AWS re:Invent 2017

We've seen companies like fast-growing startups and large enterprises adopt and evolve strategies to optimize their application deployment to Amazon EC2. Some AWS customers perform in-place updates across their servers. Some perform blue-green deployments to newly provisioned servers. In this session, we'll share the advantages of each approach and talk about the scenarios in which you should choose one over the other. We will also demonstrate how to perform auto-scaling and auto-rollback for deployments.

As Coursera has grown, both in traffic and engineering team size, we've put much more emphasis on site performance, reliability, and developer productivity. Solving these problems is more complicated than just scaling up the number of EC2 instances though -- they've required rethinking approaches from the ground up and using better tools for the job.  In this session, Coursera's frontend infrastructure team will walk you through how we leveraged AWS services, including ECS, CodeBuild, and ALBs, to improve site performance by 30% and reduce build times by 80%, all while cutting costs in the process.

Cisco's video solutions were historically designed for on-premises dedicated hardware deployments. Typically, major releases occurred annually or bi-annually. The release process lacked the ability to absorb frequent changes and adapt to rapid market trends. This session looks into how Cisco's IVP Solution team evolved a production system from its monolithic design into a microservices platform, leveraging cloud services, automated deployments, and delivery pipelines. Through this transition the team adopted a biweekly deployment cadence. This ultimately enabled a fast-paced migration to an AWS environment, using AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service.

This example based session will educate you on how to develop cross-platform .NET Core applications on AWS. Through demos, we will provide a walkthrough on how to deploy .NET Core applications using various AWS infrastructure services including Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Additionally, we will showcase how to accelerate the release of your applications with the AWS's CI/CD toolchain, with services such as AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodeBuild.

Using the DevOps model to treat your infrastructure environments as code enables you to automate and scale your development and production environments. Companies such as Puppet and Chef have built popular infrastructure automation solutions and have a thriving community interested in helping others succeed. AWS OpsWorks helps you succeed in using Puppet and Chef on AWS by removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting. In this session, discover how OpsWorks helps you focus on the core task of configuration management using Puppet and Chef, by setting up and maintaining your environment in just a few clicks.

There is a constant tension between empowering teams to be agile through autonomy and enforcing governance policies to maintain regulatory compliance.  Hear from Nathan Scott, Senior Consultant at AWS and James Martin, Automation Engineering Manager at 3M on how they have achieved both autonomy and governance through self-service automation tools on AWS. Learn how to avoid pitfalls with building the CI/CD team, right sizing and how to address. This session will also feature a demo from Casey Lee, Chief Architect at Stelligent on the tools used to accomplish this for 3M, including AWS Service Catalog, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodePipeline and Cloud Custodian, an open source tool for managing AWS accounts.

Learn how Mapbox improved and leveled up their Amazon ECS monitoring by using Amazon CloudWatch Events and custom metrics. We cover the events that kick off data collection, which enables our team to track the trillions of compute seconds happening every day on Mapbox's ECS clusters. The result of the data collection includes custom metrics and alarms used to inform stakeholders across Mapbox about detailed ECS usage, so development teams and finance alike can easily put a price tag on each container.

Chaos Engineering is described as “the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.” Going beyond Chaos Monkey, this session covers the specifics of designing a Chaos Engineering solution, how to increment your solution technically and culturally, the socialization and evangelism pieces that tend to get overlooked in the process, and how to get developers excited about purposefully injected failure. This session provides examples of getting started with Chaos Engineering at startups, performing chaos at Netflix scale, integrating your tools with AWS, and the road to cultural acceptance within your company. There are several different “levels” of chaos you can introduce before unleashing a full-blown chaos solution.  We provide a focus on each of these levels, so you can leave this session with a game plan you can culturally and technically introduce.

Managing AWS and hybrid environments securely and safely while having actionable insights is an operational priority and business driver for all customers. Using SSH or RDP sessions could lead to unintended or malicious outcomes with no traceability. Learn to use Amazon EC2 Systems Manager to improve your security posture, automate at scale, and minimize application downtime for both Windows and Linux workloads. Easily author configurations to automate your infrastructure without SSH access, and control the blast radius of configuration changes. Get a cross-account and cross-region view of what's installed and running on your servers or instances. Learn to use Systems Manager to securely store, manage, and retrieve secrets. You can also run patch compliance checks on the fleet to react to malware and vulnerabilities within minutes, while still providing granular control to users with different privilege levels and full auditability. You will hear from FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, on how they use  Systems Manager to safely manage their Enterprise environment.

Do you know how your applications will behave when things go wrong, either naturally or artificially? See how Expedia uses Amazon EC2 Systems Manager to perform automatic resilience tests as part of CI/CD pipelines, giving application owners confidence they are prepared for the worst.