AWS: Summit New York 2018 Recap

In July 2018, Amazon Web Services hosted an annual summit in New York. More than 10,000 cloud computing practitioners, AWS aficionados, and hungry technologists attended the action-packed event.

We were fortunate enough to have two separate opportunities to speak to the in-person audience and the virtual attendees streaming via the AWS Twitch channel.

Here we are speaking with Twitch host Ian Massingham (Sr. Manager of the AWS Technical Evangelism Team) about AI and Machine Learning offered through AWS services — specifically AWS Lex and Polly — and foreshadowing our customer case talk which would take place on the main stage later in the day.

After getting our feet wet with Ian and the AWS Twitch stream we were free to check out the show floor, and see some of the services and swag our fellow consulting partners had to offer.

When it came time for Kelly and Kabir to take the stage, they were introduced by the PubNub team and brought along Joe McCullough from OneCall Care Management to communicate the business value our tech was providing. Here is the video link to our full talk.

We were honored to have had these opportunities to speak and show off all the hard work our team has put in over the years. As we’ve been helping OneCall disrupt a traditional industry and create and maintain their competitive edge as market leaders for 3 years now.

Apart from our speaking engagements, there were breakout sessions focused on both technical and non-technical topics within the world of Amazon Web Services (AWS), where attendees were provided a glimpse into where the cloud is heading.

Always a big draw AWS CTO Werner Vogels was preaching his mantra “build on” during his keynote. Where he elaborated on the decline of vendor-guided innovation and monolithic architecture models, speaking towards to a new paradigm where applications are interconnected and composed of individualized, elegant building blocks. Or more simply put microservices.

Other points of interest from Mr. Vogels’ keynote were:

• The continually growing need for computing power – Mr. Vogels pre-announced the availability of new Amazon EC2 R5, R5D, and bare metal instances, which offer scalable processing power to support everything from new media-rich applications to data-rich scientific research projects.
• The growth of Machine Learning – At the New York Summit, Vogels announced features that provide greater scalability and speed in machine learning jobs within Amazon SageMaker, text analysis in Amazon Comprehend, increased language support in Amazon Translate, and channel splitting on Amazon Transcribe.
• Simplified Network Delivery – The announcement of Bring Your Own IP in Amazon VPC, where organizations will now be able to use their own publicly routable IP addresses to access resources such as EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, and NAT Gateways.
• Improvements in Storage – There were several announcements concerning storage capabilities — S3 customers can now expect faster data retrieval rates for faster processing, all at no extra charge. Added support on its Snowball Edge for SBE1, a new EC2 instance type that features a 1.8 GHz Xeon D processor.

You can read more about all of the announcements and summit highlight direct from the AWS Team on their site.

After an action-packed week in New York, we were anxious to get back to our respective offices and put the tools and strategies we just learned about into practice! Afterall we have to keep innovating and creating in order to get our next speaking invite — hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge AWS!