re:Invent 2021: AWS Containers track

In 2021, re:Invent offers an in-person and virtual conference experience for our attendees. The in-person part of the event will be held in Las Vegas from November 29, 2021 – December 3, 2021. Attendees for the virtual event can register for free and will have access to a subset of the sessions over the virtual re:Invent platform. In this post, we’ll cover the Containers track, featuring sessions on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS App Runner, AWS Fargate, AWS Proton, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), and AWS App Mesh.

As always, we’re excited to share with you what we’ve been working on since re:Invent 2020. If you haven’t yet, register now to be a virtual attendee, view the full agenda and add sessions to your calendar.

Launch sessions

CON211: Uplevel your container image security with the latest announcements from Amazon ECR – Sravan Rengarajan, Sr. Product Manager, Amazon ECR

Amazon ECR is a foundational part of the developer experience to use containers on AWS. Customers using containers on Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS App Runner, and even AWS Lambda use Amazon ECR to store and pull images from across the globe. As more customers use containers, Amazon ECR also grows and in this session, we will go over Amazon ECR’s newest launches with demos and benefits to your container workloads on AWS.

LIVE Breakout session: November 29, 2021 | 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST
Recording available on-demand post live session for virtual attendees

CON210: Getting to large Amazon EKS Clusters – Alex Kestner, Sr. Product Manager and Shyam Jeedigunta, Sr. Software Dev.Engineer, AWS Kubernetes

Learn about the newest scalability advancements and features that enable customers to build large clusters with Amazon EKS. We will dive deep into improvements ranging across the cluster control plane, networking and worker nodes. In this session, you will also learn about Karpenter, an AWS node lifecycle manager that can be used for running workloads on Amazon EKS as an alternative to cluster autoscaler. Karpenter manages your nodes based on the size of workloads that are required instead of the “one size fits all” approach that cluster autoscaler or other node lifecycle managers typically take.

LIVE Breakout session: November 30, 2021 | 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM PST
Recording available on-demand post live session for virtual attendees

Leadership and roadmap sessions

CON209-L: Containers on AWS: Everywhere and anywhere – Deepak Singh, VP of Compute Services

Containers have become the way AWS customers are building, deploying and operating their modern applications. Join Deepak Singh, VP of Compute Services, to hear about how AWS Container services are solving customer challenges as they migrate to the cloud and build cloud native applications. AWS has a growing number of services that support containers, and this session will dive into our core container services, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS and AWS App Runner, as well as the service roadmaps being shaped by our customers’ strategic goals to scale and grow with containers.

Virtual livestream only: November 29, 2021 | 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM PST

CON208: The powerful simplicity of Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) – Inbal Shani, GM Amazon ECS, and Deepak Kallakuri, Principal Product Manager, Amazon ECS

We recognize that a one size fits all approach does not work for our customers. Our commitment is to building services that fit your unique need and make your lives easier. To this end, we have invested significantly in our container services, including recent releases to help with service onboarding, hybrid environments and building web applications and API’s to enable support for how you interact with AWS tools and services.

This session will take you through these recent investments that help developers focus on their strategic projects and simplify their workflows. Inbal Shani, General Manager for Amazon ECS, will get under the hood with Amazon ECS, AWS Copilot, AWS App Runner, and Amazon ECS Anywhere and discuss the future vision for Amazon ECS.

Virtual breakout session only – available on demand beginning November 29, 2021

CON202: The future of collaboration: Delivering code and architectures through AWS Proton and git – Rafa Alvarez, Sr. Product Manager AWS Proton and David Killmon, Sr. Software Dev Engineer, AWS Containers

Infrastructure operators are looking for ways to centrally define and manage the architecture of their services, while developers need to find a way to quickly and safely deploy their code. In this talk, we will discuss how to use AWS Proton to define architectural templates and make them available to development teams in a collaborative manner, as well as how to enable development teams to customize their templates so that they fit the needs of their services.

