Know before you Go – serverless containers at AWS re:Invent 2022

This re:Invent, the Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and the AWS Fargate teams will be presenting new capabilities, best practices, and tips to amplify business agility, shorten time to market, and increase productivity for organizations in their application modernization journey. To learn more, join us in Las Vegas from November 28 through December 2.

Come by the Amazon ECS kiosk in the Expo Hall or the AWS Modern Application and Open Source Zone to meet subject matter experts from these sessions and grab some swag!

Sessions to attend

As in past years, the conference offers a variety of session formats:

• Breakout sessions: lecture-style presentations delivered by AWS experts, builders, and customers.
• Workshops: hands-on learning sessions designed to help you learn about new technologies. Bring your own laptop.
• Chalk talks: interactive sessions led by experts on a variety of topics. Share your own experiences and feedback.
• Builder’s sessions: smaller sessions led by AWS experts during which you’ll build a project on your own laptop.

Leadership sessions

SVS210 | Accelerating innovation with serverless on AWS (Nov 29, 3:30 pm, Venetian Level 5, Palazzo Ballroom B)

Serverless empowers organizations to go to market faster while lowering cost across a wide range of applications. Join Holly Mesrobian, VP of Serverless Compute at AWS, to learn about the innovations happening at all layers of the stack, across both serverless functions and serverless containers. Discover important lessons learned from customers achieving long-term success on their serverless journey in the face of rapid change. Finally, explore newly released innovations that enable more secure, reliable, and performant applications. From newly launched startups to large enterprises, learn why over a million customers choose serverless for their most demanding use cases.

CON210 | What’s new and what’s next with Amazon ECS (Nov 30, 4:00 pm, MGM Grand, Level 3 – Chairmans 355)

The Amazon ECS team continues to innovate for their users, delivering powerful features that deeply integrate with the rest of AWS. Join this session to hear about the latest advancements with Amazon ECS. Discover what’s new since last year’s launch of Amazon ECS Anywhere, new features of AWS Fargate, and a look ahead at the exciting enhancements to Amazon ECS.

Breakout sessions

CON207 | Your first container in the cloud (Nov 28, 12:15 pm, Mandalay Bay, Level 3 South – South Seas A)

In this session, we’ll provide an introduction to the basics of containers, the benefits of container orchestration, and how services like AWS App Runner can help you operate a container in production.

CON307 | Protecting production with Amazon ECS security features (Nov 30, 12:15 pm, Mandalay Bay, Level 2 South – Lagoon I)

Amazon ECS enables you to secure your applications by using the built-in security features of AWS. In this session, you’ll learn about the security features available, allowing you to deploy secure applications using AWS Identify and Access Management (AWS IAM) roles for tasks, security groups for network security, and how to provide secrets and confidential information to your containers.

CON308 | Reduce your operational and infrastructure costs with Amazon ECS (Nov 30, 4:00 pm, Mandalay Bay, Level 3 South – Jasmine H)

In this session, we’ll show you how to reduce operational overhead from the control plane with Amazon ECS. Come learn how to use containers for bin-packing workloads, efficient scaling techniques, cost savings plans, AWS Copilot, blueprints, and AWS Graviton Processor.

CON309 | Build your application easily and efficiently with serverless containers (Dec 1, 2:00 pm, Encore, Level 1 – Encore Ballroom 5)

Deep dive into concurrency and scaling across AWS App Runner, AWS Lambda containers, and AWS Fargate. In this session, we’ll discuss value and performance differences with a focus on helping audiences make the best platform decisions.

CON320 | Run hybrid cloud at the edge with Amazon ECS Anywhere (Nov 30, 7:45 pm, MGM Grand, Level 1 Grand 115)

Join us to learn how to use the benefits of containers in a hybrid environment. We’ll discuss how to satisfy compliance, data gravity, and other business requirements by running your workloads on an infrastructure you own while enjoying familiar container tooling. Learn how you can run containerized data processing workloads at edge locations on your own hardware to allow you to stay close to your end customers and maintain reduced latency. AWS customer Ocado will be present to discuss how they use Amazon ECS Anywhere to deploy containerized applications on top of edge devices.

