AWS re:Invent 2018

There is a lot of interest these days in migrating data from commercial relational databases to open-source relational databases. PostgreSQL is a great choice for migration, offering advanced features, high performance, rock-solid data integrity, and a flexible open-source license. PostgreSQL is compliant with ANSI SQL. It supports drivers for nearly all development languages, and it has a strong community of active committers and companies to provide support. In this talk, we demonstrate an overall approach for migrating an application from your current Oracle database to an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database.

In this session, we dive deep on best practices and design considerations for running Microsoft SQL Server on AWS. We cover how to choose between running SQL Server on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS. We also cover how to optimize the performance of SQL Server on AWS, how to leverage the new the Optimize CPU feature, and how to deploy SQL Server on Linux. We also review best practices for storage, monitoring, availability, security, and backup and recovery for SQL Server.

Blockchain continues to be called the next generation of technology, so why does it mystify so many? In this session, we discuss how AWS and its ecosystem will help deliver value beyond just infrastructure for blockchain. We include the blockchain competency announcement, the blockchain value proposition broken down, a customer story involving Intel and T-mobile, and a blockchain delivery kit featuring Accenture and AWS.

In this session, learn how Peak's Artificial Intelligence System (AIS) embeds Amazon SageMaker to solve business problems with outstanding results. We show you how Peak worked backwards from two customer problems to create a machine learning (ML) solution that used multiple models, trained, and then deployed on Amazon SageMaker. We highlight the challenges, classifying PII data and integrating data from multiple sources. Next, we walk through the ML model training phase for each customer, showing you how new data sources were used to improve the accuracy of the ML models. Finally, the results: Regit and Footasylum were able to use the intelligent predictions provided by Peak.AI to deliver a personalized service to their customers, resulting in a 30% increase in revenue.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger-based technology that enables you to uniquely solve inefficiencies in business networks. However, like any exchange of value, it makes sense only when used by multiple parties. With the myriad of existing protocols and proposed applications, it can be difficult to decide on the right approach to implement a blockchain solution that best fits a given use case. In this talk, we dissect use cases and blockchain architectures built for multi-party consortiums in energy and financial services sectors. Our partners GuildOne and Kaleido highlight the architectural approaches to shared IT and consortium building using Corda and Ethereum protocols.

Demand for new products, lower prices, and higher quality drives manufacturers to invest in tools that can help them compete in a global marketplace. The availability of IoT data and edge computing is helping manufacturers create new business models, add new functionality into existing products, create more accurate maintenance predictions, and optimize product design. In this session, we explore how AWS IoT, AWS Greengrass, and machine learning (ML) impact product design and production. Topics include: IoT, secondary sensing, IT vs. OT networks, ML at the edge, and digital twin. We discuss AWS services like AWS IoT, AWS IoT Analytics, AWS Greengrass, and Amazon SageMaker, and we describe both AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner solutions and industry-specific AWS reference architectures.

Many businesses need to quickly and reliably produce a transcript from audio- or video-based content. Up until now, businesses had to incur both the expense and the lengthy process of hiring staff or a service to transcribe this content. Moreover, to produce a multi-language version of the content required translating it into the target language and possibly over-dubbing the original content with a new audio track. In this session, we walk you through the capabilities, process, and coding approach for creating subtitled and translated videos using Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Polly.

Modernization involves implementing business processes and technology that provide your business applications with high availability, agility, and elasticity. Nowhere is this more important than in breaking apart the monolith. Modernizing an application as part of a migration can be extremely successful if you follow the AWS migration methodology of 'discover, plan, migrate, and optimize' as you move that application to the cloud. In this session, we share what we learned from over 400 successful migrations. We also show you how to virtually break a monolith to a modernized architecture as part of the planning phase and accelerate your migration using container technologies and application discovery tools.

Take a journey with Preston, an Amazon Sumerian host, to diagnose and explore a 3D printed jet engine in virtual reality. Preston follows your commands to control and explore different parts of the engine. Preston can also show you the future state of your machine in virtual reality and provide recommendations by analyzing data collected from a physical jet turbine engine using IoT sensors. Learn how to build your own virtual assistant with Amazon AI services, AWS IoT services, and Amazon Sumerian virtual reality.

Enterprises are seeing big business benefits by moving their SAP workloads to AWS. However, the migration to AWS is often just the first step in their innovation journeys. In this session, we share how enterprises are realizing their business transformations in the four major areas: big data & analytics, IoT, app & APIs, and DevOps, supported by a solid foundation of machine learning and compute services on AWS. We provide demonstrations so you can learn firsthand how to help your customers innovate using AWS solutions with SAP applications. Expect to leave this session with reference architectures and best practices for implementing these innovations in their SAP landscapes.