AWS re:Invent 2016

Video is a 'last-mile problem' for search technology. Unlike webpages, documents, and email, content in videos has traditionally been impossible to search. Recent advances in automated speech and text recognition, however, let businesses and universities search inside video assets as easily as inside textual content. In this session, you'll learn how Panopto is using AWS to solve the video-search problem at scale, while saving over 50% in operating costs by taking advantage of Spot instances. We discuss the cross-platform architecture that combines Windows and Linux to provide cost-effective video processing and search indexing. We also dive deep into scaling Spot elastically based on user demand, handling fallback situations when instances are revoked, and using the Spot bidding process to optimize cost structure. Finally, we discuss future plans to reduce operating costs even further through Spot fleets and grid processing.

Whether you are a traditional enterprise making a shift to the cloud or are already all-in, AWS EC2 management capabilities enable you to perform common tasks of inventory collection, and patch and image management of your infrastructure at scale. In this session, we'll provide a brief overview of these powerful capabilities and bring it all together with a demo of real-world hybrid-cloud management scenario.

In this session, you will learn how you can use EC2 management capabilities to perform repeatable automation of your infrastructure at scale, across platforms and hybrid environments. As you embark on your cloud journey and embrace a modern DevOps mindset, you not only want to deploy software quickly but also ensure configuration consistency at cloud scale. Many enterprises have successfully used services such as EC2 Run Command to perform administrative tasks, and we'll share some of those stories. In addition, we will demo new capabilities to ensure a desired state approach to software configuration either through predefined or easy to build custom configurations, and also how you can integrate with other AWS services to deliver enterprise IT and business value.

Migrating on-premises workloads to AWS is a top priority for customers today. AWS has an array of tools and capabilities to make the move faster and less risky. This deep-dive session presents how to build a migration framework for your Windows-based applications by using AWS CloudFormation templates, along with multisite replication capabilities built into AWS and optimized for Microsoft Windows workloads built on SQL HA. This framework helps speed up your data center migration and minimize risk during the process.

Learn how to architect for compliance in the AWS cloud and see how your organization can leverage the agility, cost savings, scalability, and flexibility of the cloud while meeting the most stringent regulatory and compliance requirements, including Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), ITAR, CJIS, HIPAA, and DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG) Levels 2 and 4. Hear best practices and practical use cases for using AWS GovCloud (US) to comply with a variety of regulatory regimes.

Cloud governance is critical to executing a systemic, supportable, and sustainable cloud transformation strategy. This session explores best practices to achieve that model, including standards policies, automation that consistently applies and enforces policies and controls, self-service capabilities that enable agility and speed, and automated monitoring and cost management that ensure operational integrity. A well-developed cloud governance model enables customers to improve operational integrity, reliability, performance, and transparency using the AWS cloud. This session guides you through a best practice governance model, including policy considerations and recommendations, self-service automation methods towards IT-as-a-Service, and use case examples.

Cloud computing can help government organizations increase innovation, efficiency, agility, and resiliency—all while reducing costs. This session highlights perspectives on how small, highly empowered United States Digital Service (USDS) teams within the Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are breaking down innovation barriers, tackling mission-critical operations, and delivering more value with the cloud in highly regulated, unclassified environments.

With rich controls, auditing, and broad security accreditations, AWS enables its customers to be in compliance with CJIS, FERPA, and HIPAA. Come hear customers share their approaches to achieving compliance for these and other standards across many markets.

In this session, learn how Data Polygamy, a scalable topology-based framework, can enable users to query for statistically significant relationships between spatio-temporal datasets. With the increasing ability to collect data from urban environments and a push toward openness by governments, we can analyze numerous spatio-temporal datasets covering diverse aspects of a city. Urban data captures the behavior of the city’s citizens, existing infrastructure (physical and policies), and environment over space and time. Discovering relationships between these datasets can produce new insights by enabling domain experts to not only test but also generate hypotheses. However, discovery is difficult. A relationship between two datasets can occur only at locations or time periods that behave differently compared to the regions’ neighborhood. The size and number of datasets and diverse spatial and temporal scales at which the data is available presents computational challenges. Finally, of several thousand possible relationships, only a small fraction is actually informative. We have implemented the framework on Amazon EMR and show through an experimental evaluation using over 300 spatial-temporal urban datasets how our approach is scalable and effective at identifying significant relationships. Find details about the work at