CON406 | Under the hood of AWS Fargate and AWS App Runner (Nov 28, 3:15 pm, MGM Grand – Level 3 Chairmans 364)

Since 2015, AWS has been innovating on multiple services that help customers remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting in running containerized applications. From Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, to AWS App Runner, each service provides a unique abstraction with varying levels of control over the underlying infrastructure. Under the hood of these services, there’s a sophisticated architecture with common core underpinnings. In this talk, come learn about not only how the product ideas evolved from one service to the next, but also how the underlying architecture has evolved to support this wide array of container offerings.

CON407 | Scaling containers from one user to millions (Nov 29, 3:30 pm, Mandalay Bay, Level 3 South – Jasmine H)

Many successful large businesses rely on Amazon ECS to massively scale as their business demands increase. In this session, we’ll discuss capacity providers, service autoscaling, limits and quotas, as well as best practices for building scalable infrastructure.

STG303 | AWS storage for containers and serverless applications (Nov 30, 2:30 pm, Wynn, Level 1 – Lafite 5 and Nov 30, 6:15 pm, Mandalay Bay – Level 3 South – Jasmine F)

Modern applications have revolutionized application architecture. Builders can now use containers for greater portability and/or building applications on serverless infrastructure to optimize compute resources. In this session, learn about different storage services, including Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), to help you determine which storage is the best fit for your modern applications.

Workshops

CON203 | Explore the foundation of AWS container services (Nov 29, 11:00 am, Wynn, Upper Level – Cristal 3)

Start at the beginning of the modern application deployment process and learn how Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, and AWS App Runner form a flexible and powerful set of experiences to deploy, run, secure, and scale containers. Work through a step-by-step, hands-on workshop in which you determine the right application to use and learn how to deploy microservices, set up the proper observability, and implement networks and security the right way the first time. Finally, explore how to seamlessly and securely integrate with the vast offerings of AWS. You must bring your laptop to participate.

CON303 | Networking, service mesh, and service discovery with Amazon ECS (Nov 30, 3:15 pm, Wynn, Level 1 – Mouton 2)

In this workshop, start with a deployed containerized application and explore all the native networking options available. By looking at multiple use cases, learn about connecting AWS containers to the people, places, and things that are important. Use cases in this workshop include connecting to an existing AWS environment, connecting securely to available AWS services like databases and load balancers, and discovering whether a service mesh and automatic service discovery are a necessary part of your deployment. You must bring your laptop to participate.

CON304 | Learn to deploy containerized applications in hybrid cloud environments (Nov 28, 1:45 pm, Wynn, Upper Level – Cristal 5 and Dec 1, 11:00 am, MGM Grand – Level 1 – Grand 117)

Attend this workshop to learn more about using the efficiencies and benefits of containers in a hybrid environment. Consider how you can satisfy compliance, data gravity, and other business requirements by running your workloads on infrastructure you own while enjoying simple and familiar container tooling. Learn how you can run containerized data processing workloads at edge locations on your own hardware to allow you to stay close to your end users and maintain reduced latency. Also, discover machine learning, image processing, big data, and other application workloads that don’t require you to transfer your data to the cloud or manage a third-party orchestration software. You must bring your laptop to participate.

CON305 | Deploy Node.js using AWS App Runner for web applications at scale (Nov 30, 5:30 pm, Mandalay Bay, Level 1 North – Islander C)

Learn how to start with source code or a container image build to deploy web applications automatically and load-balance traffic with encryption. Find out how to scale your traffic needs and make it easy for your services to communicate with other AWS services and applications. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP309 | Accelerate AWS observability for your containers (Nov 29, 2:00 pm, MGM Grand, Level 1 – Grand 117 and Nov 30, 5:30 pm, MGM Grand – Level 1 – Grand 117)

Collecting observability signals, such as metrics, logs, and traces, from container environments can be a challenging task. In this workshop, get hands-on experience with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry using opinionated solutions such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) observability accelerator and the new Amazon ECS Console experience to collect metrics and traces from your container applications and send them to AWS observability services such as Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, and AWS X-Ray. Also, learn to query, correlate, and visualize signals from these data sources along with advanced configurations such as Amazon Managed Grafana teams and SAML integration with third-party authentication providers using Amazon Managed Grafana. You must bring your laptop to participate.