LIVE Breakout session: November 30, 2021 | 6:30 PM. – 7:30 PM PST
Recording available on-demand for virtual attendees

CON205: AWS App Runner: Develop, deploy, scale your containerized web app, all in one step – Akshay Ram, Sr. Product Manager AWS App Runner and Noam Almog, Sr. Architect for Wix Velo

AWS App Runner empowers developers to increase their productivity by removing the need to provision or manage infrastructure, which means customers can develop, operate, and scale their web applications in minutes. In this session, we will dive deep into the full application lifecycle on AWS App Runner and showcase scaling, observability, cost allocation, and key enterprise features launched at re:Invent. We will also hear from Wix, a leading cloud-based website development platform with over 190 million users, on how the company uses AWS App Runner to make it easier for its customers to build powerful and flexible integrations between their websites and other AWS services including databases, storage, and AI/ML options.

LIVE Breakout session: December 1, 2021 | 4:45 PM – 5:45 PM PST
Recording available on-demand for virtual attendees

CON206: Kubernetes at AWS, Strategy, Roadmap and Vision – Allan Naim, Principal Product Manager, AWS Kubernetes and Anubhav Dhoot, VP of Engineering, Salesforce

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) enables customers to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises. AWS makes it easy to run Kubernetes in the cloud with scalable and highly-available virtual machine infrastructure and community-backed service integration. In this session, you’ll learn about our vision for EKS and how recent enhancements to ease-of-use, security, scale, and reliability make it a smart choice for your applications. You’ll also learn how Salesforce re-architected its infrastructure and launched a Kubernetes platform built atop of EKS. The platform abstracts away the infrastructure responsibilities of service owners, meets internal requirements around availability and security, and simplifies the developer experience.

LIVE Breakout session: November 29, 2021 | 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM PST
Recording available on-demand for virtual attendees

Getting started

CON201: You’ve got a container image. Great. Now what? – Massimo Re Ferre, Principal Technologist, AWS Containers

Customers are often overwhelmed by the richness of the AWS container offering. For some customers this may generate an analysis-paralysis. This session will provide a solid understanding, to un-opinionated customers, of the options that exist at AWS to run containers. We will start by introducing a comparison framework that takes into account multiple dimensions such as features richness, the shared responsibility model, the pricing model, the target IT personas and many more. We will then analyze each service under these lenses. Ultimately, we will aim at equipping customers with a mental model to navigate the options and select the best service(s) or technology based on the own customers’ needs and goals.

LIVE Breakout session: November 30, 2021 | 11 AM – 12 PM PST
Recording available on-demand post session for virtual attendees

CON203: AWS Copilot: Under the hood – Uttara Sridhar, Software Development Manager and David Killmon, Sr. Software Dev. Engineer, AWS Containers

In this session, we’ll talk through all of the resources that AWS Copilot builds and manages on your behalf. We’ll whiteboard the various components and discuss how and why this benefits our customers.

LIVE Chalktalk: December 1, 2021 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST

CON301: Service connectivity inside and outside the mesh using AWS App Mesh – Mridula Grandhi, Principal Technical Account Manager

While you modernize your existing applications and build microservices that need to work together as an application, it can get challenging to manage these services and have a consistent way to route and monitor traffic between them. Using a service mesh can enable you to manage service-to-service connectivity effectively without having to build language-specific SDK’s and tools for your production-ready applications. In the session, we will demonstrate connectivity options between the services of a microservices application that is configured to use AWS App Mesh. When you mesh a microservices application, the infrastructure layer of the application is abstracted from your application code to provide a consistent network topology. You can, thus, decouple the operations code from your services and keep them focused on your business logic. AWS App Mesh is a managed service mesh that can be used with Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2 instances, and with self-managed Kubernetes on Amazon EC2.

LIVE Chalktalk:
CON301-R1: November 29, 2021 | 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST
CON301-R2: December 2, 2021 | 1:45 PM – 2:45 PM PST

Modernization best practices

CON306: Best practices for detecting and mitigating attacks in Kubernetes clusters on AWS – Michael Fischer, Principal Solutions Architect and Umair Ishaq, Sr. Solutions Architect

Security is critical for your Kubernetes-based applications. Join this session to learn the security features and best practices for Amazon EKS. We will cover identifying an ongoing attack and recovering Kubernetes infrastructure, followed by securing the cluster using best practices.

LIVE HANDS-ON Workshop: December 2, 2021 | 2:30 PM – 4:30 PM PST

CON317: Mitigate supply chain security risks for your applications using Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate and Amazon ECR – Theo Salvo, Sr. Containers Specialist Solutions Architect and Andrew Park, Partner Solutions Architect

Containers are enabling organizations to build applications and reduce time-to-market. With this increased development pace, developers must consider folding security in from build to deployment. In this session, we discuss mitigating supply chain security risks using security features within AWS container services using CI/CD in Github Actions. The session demonstrates how to integrate ‘shift left’ security into your container application build and deploy cycles.

