highly parallelized analytics for data scientists and business users. Topics include the technical architecture, how and why we chose EFS for handling data sets that are terabytes in size, our recommendations, and the lessons learned along the way.

Without careful planning, data management can quickly turn complex with a runaway cost structure. Enterprise customers are turning to the cloud to solve long-term data archive needs such as reliability, compliance, and agility while optimizing the overall cost. Come to this session and hear how AWS customers are using Amazon Glacier to simplify their archiving strategy. Learn how customers architect their cloud archiving applications and share integration to streamline their organization's data management and establish successful IT best practices.

As the global leader of live entertainment, Live Nation promotes and produces over 22,000 events annually, operates out of 37 countries, and cultivates over 530 million fans globally. To focus on the growth of the business and shed increasing infrastructure costs, the company made the strategic decision to get out of the data center business and go all in with the cloud. Using instrumental services like AWS Import/Export Snowball, VM Import/Export, AWS CloudFormation and AWS Identity and Access Management, VP Cloud Services Jake Burns quickly and efficiently migrated priority business and operational applications, allowing for immediate cost efficiencies. Learn how AWS offerings like Snowball played a decisive role in Live Nation's ability to easily migrate data and enable end users to quickly access applications to minimize operational impact.

Today's health care systems generate massive amounts of protected health information (PHI) — patient electronic health records, imaging, prescriptions, genomic profiles, insurance records, even data from wearable devices. In this session, UPMCe dives deep into two efforts: Their 'Data Liberation Project' — a next-gen petabyte-scale software solution that provides responsible management of PHI within their own environments as well as externally, and “Neutrino” a real time medical document aggregator which utilizes natural language processing techniques to unlock hidden value from unstructured narratives. UPMC Enterprises (UPMCe), a division of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, builds technology and invests in health care companies, from new startups to large established partners, with an eye toward revolutionizing healthcare. They embody the startup mentality with a focus on innovation and creating new data-heavy applications—all in support of new spin-off companies, furthering economic development, and disrupting healthcare. Join us to learn how they do security management and governance using Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, and other Amazon services help UPMCe think big about healthcare data in the public sector.

Customers seeking to make transformations to their environment typically gain efficiencies in both operational and capital costs. This session presents three different case studies, each from a different category of operations – Private Equity, Managed Services, and Government. In Government, General Dynamics will discuss how implementing AWS storage as part of their DevOps environment, saving $700k per year. Carlyle Group will show how replacing their on-premises storage with cloud based solutions brought new capabilities to their organization. Finally, Cobalt Iron will discuss how moving their customers to cloud backup targets allowed them to deliver 2M cloud backups per month.

AWS Storage Gateway seamlessly combines existing infrastructure investment with the AWS Cloud for backup, restore, disaster recovery, hybrid workloads, and tiered storage use cases. It has a new file interface that supports moving files in NFS-based file systems into Amazon S3. This session dives into the use cases and advantages of hybrid cloud storage, exploring this newly updated data transfer service with stories from real-life customer deployments.

At re:Invent 2016 AWS announced several revolutionary ways to move data into and out of the AWS Cloud in large batches, so you can retire servers, racks, and data centers and embark on new projects faster. Two of these new services are AWS Snowmobile and AWS Snowball Edge. Snowmobile cuts cloud data migration projects from years to weeks in time with a 45 foot truck with 100PB of capacity. AWS Snowball Edge is a petabyte-scale data transfer service with portable storage and compute capabilities. It transports up to 100TB of data in a ruggedized, weather resistant, rack mountable, shippable device with the same embedded cryptography and security as the original Snowball. Learn more about each of these services and hear from two customers on the impact these services have made on their data center operations.

Customers using Amazon S3 at large scale benefit greatly from storage management features. Storage lifecycle policies help them reduce storage costs. Cross-region replication makes it easier to copy data between AWS regions for compliance or disaster recovery. Event notifications allow automatic initiation of processes on objects as they arrive, or capture information about objects and log it for security purposes. In this session, you'll learn about these features, and also several new storage management features in Amazon S3 that give users unmatched visibility into what data they are storing and how that data is being used. These new features make it simpler to analyze usage by users, apps, or organizations, to highlight anomalies, and to optimize business process workflows. They also help identify opportunities to reduce costs, improve performance, and archive infrequently used data. In addition, they can provide insight into who is accessing data stored in S3. As part of this talk, AWS customer Pinterest shows how they have been able to leverage many of the new S3 storage management features to reduce their storage costs significantly by moving a large amount of their data from S3 Standard to S3 Standard – Infrequent Access storage.

Aptean is a global enterprise software provider that uses AWS as the core of its infrastructure because it’s a solution that reliably backs up Aptean’s Amazon EC2 instances. Come to this session to learn what happened when Aptean needed a highly reliable, full backup solution that also allowed for ease of scale, automation, and instant recovery in case of a failure. In this session, you’ll learn how CPM helps take full advantage of AWS Snapshots, thus adding a management layer to control retention, automate recoveries, and allow live, application-aware backup of both Windows and Linux instances. Aptean will also why they selected N2W Cloud Protection Manager (CPM) in AWS Marketplace as its backup solution extending AWS services and supporting their diverse customer base. By the end of the session, you’ll have learned the details of how CPM helps Aptean properly manage its snapshots and recoveries, ensuring a resilient deployment that meets Aptean’s business continuity goals.