AWS Storage Blog
See what’s in store for Amazon S3 at re:Invent 2020 – Virtual Edition
This time last year, the AWS Storage product marketing team was entrenched in Las Vegas feverishly putting the final touches on content for re:Invent 2019 launches, sessions, workshops, and building our makeshift workstations in a hotel ballroom for the biggest week of the year (Some of us may have also done the annual testing of our luck at blackjack, hint: the house still wins). Fast-forward a year, and the team is still feverishly working on finalizing content to make this the best re:Invent ever, but we are all dispersed in our now all too familiar home offices due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. re:Invent 2020 has shifted to a free, 3-week virtual conference (From Nov 30 to Dec 18) that is sure to be the industry event of the year, offering five keynotes, 18 leadership sessions, and unlimited access to hundreds of sessions, including 10 sessions on Amazon S3. This year you will have online access to hours of sessions led by AWS experts, hear from cloud leaders, and be the first to learn what’s next and new from AWS, and be able to get technical questions answered on the spot.
In this post, you’ll find all of the Amazon S3 sessions offered at re:Invent so you can plan and prepare for this year’s 3-week event. The sessions are categorized by technical level, from intermediate to advanced, including a leadership session, deep dive sessions, and what’s new sessions for Amazon S3. If you haven’t done so already, register today so that you can view the schedules for each session and gain access to over 500 AWS sessions at re:Invent 2020. Remember to sign-up for, or bookmark the AWS Storage sessions for Amazon EFS, FSx for Windows File Server, and FSx for Lustre, EBS, AWS Backup, AWS Storage Gateway, DataSync, and the Transfer and Snow family of services.
Before we begin, let’s make sure you are up to speed on a remarkably busy month of November for the AWS Storage team that was anchored by the 2nd Annual AWS Storage Day. We had more than 20 launched at Storage Day, including automatic archival for S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which makes it it easy for you to save up to 95% on storage costs for rarely accessed data. And on November 18, we introduced Amazon S3 Storage Lens, the first cloud storage analytics solution with support for AWS Organizations to give you organization-wide visibility into object storage, dashboards with point-in-time metrics and trend lines as well as actionable recommendations.
Ok! Now that you are up to speed on the major launches of 2020, let’s take a look at Amazon S3 at re:Invent 2020.
Leadership Session – Storage
Amazon S3 Breakout Sessions
Breakout sessions are where builders go to learn what is next, understand architecting best practices from experts, and uncover advanced tips and tricks to make the difference between months and hours. Storage experts have designed and incorporated the latest product capabilities, research findings, and customer feedback into condensed yet consumable learning sessions. You can find breakout sessions across solution tracks, industry, or audience focuses. What is more exciting is that rather than making hard decisions to choose and commute between sessions, you can comfortably consume all the content you are interested in, as sessions will be broadcasted multiple times in a “follow-the-sun” fashion.
Below are the Amazon S3 focused-sessions you can add to your to-watch list, broken out by content level, and with bonus content at the end of the list, which includes sessions across AWS categories that focus on S3, and customers that discuss how they built their data lake on Amazon S3.
* Reader note: The re:Invent session catalog does not currently list the session ID or speaker names, but this will change soon. In the meantime, I have provided the session ID, speaker name, and the first broadcast time of the session because it is the session that will include moderated Q&A.
Virtual re:Invent Tips and Trick #1: It wouldn’t be AWS re:Invent without our quirky culture! Every week, you’ll have access to new activities to undertake on your own, or gather your whole team to participate together in AWS Play activities. Events include intimate conversations with top authors, DJ sets, cooking demos, and virtual mystery games.