ENT314 | Accelerate your application modernization with containers (Dec 1, 2:45 pm, MGM Grand, Level 3 – Premier 316)

Moving to containers is one of the most adopted modernization pathways today. Following the correct approach and using the right tools helps you achieve important benefits like agility, portability, and efficiency. You can benefit most when you modernize your delivery and operational practices and transform your organizational processes and culture. In this workshop, learn how to use AWS App2Container to jumpstart your application’s containerization and deploy it to Amazon ECS. Learn how to adopt DevOps principles by building a mature CI/CD pipeline with AWS developer tools. Discover how to achieve operational excellence through observability for your Amazon ECS environments and containers. You must bring your laptop to participate.

BOA317 | Building containerized apps: From development to production (Nov 29, 11:00 am, Wynn, Level 1 – Lafite 2 and Nov 30, 9:15 am, Caesars Forum – Level 1 – Summit 216)

In this workshop, learn how to develop with containers with fewer challenges and implement best practices using AWS Copilot, an AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) tool designed to deploy containers with best practices. Walk through how to build a virtual photo booth app and deploy it into Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate. Start with a simple API implementation, horizontal scaling, and integration with Amazon DynamoDB to implement CI/CD. Then, as the app grows, implement asynchronous communication and implement publish and subscribe. Gain a practical knowledge of using AWS Copilot for deployment to a DevOps implementation.

Chalk talks

CON310 | Best practices for container platform management systems (Nov 28, 12:15 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1 – Forum 101)

In this chalk talk, we’ll focus on five best practices to build a container platform management system. From building the right teams to innovate, design, and operate a container management platform, to choosing the right AWS and ISV tools, we’ll cover key steps to help drive efficiency and effectiveness.

CON311 | Best practices for deploying microservices on Amazon ECS (Nov 28, 10:00 am, Mandalay Bay – Level 2 South – Breakers L and Nov 29, 11:00 am, Caesars Forum, Level 1 – Summit 217)

Customers increasingly run their applications as containerized microservices on Amazon ECS. This chalk talk will focus on sharing best practices for how customers can safely and quickly roll out new application versions with Amazon ECS. The discussion will include the various tools customers can use for Amazon ECS deployments (e.g., AWS CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), Terraform, CLI, AWS Management Console) and best practices for safeguards customers can use depending upon the application type (load-balanced vs. event-driven) and infrastructure provider (Amazon EC2 vs. AWS Fargate).

CON312 | Auto scale your web application using AWS App Runner (Nov 29, 2:00 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1 – Alliance 311)

Automatic scaling provides adequate request handling when incoming traffic is high, and reduces your cost when traffic slows down. and with AWS App Runner auto scaling is enabled by default for each AWS App Runner service. In this chalk talk, we’ll deep dive on how AWS App Runner auto scaling works and the huge benefits it brings to customers.

CON313 | Migrating from Amazon EC2 to Amazon ECS for application modernization (Nov 28, 4:00 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1 – Forum 104 and Dec 2, 10:00 am, Caesars Forum – Level 1 – Forum 104)

Customers often ask how they can take an existing application running on their Amazon EC2 instances and migrate them to a containerized workflow or environment. In this workshop, we’ll take an application that is running on Amazon EC2 and walk through how to break it up into containers. We’ll start by defining our applications as container images and run them locally. Next, we’ll take those container images we built locally and walk through how to deploy them to Amazon ECS using the AWS Copilot CLI.

