In the Amazon Web Services world, this has always been a busy time of the year. Busy, because, although we aim for a fairly even pace of new service announcements and new feature releases all year, invariably, somewhat more happens towards the end of the year than early on. And, busy, because the annual AWS re:Invent conference is in early November and this is an important time to roll out new services or important features. This year is no exception and, more than ever, there is a lot to announce at the conference. It should be fun.

I enjoy re:Invent because it’s a chance to talk to customers in more detail about what we have been building, learn how they are using it, and what we could do to make the services better. It’s always exciting to see what customer have done with AWS over the last year and I like the fact that customer presentations are a big part of the conference. It’s great to hear from an engineer how a service should work but almost always more interesting to see how customers are actually using the service. Each year there are more customers who have decided to move aggressively and go 100% cloud hosted and there are more and more stories of large, mission critical applications that have been moved to the cloud. It’s good to hear the details behind these decisions and how they were executed.

Andy Jassy who leads AWS will give the conference keynote Wednesday November 12^th at 9am. If you can’t be at re:Invent in person, it will also be available via live streaming. This session is always packed with new service and major feature announcements so, if you can only watch one session, this is it.

Later that day at 4:30, I’ll be presenting AWS Innovation at Scale which will also be available via video streaming. In this session, I’ll be putting some quantitative numbers on current AWS growth rates. Then I’ll focus on two main areas: networking and database. Networking is interesting because it’s an area that is running counter-Moore and actually getting relatively more expensive while the rest of the industry is going the other way. And, at the same time that is happening, network traffic is increasing at rates faster than server deployments. We’ll lay out how we have fundamentally reengineered our network for more capacity, lower latency, and reduced jitter while lowering costs. Database is my second area of focus. It’s another area where we feel substantial new engineering investment can give developers better solutions at far lower costs partly based upon open source, partly based upon shifting the bulk of the complexity of database administration to AWS, and partly based upon new engine development optimized for cloud deployments. There is lots to cover in both networking and database but I’ll also show how AWS processes 10s of millions of records per second internally and how this solution has become an externally available cloud service.

I’ll post the slides I present once available to: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/work/

Live streaming for select sessions available at: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/livestream-reg.html

–James Hamilton, jrh@mvdirona.com