AWS re:Invent 2017

Healthcare and life sciences companies often have to adhere to specific regulatory requirements, such as GxP or HIPAA. The ability to treat your application environment as code on AWS lets you iterate faster while adhering to the appropriate regulatory frameworks. In this session, we discuss how DevOps principles can help you achieve your compliance requirements by validating your infrastructure in the same way that you do software. In particular, we discuss common compliance principles, demonstrate how to translate from policies to technical controls, and highlight how our partners are building for GxP and HIPAA.

Come see first-hand how Amazon EC2 Systems Manager can help you manage your servers at scale with the agility and security you need in today's dynamic cloud-enabled world. To be truly agile, you need a way to define and track system configurations, prevent drift, and maintain software compliance. At the same time, you need to collect software inventory, apply OS patches, automate your system image maintenance, and configure anything in the OSs of your EC2 instances and on-premises servers. Amazon EC2 Systems Manager does all of that and more for both Linux and Windows systems. In this session, learn about the seven services that make up Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and see them in action. No matter if you are managing 10 or 10,000 instances, see how you can manage your systems, increasing your agility and security with EC2 Systems Manager.

SaaS architects must always have their finger on the pulse of tenant consumption. Understanding the patterns for tenant consumption provides both business and technical teams the data they need to make sound decisions about product packaging, metering, and tiering. Of course, building a robust model for analyzing and attributing tenant consumption can be tricky. In this session, we look at specific strategies for capturing, aggregating, and associating consumption with tenants in a multitenant, shared resource model. We touch on common patterns and strategies that are used to instrument and publish metrics spanning compute, storage, and so on. We also look at how tools and models that can be used to correlate consumption with AWS spend.

Supporting a multitenant environment requires a robust management and monitoring strategy. SaaS operations teams require tools and views of system health that enable them to analyze and diagnose both multitenant and tenant-centric issues. The goal of this session is to identify specific strategies and tools that can be combined to support the unique set of operational challenges that SaaS providers face. In this session, we look at how analytics, consumption, and application metrics can correlate tenant activity with system health to proactively identify and troubleshoot issues. We also explore techniques for monitoring and managing different SaaS tenant isolation models, such as silo, pool, and so on.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the foundation that all AWS services require to function and perform any action. Mastering IAM is the skill set you need in your arsenal so that you can provide best-in-breed services through your application or services to your customers. This session shows you best practices for IAM, the latest service additions, and advanced automation techniques to become a certified IAM ninja.

Data exfiltration—also called data extrusion, data exportation, or data theft—is the unauthorized transfer of data. It is a very serious challenge to business because attackers go after business critical or highly confidential data. Data exfiltration can be done manually by a person, or automated using scripts. Attack sophistication increases by the day. Signature-based techniques to defend against attacks are limited and cannot protect against zero-day attacks. To counter this, we use machine learning (ML) techniques. ML is effective at solving many problems in computer vision, robotics, etc., and is increasingly used in security. Learn an ML technique called anomaly detection, and other state-of-the-art techniques to identify data exfiltration attempts.

AWS provides a suite of services and tools to deploy business-critical SAP HANA workloads on the AWS Cloud. In this session, we discuss how you can use AWS services, native SAP HANA high availability (HA) tools, and third-party software to achieve HA for SAP HANA systems on the AWS Cloud. We review multiple options that use different AWS features, Availability Zones, and global regions, and discuss the pros, cons, and related costs of each option.

Real-time data processing is a powerful technique that allows businesses to make agile automated decisions. This process is particularly powerful when applied to workloads like security, analyzing access logs, parsing audit logs, and monitoring API activity to detect behavior anomalies. Combined with automation, business can quickly take action to remediate security concerns, or even train a machine learning (ML) model. We explore different techniques for analyzing real-time streams on AWS using Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Spark with Amazon EMR, and Amazon DynamoDB. We also cover best practices around short- and long-term storage and analysis of data and, briefly, the possibility of leveraging ML.

Is your customer worried about scaling their monolithic application for an upcoming major event and has a tight timeline? Maybe it's time you recommend moving their application to a microservices architecture. In this session, we explore how to convert a monolithic application to a microservices model by using AWS serverless services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB. We step through the common architectural changes in moving to a microservices structure, and we discuss how to manage your application at scale. We also demonstrate a web application built using AWS serverless services.

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.  A proper data model is an integral part of an optimal Amazon Redshift deployment. It allows you to scale efficiently in a cost-effective manner to meet your increasing demand. In this session, I offer tips to help you optimize your Amazon Redshift deployment.