AWS re:Invent 2017

As one of the thought leaders in Expedia's cloud migration, the Expedia Global Payments Business Intelligence group architected, designed and built a complete cloud data mart solution from the ground up using the AWS and Tableau online. In this session, we will discuss our business challenge, the journey to the solution, high-level technical architecture (using S3, EMR, data pipelines, Redshift, Tableau Online) and lessons learned along the way, including best practices and optimization methods, etc. Session sponsored by Tableau

Many industries are going through a digital transformation as their existing business models are being disrupted and new competitors emerge. The key driver is a need for faster time-to-value as a direct relationship with customers provides analytics that drive personalization and rapid product development. There's a cultural aspect to the change, as well as new organizational patterns that go along with a migration to cloud native services. Application architectures are evolving from monoliths to microservices and serverless deployments, and they becoming more distributed, highly available, and resilient. The highly automated practices that have built up around DevOps are moving to the mainstream, and some new techniques are emerging around security red teams and chaos engineering.

Whether you're a cash-strapped startup or an enterprise optimizing spend, it pays to run cost-efficient architectures on AWS. This session reviews a wide range of cost planning, monitoring, and optimization strategies, featuring real-world experience from AWS customers. We cover how to effectively combine Amazon EC2 On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances to handle different use cases; leveraging Auto Scaling to match capacity to workload; and choosing the optimal instance type through load testing. We discuss taking advantage of tiered storage and caching, offloading content to Amazon CloudFront to reduce back-end load, and getting rid of your back end entirely by serverless. Even if you already enjoy the benefits of serverless architectures, we show you how to select the optimal AWS Lambda memory class and how to maximize networking throughput in order to minimize Lambda run-time and therefore execution cost. We also showcase simple tools to help track and manage costs, including Cost Explorer, billing alerts, and AWS Trusted Advisor. This session is your pocket guide for running cost effectively in the AWS Cloud.

As more customers adopt Amazon VPC architectures, the features and flexibility of the service are squaring off against evolving design requirements. This session follows this evolution of a single regional VPC into a multi-VPC, multi-region design with diverse connectivity into on-premises systems and infrastructure. Along the way, we investigate creative customer solutions for scaling and securing outbound VPC traffic, securing private access to Amazon S3, managing multi-tenant VPCs, integrating existing customer networks through AWS Direct Connect, and building a full VPC mesh network across global regions.

Migrating workloads to the cloud requires detailed planning and execution. When you're an established business with users that rely on your cloud workloads, this can seem like an insurmountable task. A complete migration is a victory often celebrated as the end of the journey, when in reality it is just the first step in a process of continual optimization and evolution. To truly optimize the power of AWS and reap the financial and performance benefits of cloud computing, it is critical that you evaluate your workloads for opportunities to continue to evolve to drive business value and embrace the innovative nature of the AWS Cloud. In this session, join Rackspace to learn about key components to consider in order to execute a successful migration to AWS, the importance of optimizing your AWS environment over time, and how customers are leveraging Rackspace's Fanatical Support for AWS to help them migrate and transform their workloads on AWS. Session sponsored byRackspace

With more companies entering the OTT market, AWS sees customer demand for ways to decrease the time it takes to get content into their users' hands, while increasing operational efficiency and lowering IT infrastructure costs. Using deep learning-based image analysis can provide users actionable feedback about the content they view. When combining a new serverless architecture approach using Amazon Elastic Transcoder with AWS' deep learning technology Amazon Rekognition, companies can provide near real-time, on-demand encoding of assets and content moderation. This session covers serverless versus virtualized infrastructure, handling encoding jobs with AWS Lambda, encoding dynamic media assets with Elastic Transcoder (or Elemental), moderating content with Amazon Rekognition, and storing metadata with Amazon DynamoDB. We also provide a demo to test a production-ready serverless encoding architecture.

Learn how Netflix efficiently manages costs associated with 150K instances spread across multiple regions and heterogenous workloads. By leveraging internal Netflix tools, the Netflix capacity team is able to provide  deep insights into how optimize our end users' workload placements based on financial and business requirements. In this session, we discuss the efficiency strategies and practices we picked up operating at scale using AWS since 2011, along with best practices used at Netflix. Because many of our strategies revolve around Reserved Instances, we focus on the evolution of our Reserved Instance strategy and the recent changes after the launch of regional reservations. Regional Reserved Instances provide tremendous financial flexibility by being agnostic to instance size and Availability Zone. However, it's anything but simple to adopt regional Reserved Instances in an environment with over 1,000 services, that have varying degrees of criticality combined with a global failover strategy.

Bots are leading the next disruptive wave of how people and companies communicate. Companies can use bots for internal communications, such as facilities management or support, or for external communications, such as selling products, helping customers with searches, and acting as a trusted advisor in other ways. In this session, we show how easy it is to deploy a bot and how it improves customer interactions. Further, most bot solutions operate with a single language. We show how to build a language-agnostic bot solution using AWS Lambda and other AWS services.

Fed up with stop and go in your data center? Shift into overdrive and pull into the fast lane!  Learn how AutoScout24, the largest online car marketplace Europe-wide, is building its Autobahn in the Cloud. The secret ingredient? Culture! Because “cloud” is only half of the digital transformation story. The other half is how your organization deals with cultural change as you transition from the old world of IT into building microservices on AWS, with agile DevOps teams in a true „you build it, you run it“ fashion. Listen to stories from the trenches, powered by Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, Amazon API Gateway and much more, backed by AWS Partners, AWS Professional Services, and AWS Enterprise Support. Learn how to become cloud native, evolve your architecture, drive cultural change across teams, and manage your company's transformation for the future.

In this session, go on a journey from traditional, on-premises applications and architecture to pure cloud-native environments. This transformative approach highlights the steps required to incrementally move to AWS technologies while increasing resiliency and efficiency and reducing operational overhead. We challenge traditional understanding and show you how different types of workloads can be migrated using real-world examples. Additionally, we demonstrate how you can assemble and use the AWS building blocks available today to bolster your success and position yourself to inherit the power of our managed services, such as Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon Cognito, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon SNS and our AWS CodeStar suite. You leave this session armed with the knowledge you need to begin your own voyage towards serverless architecture.