LIVE Chalktalk:
CON317-R1: November 29, 2021 | 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM PST
CON317-R2: December 1, 2021 | 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM PST

CON307: GitOps as a continuous operating model – Sheetal Joshi, Sr. Developer Advocate and Nick Thomson, Software Dev. Engineer, AWS Containers

In this session, learn how you can reliably deploy and manage your Kubernetes clusters and applications by adopting GitOps workflows. If GitOps is new to you, the session will start with a quick overview of what GitOps is, and then you’ll get hands on by bootstrapping a reference environment using Amazon EKS. From there, you’ll work through enabling automated deployments, provisioning and configuring cluster infrastructure, and managing AWS cloud resources such as storage components and database instances. The goal of this session is to show you how to adopt GitOps as part of your own development environment, and leave you with some guidance to enable a smooth adoption in your teams.

LIVE HANDS-ON Workshop: November 30, 2021 | 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM PST

CON309: Migrating from Amazon EC2 to Amazon ECS for application modernization – Maish Saidel-Keesing, Sr. Developer Advocate, AWS Containers

Customers often ask how can they take an existing application running on their Amazon EC2 instances, and migrate them to a containerized workflow/environment. In this workshop, we will 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.

LIVE HANDS-ON Workshop:
CON309-R1: November 29, 2021 | 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM PST
CON309-R2: December 1, 2021 | 2:30 PM – 4:30 PM PST

CON303: Amazon EKS Anywhere: Manage your Kubernetes clusters on-premises – Lichun Li, Sr. Product Manager and Joey Wang, Software Dev. Engineer, AWS Kubernetes

Amazon EKS Anywhere helps you create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises and gives you a seamless Amazon EKS experience through consistent tooling. In this session, we will bring you the latest updates from Amazon EKS Anywhere and show you how to manage Amazon EKS Anywhere clusters with the integrated toolset.

LIVE Chalktalk:
CON303-R1: November 30, 2021 | 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST
CON303-R2: December 1, 2021 | 7:45 PM – 8:45 PM PST

CON204: Observability & beyond with container-based services on AWS – Colin Bookman, Sr. Solutions Architect

Having an effective observability architecture for a containerized workload is essential to every business-critical environment running on AWS. By combining open-source technology with managed service experience, AWS provides customers observability tools which are seamlessly integrated with the AWS container-based hosting environments, specifically Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS. During this session we will provide a hands-on experience for you to setup monitoring and observability of your applications using AWS provided and supported tooling, such-as: AWS for Fluent Bit, Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights, Amazon Managed Prometheus, Amazon Managed Grafana, and AWS Distro for Open Telemetry.

LIVE HANDS-ON Workshop:
CON204-R1: November 29, 2021 | 10:45 AM – 12:45 PM PST
CON204-R2: December 1, 2021 | 9:15 AM – 11:15 AM PST

Builders’ Sessions

CON313: Build, operate, and observe a containerized application with Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate

In this builder’s session, we will containerize a demo application, deploy it to AWS Fargate, and then monitor it while running a load test. You will learn how to write a simple Dockerfile to define your container, then use AWS Copilot to deploy the container as a service. Then you will learn how to use AWS Copilot to spin up a standalone load test job. Finally you will learn how to access metrics for your service, and create a dashboard.

LIVE HANDS-ON Builders’ session:
CON313-R1: December 1, 2021 | 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM PST
CON313-R2: December 2, 2021 | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST

CON305: Automatic node provisioning with Karpenter

In this session, learn about Karpenter, an AWS node lifecycle manager that can be used for running workloads on Amazon EKS as an alternative to cluster autoscaler. Karpenter manages your nodes based on the size of workloads that are required instead of a one-size-fits-all, that cluster autoscaler or other node lifecycle managers do.

LIVE HANDS-ON Builders’ session: November 29, 2021 | 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST

CON207: Deploy production web apps in minutes with AWS App Runner and Amazon ECR

This session will demonstrate how to use Amazon ECR and AWS App Runner to run container images regardless of where they’re from. We’ll go over how to deploy to AWS App Runner from Amazon ECR Public, mirror images from other public repositories into Amazon ECR, how this benefits customers, and an interactive demo for you to get started easily from code to running container in AWS App Runner.

