Highlights of the AWS Summit Mumbai 2018

The AWS Global Summit-athon 2018 kicked off earlier this year in March, with the first summit in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 14th March 2018. So far, 9 such summits out of the planned 35 have been successfully completed with a major turnout across the globe from AWS neophytes as well as devouts alike. The AWS Summit Mumbai was the latest one to conclude recently on 10th May 2018, and no wonder, it too was well received with a similar response with overcrowded auditoriums for all events and breakout sessions. I was lucky that I got a chance to attend the one-day Mumbai summit this year, and the experience was thoroughly amusing and enriching.

The AWS Global Summits act as a platform for the AWS team to showcase their latest product lineup, for the customers to share their experiences, and for the hardcore AWS engineers to have technical sessions with AWS aficionados to help them learn more about existing as well as upcoming AWS products. Also, it is a great platform to network with some of the brightest minds in the cloud domain. The registration for the event, mandatory, was completely ‘Free’ with lots of early bird goodies & food in-store for the participants. The venue was “Bombay Exhibition Center, Mumbai’ which saw an overwhelming turnout in excess of 5000 people from across India. The summit took off exactly at 9:30 am with the opening note delivered by Mr. Bikram Bedi (Director, Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd, India), followed by the keynote speech by Mr.Oliver Klein (Head, Emerging Technologies, APAC Region, AWS). One of the major announcements included the upcoming launch of 4 more regions globally that included Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Sweden and a second AWS GovCloud Region in the US with a total of 12 new Availability Zones in all.

Let’s have a quick look at some of the key announcements in this edition of the AWS Summit-

• AWS announced Optimize CPUs features for Amazon EC2 Instances on 8th May 2018. The attendees were introduced to this new feature which will provide users with greater control of their EC2 instances on two fronts. Firstly, users will be able to specify custom number of vCPUs when launching new instances to help them save on vCPU-based licensing costs. Secondly, they will be able to disable Intel Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel HT Technology) for workloads that perform well with single-threaded CPUs, like certain high-performance computing (HPC) applications.
• The upcoming launch of a Kubernetes-grade installation feature on EKS which is a platform for enterprises to run production-grade Kubernetes clusters and is currently in Preview state.
• The upcoming launch of AWS Fargate for EKS will allow users to start working directly with containers without the need to configure the underlying infrastructure.
• The announcement of S3 Select and Glacier Select for retrieving subsets of objects feature will allow users to use simple SQL expressions to pull out only the bytes they need from the objects.
• Introduction to the recently launched Amazon DynamoDB Backup and Restore service, which is a service for fully automated on-demand backup, restore, and point-in-time recovery for data protection and archiving for DynamoDB wherein all backups are automatically encrypted, cataloged, and made easily discoverable and retained until explicitly deleted.
• Introduction to the recently launched Amazon GuardDuty - an Intelligent threat detection service that provides users with an accurate and easy way to continuously monitor and protect their AWS accounts, applications, and services running within them.
• Introduction to the recently launched Nitro hypervisor feature for C5 instances which is built on the core Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology but does not include general-purpose operating system components.
• Increase in the maximum database storage size/limit for SQL server using the Amazon RDS service from 4TB to 16TB.
• AWS proudly announced the fact that it now has more than 125 services in the offering and that it had been ranked as market leader for the past 7 years in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for providers in the Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space.

After the keynote speech, the participants had the option to attend any of the 48 breakout sessions for which they had cited interest at the time of registering for the summit. The sessions were scheduled keeping in mind the 6 key areas, viz. building, scaling, securing, migrating, innovating, and impact of various AWS services.

The venue was divided into four sections majorly, which included the AWS Booth, the AWS Innovation Pavilion, AWS Certification, and Built on AWS – ISV Village, along with six ballrooms for managing the breakout sessions. The AWS Booth hosted a panel of AWS experts who could be engaged with for technical discussions as well as partnership programs. The AWS Certification Lounge was open to AWS certified candidates only and served as a platform for networking between the elite AWS certified experts attending the event. The AWS Innovation Pavilion hosted in excess of 40 fastest-growing startups and innovation partners which used AWS services as building blocks for their products and gave the participants a chance to engage with them to further enable their own business growth. Last but not least - the ISV Village hosted independent software vendors and technology partners of AWS in India who could be engaged to understand their best practices and learn how their solutions could help the participant’s business to achieve success.

The event had a lot of sponsors, including some of the world’s most iconic names in the IT industry, and turned out to be a grand success with such a high level of participation from industry doyens. Despite being a high profile event, one could see enthusiastic participants - both the learned and the learners approaching the AWS teams with their seemingly infinite set of questions but returning in a state of enlightenment with their hardest problems resolved effortlessly on location. The AWS kitty already has a lot of amazing services in the offering, which fascinates me as I continue to discover them, and the appreciation just continues to grow with these new announcements and the freshly acquired knowledge. I wish only the best of wishes to the AWS team for putting together such an awesome event and look forward to attending more such events in the near future.