ENT307: Saving at Scale with Reserved Instances

Amazon EC2 provides a broad selection of instance types to accommodate a diverse mix of workloads. In this session, we provide an overview of the Amazon EC2 instance platform, key platform features, and the concept of instance generations. We dive into the current generation design choices of the different instance families, including the General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Storage Optimized, Memory Optimized, and GPU instance families. We also detail best practices and share performance tips for getting the most out of your Amazon EC2 instances.

Amazon Echo and Alexa have shown that voice interfaces provide significant benefits to users – interactions are easy, fast, and context-driven. In this hands-on session, you’ll see how to add compelling voice and chat interfaces to your mobile apps, using Amazon Lex for processing conversations and triggering corresponding actions in your backend systems, all without having to manage any infrastructure. You’ll leave knowing how to build apps that can “Find me a nearby hotel” or “Reorder supplies for the copier”.

brings VMware’s enterprise class Software-Defined Data Center software to Amazon’s public cloud, delivered as an on-demand, elastically scalable, cloud-based VMware sold, operated and supported service for any application and optimized for next-generation, elastic, bare metal AWS infrastructure. This solution enables customers to use a common set of software and tools to manage both their AWS-based and on-premises vSphere resources consistently. Further virtual machines in this environment have seamless access to the broad range of AWS services as well. This session will introduce this exciting new service and examine some of the use cases and benefits of the service. The session will also include a VMware Tech Preview that demonstrates standing up a complete SDDC cluster on AWS and various operations using standard tools like vCenter.

Dynamic applications require dynamic resources and dynamic infrastructure. AWS provides many resources for applications to build highly scaled, highly available, dynamic applications, services, and microservices. However, managing and tracking these resources—and making sure they are operating as expected—is a challenge. In this session, we discuss how to monitor and manage the dynamic resources that make up your applications, and learn how to tell when a resource is causing your application problems. Designed for people already acquainted with basic dynamic resource allocation techniques, such as effectively using Auto Scaling, this session helps you take your resource management to the next level.

As your Reserved Instance portfolio grows, tracking your ROI becomes more critical. You’ll need the right tools, metrics, and strategies in place to make sure you’re maximizing RI savings and minimizing unused RI hours.

Customers using Amazon S3 at large scale benefit greatly from storage management features. Storage lifecycle policies help them reduce storage costs. Cross-region replication makes it easier to copy data between AWS regions for compliance or disaster recovery. Event notifications allow automatic initiation of processes on objects as they arrive, or capture information about objects and log it for security purposes. In this session, you'll learn about these features, and also several new storage management features in Amazon S3 that give users unmatched visibility into what data they are storing and how that data is being used. These new features make it simpler to analyze usage by users, apps, or organizations, to highlight anomalies, and to optimize business process workflows. They also help identify opportunities to reduce costs, improve performance, and archive infrequently used data. In addition, they can provide insight into who is accessing data stored in S3. As part of this talk, AWS customer Pinterest shows how they have been able to leverage many of the new S3 storage management features to reduce their storage costs significantly by moving a large amount of their data from S3 Standard to S3 Standard – Infrequent Access storage.

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.

In this session, we will review ways to manage the lifecycle of your dev, test, and production infrastructure using CloudFormation. Learn how to architect your infrastructure through loosely coupled stacks using cross-stack references, tightly coupled nested stacks and other best practices. Learn how to use CloudFormation to provision and manage a continuous deployment pipeline for your infrastructure-as-code. Automate deployment of new development environments as your infrastructure evolves, promote your new architecture for testing, and deploy changes to production.

This session discusses the architecture, formation, and usage of a collaborative HPC/big data scientific research and analysis environment on AWS. The pharmaceutical industry trend toward joint ventures and collaborations has created a need for new platforms in which to work together. We'll dive into architectural decisions for building collaborative systems. Examples include how such a platform allowed Human Longevity, Inc. to accelerate software deployment to production in a fast-paced research environment, and how Celgene uses AWS for research collaboration with outside universities and foundations.

Redis Labs' CMO is hosting a fireside chat with leaders from multiple industries including Groupon (e-commerce ), Intuit (Finance ), and LifeLock (Identity Protection ). This conversation-style session will cover the Big Data related challenges faced by these leading companies as they scale their applications, ensure high availability, serve the best user experience at lowest latencies, and optimize between cloud and on-premises operations. The introductory level session will appeal to both developer and DevOps functions. They will hear about diverse use cases such as recommendations engine, hybrid transactions and analytics operations, and time-series data analysis. The audience will learn how the Redis in-memory database platform addresses the above use cases with its multi-model capability and in a cost effective manner to meet the needs of the next generation applications.