Level 200 – Intermediate
STG201 – What’s new with Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. With Amazon S3, organizations of all sizes and industries can store any amount of data for any use case, including applications, IoT, data lakes, analytics, backup and restore, archive, and disaster recovery. In this session, learn what’s new with Amazon S3, including new features such as Amazon S3 Access Points, Amazon S3 Batch Operations, and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
Featured speaker: Christoph Bartenstein, Amazon S3
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 1, 2020 | 6:00 PM – 6:30 PM EST
STG 202 – Now is the time: Move your workloads to AWS storage
Organizations of every size realize the benefits of moving to cloud storage. They want to put an end to hardware refresh cycles and data migrations resulting from systems upgrades while increasing their agility in delivering new capabilities to their businesses faster and with better data durability, massive scalability, higher availability and performance, and lower cost. In this session, you learn how moving to Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon FSx, or Amazon EFS provides better business value. You also learn about how to manage costs with cloud storage and the different methods of migrating on-premises data to the cloud.
Featured speaker: Robbie Wright, AWS Storage
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 1, 2020 | 5:30 PM – 6:00 PM EST
Virtual re:Invent Tips and Trick #2: Movement Breaks You deserve a break – take a few minutes and rejuvenate with our desk stretch series.
STG203 – Break down data silos: Build a serverless data lake on Amazon S3
Flexibility, security, performance, and optimizing costs are key when building and scaling a data lake. The analytics solutions you use in the future will almost certainly be different from the ones you use today, and choosing the right storage foundation gives you the agility to quickly experiment and migrate with the latest analytics solutions. In this session, explore the best practices for optimizing your storage, performance, and costs when building a data lake in Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier.
Featured speaker: Ganesh Sundarasen, Solution Architect, AWS Storage
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 2, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST
STG204 – Modernize your on-premises backup strategy with AWS
On-premises data centers can be prone to unintended outages, disasters, and malicious threats. Attend this session to learn how you can easily and cost-effectively protect your data and applications to meet your business and regulatory compliance requirements. The session reviews deploying enterprise-wide backup solutions using AWS storage services. You learn how to use AWS Storage Gateway for seamless integrations to extend your backups to the cloud with Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier and how to use Amazon EFS to back up databases and other enterprise applications.
Featured speaker: Peter Imming, Amazon S3
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 2, 2020 | 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST
STG205 – Amazon S3 foundations: Best practices for Amazon S3
Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier provide developers and IT teams with object storage that offers industry-leading scalability, durability, security, and performance. In this session, see an overview of Amazon S3 and review key features such as storage classes, security, data protection, monitoring, and more. This session also covers how Airbnb uses Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier for cost optimization, data management, and analytics of its workloads.
Featured speaker: Bijeta Chakraborty, Amazon S3
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 2, 2020 | 5:00 PM – 5:30 PM EST
STG214 – Supercharge your compute workloads: Deep dive on Amazon FSx for Lustre + S3
Fast, shared file systems can help your compute workloads achieve peak performance and reduce costs. Amazon FSx for Lustre is a fully managed, POSIX-compliant shared file system, integrated with Amazon S3. FSx for Lustre provides high-performance storage for Amazon EC2 compute resources without the overhead and complexity of a self-managed file system. In this session, learn common storage challenges with running compute-intensive workloads. Come learn best practices and see a demo of how you can maximize compute resources while reducing total cost.
Featured speaker: Darryl Osborne, AWS Storage
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 8, 2020 | 5:15 PM – 5:45 PM EST
STG218 – Accelerate your migration to Amazon S3: AWS offers a wide variety of services and partner tools to help you migrate your data to Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier. Learn how AWS Storage Gateway and AWS DataSync can remove the friction out of the data migration process as you dive into the solutions and architectural considerations for accelerating data migration to the cloud from on-premises systems.
Featured speaker: Avi Drabkin, AWS Storage
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 10, 2020 | 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM EST
Advanced techniques for building with Amazon S3 in .NET applications
In this demo-heavy session, learn about newly released features in the AWS SDK for .NET that help you use Amazon S3 from within your applications. Specifically, this session examines using pagination with C# 8.0 IAsyncEnumerables and hosting Blazor applications in Amazon S3 buckets, and it covers new support for data encryption, including using your own keys and custom encryption.
