AWS re:Invent 2016

As serverless architectures become more popular, AWS customers need a framework of patterns to help them deploy their workloads without managing servers or operating systems. This session introduces and describes four re-usable serverless patterns for web apps, stream processing, batch processing, and automation. For each, we provide a TCO analysis and comparison with its server-based counterpart. We also discuss the considerations and nuances associated with each pattern and have customers share similar experiences. The target audience is architects, system operators, and anyone looking for a better understanding of how serverless architectures can help them save money and improve their agility.

Warner Bros’ Turbine team shares lessons learned from their enhanced microservices game platform, which uses Docker, Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon ElastiCache to scale up in anticipation of massive game adoption. Learn about their Docker-based microservices architecture, tuned and optimized to support the demands of the massively popular [Batman: Arkham Underworld and other franchises]. Turbine invent and simplify microservices persistence services – consolidating their previous NoSQL database solution with highly performant PostgreSQL on Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS. Turbine also describes other innovative strategies, including integrated analytic techniques to anticipate and predict their scaling operations.

In this session, we share how an Amazon.com team that owns a document management platform that manages billions of critical customer documents for Amazon.com migrated from a relational to a non-relational database. Initially, the service was built as an Oracle database. As it grew, the team discovered the limits of the relational model and decided to migrate to a non-relational database. They chose Amazon DynamoDB for its built-in resilience, scalability, and predictability. We provide a template that you can use to migrate from a relational data store to DynamoDB. We also provide details about the entire process: design patterns for moving from a SQL schema to a NoSQL schema; mechanisms used to transition from an ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) model to an eventually consistent model; migration alternatives considered; pitfalls in common migration strategies; and how to ensure service availability and consistency during migration.

From servers to workstations, AWS provides the best place to run your Windows workloads. In this session, we'll discuss the ease of deploying Windows workloads on AWS, and architecting for performance, scalability, security, and cost savings. We will explore the use of AWS Directory Service, the Amazon EC2 Run command, and Windows PowerShell to bootstrap your instances for seamless Microsoft Active Directory integration, application installation, and management. We will walk through an architecture that includes Amazon RDS, Amazon EC2, and Amazon WorkSpaces, and discuss the secure relationships among these services. You will learn how you can use native AWS services as well as the tools you are already familiar with to manage your Windows environment.

The advent of 4K video has resulted in a huge uptick in resource requirements, which is difficult to scale in a traditional environment. The cloud is a perfect environment for handling problems of this scale; however, there are many unanswered questions around best practices and suitable architectures for dealing with massive, high-quality assets. In this session, we will define problem cases and discuss practical architectural patterns for dealing with these challenges by using AWS services such as Amazon EC2 (graphical instances), Amazon EMR, Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, Amazon Glacier, AWS Snowball, and the new magnetic EBS volumes. The best practices that we'll discuss will also be helpful to architects and engineers who are dealing with non-video data. Amazon Studios will present how, powered by AWS, they solved many of these problems and are able to create, manage, and distribute Emmy Award-winning content.

OK, so you have your SaaS application up and running on AWS and now the real fun begins. The adoption of SaaS and a shared multi-tenant infrastructure brings with it a unique set of challenges that require developers to find new and creative ways to optimize their SaaS applications. For many engineers, this means tackling a whole new realm of questions. How do you optimize tenant experience by tiers? How do you perform real-time performance tuning or centralized tenant policy management? How do you collect and aggregate tenant analytics? How do you implement scalable policy-driven configuration of tenant experience? These and many other challenging topics will be covered in this technical deep dive. Tod Golding, an AWS Solutions Architect specializing in helping AWS partners build SaaS systems, will explore a collection of strategies that can be leveraged to increase the performance, flexibility, and agility of SaaS environments. You will learn how to identify areas where services, tools, and design strategies can be combined to enrich the agility of your SaaS architecture.

Deploy, scale, and manage the Microsoft servers on AWS supporting 100K users. This session covers the AWS and Microsoft architectures to stand up Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, SQL Server, and Active Directory for enterprises. We focus on the architecture, automation, and management of Windows resources on AWS, including cloud-first technologies like AWS CloudFormation, Amazon EC2 Simple Systems Manager, and Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

Organizations today are striving to provide a more flexible environment for their end users, allowing them access to corporate resources from any device, anytime. At the same time, securing corporate information remains a top priority for CIOs. Traditional solutions such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) offer worker flexibility and security benefits, but they are expensive to purchase, complex to deploy, and they don’t scale well. In this session, you’ll learn how Amazon WorkSpaces combines the benefits of VDI with the economics of the cloud to deliver better value for organizations. We’ll show you just how easy it is to get started, and talk through how customers are using Amazon WorkSpaces today.

Amazon WorkSpaces is a desktop computing service that runs in the cloud, and now supports both monthly and hourly billing. In this session, we help you determine the right billing method for your use cases, show you how to provision Amazon WorkSpaces for monthly or hourly billing, and work through a real-world example. News UK, a media organization that owns a stable of news and media brands, describes how they use Amazon WorkSpaces to solve a unique business need.

Join leaders in higher education in this panel discussion as they share how they use Amazon WorkSpaces to move to desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) to provide faculty, staff, and students, access to applications and information they need in classrooms, research labs, and across campus. Amazon WorkSpaces enables major educational institutions be more agile, improve their security posture, and offer end users a more flexible experience, while meeting stringent compliance requirements and remaining cost effective. Hear directly from the world of higher education about their projects to deliver the next generation of end-user computing in their organizations.