LIVE HANDS-ON Builders’ session:
CON207-R1: November 29, 2021 | 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM PST
CON207-R2: November 30, 2021 | 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM PST

Diving deep

CON304: Deep dive on Amazon EKS – Mike Stefaniak, Sr. Product Manager AWS Kubernetes

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service. This session will cover recent enhancements for Amazon EKS and deep dive on the latest features. Learn about how Amazon EKS gives you the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications in the AWS cloud or on-premises and how customers trust Amazon EKS to run their most sensitive and mission critical applications.

LIVE Breakout session: December 1, 2021 | 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM PST
Recording available on-demand for virtual attendees

CON311: AWS App Runner deep dive – Tori Hara, Sr. Developer Advocate and Yang Xiao, Sr. Software Dev. Engineer, AWS Containers

AWS App Runner allows customers to deploy and run scalable and secure web application in minutes. In this session, learn about how you can use AWS App Runner for the full application life cycle from development to production. We will walk through topics such as getting started, scaling, observability, and cost allocation and demo the service including some key features launched at re:Invent.

LIVE Chalktalk:
CON311-R1: November 29, 2021 | 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST
CON311-R2: November 30, 2021 | 8:00 PM – 9:00 PM PST

CON315: Enabling new workloads on AWS Fargate – Saloni Sonpal, Sr. Product Manager AWS Fargate, and Re Alvarez Parmar, Principal Containers Specialist

AWS Fargate provides security by design, pay per use pricing, and takes care of the undifferentiated heavy-lifting so you can focus on building applications. With our new upcoming features, we are unlocking new workloads for AWS Fargate. In this session, we will talk about the capabilities we have recently added that allow you to run large-scale workloads on AWS Fargate while still reaping the benefits of serverless compute.

LIVE Chalktalk: November 30, 2021 | 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM PST

CON302: Amazon ECS: Scaling containerized workloads to thousands of tasks – Yumeng Xie, Software Dev. Engineer and Sharanya Devaraj, Software Dev. Engineer, AWS Containers

Customers will learn how they can achieve more than 10,000 Amazon ECS tasks to run their workload while taking full advantage of Amazon ECS’s deep AWS integration and its simplicity. Being able to know details and tips to run ECS at a large scale will reduce the developer and devops cost to manage clusters and help them achieve operational excellence with less overhead. Here, we will provide a real-world problem and walk through different ways to achieve that scale and beyond.

LIVE Chalktalk:
CON302-R1: November 30, 2021 | 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST
CON302-R2: December 1, 2021 | 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST

CON314: Building event-driven services on Amazon ECS – Vibhav Agarwal, Sr. Product Manager Amazon ECS, and Maish Saidel-Keesing, Sr. Developer Advocate, AWS Containers

Customers need a way to build long running services that act on some async input – a lot of the guidance exists today, including sessions around request/response services. This session brings visibility into building on Aamzon ECS for additional types of workloads and for customers looking to migrate from AWS Lambda.

LIVE Chalktalk: November 30, 2021 | 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

CON308: Get your application up and running in minutes using AWS CDK patterns – Nathan Peck, Sr. Developer Advocate

AWS CDK patterns for Amazon ECS enables you to use code instead of AWS CloudFormation to deploy the required AWS resources. In this workshop, you will learn to use this simple and automate-able pattern to deploy and manage your applications.

LIVE HANDS-ON Workshop: November 30, 2021 | 5:45 PM. – 7:45 PM PST

CON319: Simplifying lifecycle management for Kubernetes clusters with Amazon EKS – Eddie Zaneski, Sr. Developer Advocate and Gregory Fina, Sr. Solutions Architect

Amazon EKS makes it easy to run secure and highly available Kubernetes clusters. In this session, you will learn how to create and manage clusters at scale through Managed Node Groups, Amazon EKS Add-ons, and other features. These features greatly simplify Kubernetes version upgrades and other operational tasks.