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 9, 2020 | 11:45 AM – 12:15 PM EST
Virtual re:Invent Tips and Trick #3: Plan Daily Debriefs Now that re:Invent is virtual and free, there is no reason to not send the whole team. Be sure to strategically conquer all of the breakout sessions. Don’t forget to find time to virtually reconvene your team and debrief on their learnings.
Level 300 – Advanced
STG301 – Architecting for high availability on Amazon S3High availability starts with an infrastructure that is resilient and resistant to disruption, and the core of that is Amazon S3. Amazon S3 delivers high durability, availability, and performant object storage. That is the foundation, but to architect your system for high availability, you also need the right components and defined processes to respond quickly, minimize disruptions, and reduce downtime. In this session, get an inside look at how Amazon S3 is architected for high availability, and get actionable
Featured speaker: Eno Thereska, Principal Engineer, Amazon S3
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 15, 2020 | 3:15 PM – 3:45 PM EST
STG302 – Data lake security in Amazon S3: Perimeters and fine-grained controls
As you build a data lake on Amazon S3, managing security and access is essential. You require granular access control for your data with strong controls around authentication, authorization, encryption, and auditing. At the same time, you require strong guardrails that protect your data from outside access, at scale. Amazon S3 provides enhanced data security features in the cloud, on both ends of this spectrum. In this session, get guidance on the mechanisms you use on AWS, from identity to encryption to networking, to maintain tight control over your data.
Featured speakers: Becky Weiss, Principal Engineer, AWS and Rajeev Sharma, Chief Security Architect, Vanguard
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 15, 2020 | 4:30 PM – 5:00 PM EST
STG304 – Lessons from the vanguard: build modern apps using Amazon S3 or Amazon EBS
Serverless technology allows you to build modern applications with increased agility and lower total cost of ownership. You can focus on product innovation and shorten your time-to-market without worrying about provisioning, maintaining, and scaling servers for backend components, such as storage. In this session, learn how to start innovating with serverless technology from Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS. The session includes user stories of accelerating innovation and driving business value.
Featured speaker: Shasya Sharma, Amazon S3
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 16, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST
Analyzing data at any scale with AWS LambdaAWS Lambda functions provide a powerful compute environment that can be used to process and gain insights from data stored in databases, Amazon Aurora, object storage, and file systems. This session reviews options and techniques to optimize your data analytics platform without managing a server, and it focuses on unstructured (Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS) and structured (Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora) data, including integrations with Amazon Athena, an interactive query service.
Broadcast time with Q&A: DEC 4, 2020 | 12:45 AM – 1:15 AM EST
Bonus content! Sessions that cover S3 or customer data lakes built on S3
The right tool for the job: Enabling analytics at scale at Intuit: Intuit’s migration from an on-premises data center to an AWS data lake required creative solutions, both in technology (dealing with hundreds of data sources and leftover on-premises tooling) and in culture (requiring engineers and data consumers to embrace the change of a new cloud platform). This session walks through Intuit’s implementation end to end, explaining how the company worked with AWS to tackle these challenges by leveraging a complex AWS analytics portfolio, including Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue. It also covers how this successful migration is enabling Intuit to build even more.
Nationwide’s journey to a governed data lake on AWS: Nationwide is a group of large US insurance and financial services companies based in Columbus, Ohio. Nationwide has more than 20 business solution areas (BSAs) and more than 100 AWS accounts. In 2019, Nationwide worked with AWS to architect, design, and implement a governed data lake on AWS that allowed its BSAs to share, manage, and catalog datasets under one governed data lake. In this session, Jeff Anderson, Nationwide’s governed data lake architect, and Viral Desai, AWS principal solutions architect, discuss the journey, architecture, lessons learned, and the road ahead.
