AWS re:Invent 2016

When your business is counting on the performance of your cloud solutions, having relevant and timely insights into events impacting your AWS resources is essential. AWS Personal Health Dashboard serves as the primary destination for you to receive personalized information related to your AWS infrastructure, guiding your through scheduled changes, and accelerating the troubleshooting of issues impacting your AWS resources. The service, powered by AWS Health APIs, integrates with your in-house event management systems, and can be programmatically configured to proactively get the right information into the right hands at the right time. The service is integrated with Splunk App for AWS to enhance Splunk’s dashboards, reports and alerts to deliver real-time visibility into your environment.

AWS provides a broad array of services, tools, and constructs that can be used to design, operate, and deliver SaaS applications. In this session, Tod Golding, the AWS Partner Solutions Architect, shares the wisdom and lessons learned from working with dozens of customers and partners building SaaS solutions on AWS. We discuss key architectural strategies and patterns that are used to deliver multi-tenant SaaS models on AWS and dive into the full spectrum of SaaS design and architecture considerations, including tenant isolation models, tenant identity management, serverless SaaS, and multi-tenant storage strategies. This session connects the dots between general SaaS best practices and what it means to realize these patterns on AWS, weighing the architectural tradeoffs of each model and assessing its influence on the agility, manageability, and cost profile of your SaaS solution.

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; choosing the optimal instance type through load testing; taking advantage of Multi-AZ support; and using Amazon CloudWatch to monitor usage and automatically shut off resources when they are not in use. 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 leveraging AWS high-level services. 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 Amazon Cloud.

Organizations today are striving to provide a more flexible environment for their end users, allowing them access to corporate resources from any device, anytime. At the same time, securing corporate information remains a top priority for CIOs. Traditional solutions such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) offer worker flexibility and security benefits, but they are expensive to purchase, complex to deploy, and they don’t scale well. In this session, you’ll learn how Amazon WorkSpaces combines the benefits of VDI with the economics of the cloud to deliver better value for organizations. We’ll show you just how easy it is to get started, and talk through how customers are using Amazon WorkSpaces today.

As we add thousands of skills to Alexa, our developers have uncovered some basic and more complex tips for building better skills. Whether you are new to Alexa skill development or if you have created skills that are live today, this session helps you understand how to create better voice experiences. Last year, Capital One joined Alexa on stage at re:Invent to talk about their experience building an Alexa skill. Hear from them one year later to learn from the challenges that they had to overcome and the results they are seeing from their skill. In this session, you will learn the importance of flexible invocations, better VUI design, how OAuth and account linking can add value to your skill, and about Capital One's experience building an Alexa skill.

Learn how to develop voice-based serverless back ends for Alexa Voice Service (AVS) and Alexa devices using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), which allows you to add new voice-based interactions to Alexa. We’ll code a new skill, implemented by a serverless backend leveraging AWS services such as Amazon Cognito, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB. Often, your skill needs to authenticate your users and link them back to your backend systems and to persist state between user invocations. User authentication is performed by leveraging OAuth compatible identity systems. Running such a system on your back end requires undifferentiated heavy lifting or boilerplate code. We’ll leverage Login with Amazon as the identity provider instead, allowing you to focus on your application implementation and not on the low-level user management parts. At the end of this session, you’ll be able to develop your own Alexa skills and use Amazon and AWS services to minimize the required backend infrastructure. This session shows you how to deploy your Alexa skill code on a serverless infrastructure, leverage AWS Lambda, use Amazon Cognito and Login with Amazon to authenticate users, and leverage AWS DynamoDB as a fully managed NoSQL data store.

Natural user interfaces, such as those based on speech, enable customers to interact with their home in a more intuitive way. With the VUI (Voice User Interface) smart home, now customers don't need to use their hands or eyes to do things around the home — they only have to ask and it's at their command. This session will address the vision for the VUI smart home and how innovations with Amazon Alexa make it possible.

Ever wonder what it takes to add the power of Alexa to your own products? Are you curious about what Alexa partners have learned on their way to a successful product launch? In this session you will learn about the top tips and tricks on how to go from VUI newbie to an Alexa-enabled product launch. Key concepts around hardware selection, enabling far field voice interaction, building a robust Alexa Voice Service (AVS) client and more will be discussed along with customer and partner examples on how to plan for and avoid common challenges in product design, development and delivery.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is an application streaming service that provides users instant access to their applications from anywhere, on any connected device. Enterprises can use Amazon AppStream 2.0 to securely deliver the latest versions of their desktop apps to their users. ISVs can reach more users across more devices, without rewriting applications, by streaming their desktop apps from the cloud to their users’ browsers. In this session, we show you how easy it is to upload your apps to Amazon AppStream and start delivering them to thousands of users. We’ll also learn from Siemens PLM how they are moving their desktop apps to the cloud with Amazon AppStream 2.0, and enabling their enterprise customers greater flexibility and productivity through streamed applications.

As systems and user bases grow, a once abundant resource can become scarce. While scaling out PlayStation services to millions of users at over a 100,000 requests/second, network throughput became a precious resource to optimize for. Alex and Dustin talk about how the microservices that power Playstation achieved low latency interactions while conserving on precious network bandwidth. These services powered by Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon DynamoDB benefitted from soft-state optimizations, a pattern that is used in complex interactions such as searching through a user’s social graph in sub 100 ms, or a user’s game library in 7 ms. As a developer utilizing Amazon Web services, you will discover new patterns and implementations which will better utilize your network, instances, and load balancers in order to deliver personalized experiences to millions of users while saving costs.