LIVE Chalktalk: November 30, 2021 | 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM PST

CON312: Build with AWS CDK and cdk8s – Eddie Zaneski, Sr. Developer Advocate and Eli Polonski, Software Dev. Engineer, AWS Containers

Containers are emerging as the new standard for how we package and deploy our applications, and Kubernetes is becoming the go-to platform that enables that. However, orchestrating containers with Kubernetes does create another layer of complexity. In this session, we will combine the AWS CDK with the CDK for Kubernetes (cdk8s) into a unified library that makes deploying Kubernetes application on AWS simple and scalable. We will see how that library can be used for a variety of use-cases and demonstrate how to containerize a traditional Spring Boot Java application, and deploy it to your Amazon EKS cluster.

LIVE Chalktalk: November 29, 2021 | 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM PST

CON316: High performance with Amazon EKS: 100’s of lessons learned in 60 minutes – Shyam Jeedigunta, Sr. Software Dev. Engineer AWS Kubernetes, and Shane Corbett, Sr. Containers Specialist

Looking for a comprehensive session on scaling massive workloads on Amazon EKS? Join us as we deep dive into aspects of the control-plane, infrastructure, and application layers, necessary to scale some of the largest workloads in the world. We will start our journey by diving deep into the control plane, where we will discuss the engineering behind the new scalability features of Amazon EKS. Then, our Amazon EKS scalability experts will guide you through pragmatic advice by sharing hard earned lessons learned working with hundreds of customers at the largest scale.

LIVE Chalktalk:
CON316-R1: November 29, 2021 | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST
CON316-R2: December 1, 2021 | 10:45 AM – 11:45 AM PST

CON318: Orchestrate your microservices with AWS Step Functions and Amazon ECS – Amit Borulkar, Sr. Solutions Architect and Sheetal Joshi, Sr. Developer Advocate AWS Containers

Once you have containerized your application and broken down your monolith into a set of microservices, it becomes very critical on how these microservices interact with one another to satisfy your business logic. Do we embed the conditional logic, call back logic within the microservices or can we abstract it? What if some of these microservices perform a batch job or some of them wait for a human intervention? In this chalk talk, we explore how to orchestrate microservices with AWS Step Functions and Amazon ECS to implement your business logic in a scalable and simple manner.

LIVE Chalktalk: December 2, 2021 | 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM PST

Open source

CON320: Keeping your host operating system secure with Bottlerocket – Samuel Karp, Sr. Software Dev. Engineer and Vaishnavi Venkatesan, Sr. Product Manager, Linux and Open-Source

Bottlerocket is an open-source, minimal, Linux-based container optimized operating system that is purpose built to host container workloads. It only includes tools needed to run containers, significantly reducing the attack surface and impact of vulnerabilities. In this session, we will demonstrate many aspects of Bottlerocket including how you can restrict container privileges, limit access to host level entities such as sockets and block devices, and demonstrate how configurations designed to exploit vulnerabilities are blocked by Bottlerocket keeping your host operating system secure.

Live demos at the Demo Theatre

DEM094: Easily run containers on customer-managed infrastructure with Amazon ECS Anywhere – Tori Hara, Sr. Developer Advocate, AWS Containers

Amazon ECS Anywhere is a feature of Amazon ECS that enables you to easily run and manage container workloads on customer-managed infrastructure. Join us as Tori Hara, Sr Developer Advocate for AWS, shares a demonstration of Amazon ECS and its ability to provide a consistent tooling and API experience across your container-based applications. Tori will share examples of cluster management, workload scheduling, and monitoring in your own hybrid environment.

DEM085: Amazon EKS Anywhere and Amazon EKS Connect: Management for multi cloud Kubernetes – Vignesh Goutham Ganesh, Software Development Engineer, AWS Kubernetes

Create and operate Kubernetes clusters in your data center with the AWS management experience and optimized defaults for cluster configuration, machine operating systems, and 3rd-party integrations. Join us as Vignesh Goutham Ganesh, Senior Software Development Engineer, will demonstrate how Amazon EKS Anywhere helps simplify the creation and operation of on-premises Kubernetes clusters while providing tools for automating cluster management. Vignesh will then share how Amazon EKS Connector can be used to leverage the Amazon EKS console to view all of your Kubernetes clusters, even those outside AWS.

DEM090: Deploy web applications in a few clicks with AWS App Runner – Akshay Ram, Sr. Product Manager, AWS App Runner

In this demo, we will deploy a web application live on AWS App Runner and walk through built-in features for deployments, observability, cost allocation, and pricing.

We hope to see you soon in December! If you haven’t already, register to attend re:Invent 2021 virtually now!