How Nielsen built a multi-petabyte data platform using Amazon EMR: In this session, learn how Nielsen used Amazon EMR to build and operate its multi-petabyte data lake and date warehouse. Nielsen discusses the growing pains of building a data lake, explains how to avoid them, and shares Amazon EMR best practices to improve performance in order to gain insights, reduce the cost of operating analytics workloads, and improve operational efficiency. Nielsen also walks through how it performs data exploration, sets up and terminates Spark clusters using Jenkins, manages batch workloads through Airflow DAGs, and writes queries using notebooks.
400 years of serverless land deeds: Come learn how Registers of Scotland (RoS) is migrating its 400-year-old dataset of land deeds to the serverless cloud. This session dives deep into the RoS solution, which uses a variety of AWS services including Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Cognito to provide a common archiving service for its registers. The session also reviews how RoS uses S3 Object Versioning, MFA Delete, and replication to ensure that documents are retained indefinitely in a more secure, auditable, and durable manner than previously possible. Finally, you learn how RoS is accelerating its registration processes by making deeds available as text with Amazon Textract.
Data-driven vehicle development at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles: In this session, learn how Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles (VWC) built a solution using AWS for data-driven and customer-centric vehicle development. Hear how VWC is gaining insights from terabytes of measurement data from its test fleet as well as from the vehicles of pilot customers. Learn how VWC set up a scalable, serverless data processing pipeline to harvest insights from raw vehicle sensor data using Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and more.
AstraZeneca genomics on AWS: A journey from petabytes to new medicines: Join this session to hear about AstraZeneca’s mission to analyze 2 million genomes/exomes by 2026 for integration with clinical data and use in R&D, clinical trials, and stratified medicine. AstraZeneca describes how it has built a world-leading genomics pipeline using high performance computing technologies such as AWS Batch and AWS Step Functions that is capable of processing more than 1,600 exomes per hour. Attend this session to learn how AWS services can be used to build a large-scale processing workflow, create millions of Amazon S3 objects, and create billions of records in an effective manner.
How Zalando tracks business performance in near-real time: In 2016, Zalando (Europe’s largest online fashion platform) started migrating its SAP systems to AWS to increase agility, simplify IT maintenance, and build a future-ready data architecture as part of its digital transformation. With a hybrid data lake on AWS that is tightly integrated with one of the world’s largest SAP S/4HANA systems, Zalando has reduced its cost of insight by 30% while improving customer satisfaction. In this session, you learn about Zalando’s S/4HANA implementation and how it built its data lake with services like Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, Amazon S3, and more.
Paving the way toward automated driving with BMW Group: In this session, explore the AWS autonomous driving data lake reference architecture to learn how organizations manage the challenge of ingesting, transforming, labeling, and cataloging massive amounts of data to develop automated driving systems using Amazon EMR, Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, and more. See how BMW Group collects 1 billion+ km of anonymized perception data from its worldwide connected fleet of customer vehicles to develop safe and performant automated driving systems. This sessions explains the purpose of and approach to the data collection and discusses examples from analyzing this valuable dataset.
How FINRA operates PB-scale analytics on data lakes with Amazon Athena: FINRA, the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the US, regulates trading in equities, corporate bonds, security futures, and options. Security and SLAs are critical for FINRA to meet its regulatory requirements. In this session, hear how FINRA developed applications on Amazon Athena to enable 1,500+ analysts and business partners to securely query financial trading data with multiple terabytes in daily updates.
Your Virtual re:Invent Checklist
- Register for re:Invent
- Add the 5 Keynotes to your agenda
- Buy 3 weeks of coffee, tea, or your beverage of choice. No coffee lines this year, and you can get to pick the beans!
- Add the Storage Leadership Session to your agenda
- Favorite the storage sessions of interest to you
- Review the AWS communities
- Connect with colleagues to plan how to conquer the many hours of content
- Check out the play activities and add them to your agenda
- Follow Amazon Web Services on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter
Did you know? Amazon S3 will turn 15 years old on March 14 (pi day), 2021. How should we celebrate?
