AWS Summit Santa Clara 2016 Recap

This is a guest post from Paul Sears, Partner SA, Amazon Web Services

On July 12th – 13th, AWS hosted the 2016 AWS Summit Santa Clara. Attendees took part in AWS and Partner-led technical sessions, bootcamps, and GameDay, and had the opportunity to interact with a wide range of Consulting and Technology Partners in the Partner & Solutions Expo.

AWS GameDay

Led by AWS Partner SAs, participants in AWS GameDay were presented with the following scenario: Unicorn Rentals is the latest hot startup, and it is your first day leading the DevOps team through the product launch! Inheriting an existing infrastructure design, more than 150 participants, grouped into 54 teams, competed to make Unicorn Rentals the most profitable startup possible, while dealing with real-world conditions, such as poor documentation, limited design, and random service impacting events.

Congratulations to JustHereForTheFreeFood, the most successful team for GameDay, winning the coveted Unicorn trophy.

Summit Keynote

Dr. Matt Wood, GM, Product Strategy, presented the keynote for the event on July 13th, focusing on four viewpoints of the future. View one explored the Ubiquitous Use of Data and Big Data and Analytics. Dr. Wood introduced Alex Dickinson, SVP of Strategic Initiatives, Illumina, to share the company’s big data and cloud computing story on AWS. The second view focused on Building Apps with Services, Not Servers, outlining microservices, while also discussing Amazon ECS and serverless computing with AWS Lambda. Through the third view, Dr. Wood discussed Security and Governance That’s Transparent and Continually Improving, and detailed the use of Amazon Inspector. The fourth view focused on Rapid and Even Distribution of New Technologies, including the AWS IoT Platform. Dr. Wood introduced Colin Angle, Founder, Chairman and CEO of iRobot to share the company’s story on AWS, focused on the connected home and the connected iRobot.

The keynote closed with a discussion of data and database migration, with Brian Kaiser, CTO, Hudl, sharing the company’s story on AWS, and how Hudl has expanded its use of AWS over time. Watch the keynote here.

New Announcements

The following announcements were made during the Summit keynote:

AWS Database Migration Service now supports continuous data replication with high-availability, enables SSL endpoints, and adds support for SAP ASE (formerly SAP Sybase ASE)
AWS Schema Conversion Tool now supports conversions from Oracle DW and Teradata to Amazon Redshift, Embedded Code Conversion, and Cloud native Code Optimization
Amazon EC2 Container Service Now Supports IAM Roles for Tasks

AWS Partner Solutions Explorer

The AWS Partner Solutions Explorer provided Summit attendees an effective way to find the right Partner solution for their unique business requirements. Don’t miss your opportunity to check it out at the AWS New York Summit!

Technical Sessions

Attendees were able to select from more than 50 breakout sessions on Wednesday, July 13^th, covering the topics of Big Data & Analytics, Diversity, Enterprise, Public Sector, Security and Services. APN Partners also hosted sessions, such as:

Hack-Proof Your Cloud: Responding to 2016 Threats where Aaron Newman of CloudCheckr discussed cloud security
Redis Labs presented the story of SAP Ariba and how the company accomplished seamless scaling while reducing costs in Achieving High Scalability and High Availability in Clouds with Redis Labs

Partner Breakfast

The Partner breakfast focused on Building Your Practice On AWS. Presented by Ed Omland, Global Head, Growth Partner Segment, the talk focused on helping attendees understand the value of being an APN Partner, and our philosophy around our Partner ecosystem. Ed discussed three key themes: Put the Customer First, Invent, and Be Patient. He walked through a number of resources provided by the APN to help firms succeed, and pointed to a number of APN Partner successes throughout the talk.

You can view the presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEfc20KCJYA

Partner Theater

In the Partner Theater, focused Lightning talks covered a variety of partner stories and solutions, including the following:

AWS DevOps Competency Partner Rackspace presented customer case studies leveraging Rackspace services on AWS
AWS DevOps Competency Partner Datadog shared its perspective on monitoring container-based infrastructure with the talk, “Monitoring in Motion: Monitoring Containers and Amazon ECS”
AWS Migration Competency Partner New Relic hosted the session, “Monitoring the Dynamic Nature of Cloud Computing”
AWS Security Competency Partner evident.io hosted the session, “Continuous CIS Benchmarking of Infrastructure on AWS”

More Information

If you missed the AWS Summit Santa Clara, you have another opportunity to interact with AWS Customers, AWS Partners, and AWS staff, attend technical break-out sessions, and participate in GameDay at the AWS New York Summit on August 10-11. Registration for the event is free!

If you are unable to attend in person, you can still follow the event live as it happens by following @AWSSummits on Twitter.