CON314 | Serverless high-concurrency containers on AWS (Nov 30, 10:00 am, Mandalay Bay, Level 2 South – Breakers L)

On AWS, there are three main serverless options for running your containers: AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, and AWS App Runner. In this chalk talk, we’ll show you how the serverless compute models of these service compare, how they handle high concurrency traffic, and how you can figure out which one is best for your use case.

CON315 | Managing hybrid container workloads at scale with Amazon ECS Anywhere (Nov 28, 10:45 am, Caesars Forum, Level 1 – Forum 126 and Dec 1, 1:15 pm, Caesars Forum – Level 1 – Alliance 305)

This chalk talk will provide a deep dive into how you can use Amazon ECS Anywhere to manage your hybrid workloads at scale. You’ll see an example of how you can go about at managing thousands of managed instances and deploy tasks to your hybrid environments with ease using Amazon ECS Anywhere.

CON316 | Container image signing on AWS (Nov 28, 11:30 am, Caesars Forum, Level 1 – Summit 217)

Containers have become a common distribution solution for cloud-native applications and are driving the need for new innovations in software supply chain security. In this chalk talk, members of the AWS Signer and Amazon ECR teams will walk customers through open-source components and AWS solutions to build an end-to-end container image signing solution on AWS. We’ll discuss in detail the open-source work we’ve done in the Notary project, the OCI Distribution and Image specifications, and other tooling to provide customers with flexible options for a variety of container image signing use cases.

CON317 | Simplify the on ramp to running production-ready container workloads (Nov 28, 10:00 am, Caesars Forum, Level 1 – Forum 110 and Dec 1, 2:45 pm, Caesars Forum – Level 1 – Academy 412)

AWS provides managed services that can help you centralize on best practices, gain visibility into what templates are running and how old they are, and provide your app developers with a simple way to deploy architectures leveraging container technologies. In this chalk talk we’ll look at how customers are leveraging AWS Proton to define consistent IaC templates and enabling developers to deploy their applications across environments with the click of a button. We’ll dive into the anatomy of a AWS Proton template bundle and the various IaC tools that it supports.

Builder’s sessions

CON408 | Deploy containerized web applications in minutes using AWS App Runner (Nov 30, 2:30 pm, Mandalay Bay, Level 1 North – South Pacific D)

In this session, you’ll learn how to build and deploy containerized web applications on AWS App Runner. Learn how to automatically scale your application based on requests, load balance traffic, integrate with a data layer, and have a pipeline release for automated deployment of new versions of your application, all from a fully managed experience. You must bring your laptop to participate.

CON409 | Canary deployment with metrics-driven rollback ability for Amazon ECS (Dec 1, 3:30 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1 – Academy 417)

In this session, we’ll discuss the importance of deployment strategies and how to implement a CICD strategy using AWS CodeSuite services for performing canary deployments on Amazon ECS using AWS App Mesh for communication between the microservices. We’ll also cover what can be achieved with AWS CodeDeploy and the differences to our reference architecture that does not require ELBs for internal communication.

COP339 | AWS open-source observability for monitoring Amazon ECS (Nov 30, 1:00 pm, Mandalay Bay, Level 1 North – South Pacific D)

Do you know how to instrument your microservices running on Amazon ECS to collect and visualize metrics and logs? This hands-on builders’ session focuses on metrics and logs. You’ll take a sample microservice application running on AWS Fargate and send metrics using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. Learn how to configure the container to collect and send logs to Amazon CloudWatch using FireLens. Build a dashboard with Amazon Managed Grafana using metrics data from Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and logs from Amazon CloudWatch Logs as data sources. You must bring your laptop to participate.

If you are unable to join us in-person, then you can join the livestream of the Keynotes & Leadership Sessions. You can register for the event and choose the virtual-only pass. Breakout Sessions will be available via our YouTube channel after the event.

Contact your AWS Account Team is you are interested in learning more about any of these sessions or how to bring our experts to you.

We look forward to seeing you at re:Invent 2022! For more learning resources, visit Amazon ECS to get started.