What’s in store with AWS Storage at re:Invent 2021

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This is by far my favorite post that I write every year, it’s the re:Invent preview for AWS Storage! On behalf of the entire AWS Storage team, I am excited to tell you some of the highlights of the storage category that you shouldn’t miss.

AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted for the global cloud community, and is the most customer-focused event I have been involved in. We are super excited to join you at the 10^th annual re:Invent to share the latest from AWS leaders and discover more ways to learn and build. Let’s celebrate this milestone that will be offered in person in Las Vegas (November 29-December 3) and in virtual (November 29–December 10) formats. The in-person event is now sold out, but check out the virtual section

The health and safety of our customers and partners remains our top priority and you can learn more about it in health measures page.

During the week, there will be more than 1,000 sessions (close to 100 storage sessions), and AWS Storage has big plans for you, starting with our leadership session (STG211) – Driving innovation and insight with cloud data on AWS storage with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec. With new launches, sessions, workshops, and an in-person customer reception, there will be something new to do for everyone! Keep reading for more information on how you can get the most out of your re:Invent 2021 experience, whether in-person or virtual.

You can start planning your schedule at any time by logging into your account, visiting the session catalog, and registering or favoriting sessions of interest (I suggest using the storage filter to help narrow down the list, but I am biased). Below is a sample of some of the most interesting topics across the storage portfolio.

AWS Storage Leadership Session

STG211: Driving innovation and insight with cloud data on AWS storage with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec

Every business is a data business, and data is growing at an unprecedented rate. Modern data use needs innovative storage infrastructure to scale and integrate with next-generation applications, like machine learning, that are powering businesses. In this session, join Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President of Block and Object Storage at AWS, to learn how to build modern data architectures that scale without limit, respond with agility to unexpected pivots in demand, and fuel innovations with data-driven insights using the AWS storage portfolio and latest launches.

Speaker: Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP of Block and Object Storage, AWS
Date: Tuesday, November 30
Time: 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Location: Level 2, Venetian Theatre, Venetian

If you are attending re:Invent in-person, visit the re:Invent site, and search in the session catalog using “STG211” and register for the session.

If you are attending virtual re:Invent this year, you can register for the virtual event here [link discontinued], and then proceed to register for STG211 or the Storage Leadership session [link discontinued].

PRO TIP: Leadership Sessions are a topic area’s State of the Union, where AWS leadership will share the vision and direction for storage at AWS (Hint: There will be launches!).

Breakout sessions

Lecture style and 60 minutes long. These sessions will take place throughout the re:Invent campus and cover all topics at all levels (200–400). Sessions are delivered by AWS experts, customers, and partners, and they typically include 10–15 minutes of Q&A at the end.

STG206: First SAN built for the cloud: io2 Block Express for mission-critical SANs

In this session, learn how to use io2 Block Express and the Amazon EBS portfolio to achieve the highest-performance block storage in the cloud for your largest, most I/O intensive, mission-critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS analytics. Discover the benefits of migrating on-premises workloads to Amazon EBS and help free your business from the high costs and complexity of operating traditional on-premises SANs.

Date: Tuesday, November 30
Time: 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Location: Level 4, Lando 4202, Venetian
Speaker: Cami Tavares

STG220: Protecting and Governing Your Data on AWS

The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data. Strong data protection and governance fuels your business success and regulatory compliance, and proactively prevent cyberattacks or data loss. Join Nancy Wang, AWS General Manager of Data Protection Services, and Satish Lakshmanan, AWS Director of Storage Business Development, as they dive deep on how AWS managed data protection services help customers architect multi-layered defense perimeters around their sensitive application data, at rest and in transit.

Date: Tuesday, November 30
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Location:Level 1, Forum 113, Caesars Forum
Speakers: Satish Lakshmanan, Nancy Wang

PRO TIP: Search topics you are interested in and start favoriting/reserving sessions you think you might be interested in attending. Step Two: Make sure roughly 80% of your favorites are breakout sessions. Step Three: Get crazy! Once you have your core topics explored and your sessions favorited, explore by other topics! You never know what you might discover.

STG202: Simplify your file-based workloads with Amazon FSx

More and more customers are moving their file storage and file-based applications to Amazon FSx to improve agility, reduce cost, and scale faster. In this session, learn how Amazon FSx can help simplify your infrastructure with fully managed cloud file storage powered by popular commercial and open-source file systems. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides complete, fully managed ONTAP file systems in the cloud. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server offers fully managed Windows storage—built on Windows Server. Hear about the latest Amazon FSx capabilities, gain best practices, and explore common use cases to extend and protect your on-premises file-based workloads on AWS.

Date: Tuesday, November 30
Time: 5:45 PM – 6:45 PM
Location: Level 4, Lando 4305, Venetian
Speakers: Edward Naim, Andrew Crudge, Norm Nadeau

STG204: Data archiving and digital preservation solutions with AWS

Learn how to manage long-term data archiving and digital asset preservation needs with AWS. This session details compliance use cases requiring write-once-read-many (WORM) protection. It also discusses AWS methods for data validation and fixity checking that help ensure your data is available when you need it by using Amazon S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive.

Date: Wednesday, December 1
Time: 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM
Location: Level 4, Delfino 4006, Venetian
Speakers: Gayla Beasley, Marc Trimuschat

STG348: Optimizing Amazon EFS performance

Amazon EFS delivers highly available and highly durable file systems that are distributed across an unconstrained number of storage servers, enabling massively parallel access. This means that highly parallelized workloads can drive high levels of aggregate throughput and operations each second. This session shares best practices for using this distributed data storage design. Learn how to select the appropriate performance and throughput mode, and discover best practices for configuring clients, ingesting data, and monitoring performance.

Date: Tuesday, November 30
Time: 5:45 PM – 6:45 PM
Location:Level 5, Palazzo B, Venetian
Speakers: Priya Chakravarthi, Geert Jansen

STG315: Deep dive on Amazon S3 security and access management

Strong adherence to architecture best practices and proactive controls is the foundation of storage security and access controls. In this session, find out the best practices for data security in Amazon S3. Then, learn about the Amazon S3 security architecture fundamentals, and dive deep into the latest enhancements in usability and functionality. Finally, discover options for encryption, access control, security monitoring, auditing, and remediation.

Date: Friday, December 3
Time: 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Location:Level 5, Palazzo C, Venetian
Speakers: Meg Rose, Becky Weiss

PRO TIP: The maximum number of 60-minute sessions you can attend across the week is 24! They should make up the bulk of your plan and have the most seats too!

Chalk talks

Highly interactive content format with a smaller audience. They begin with a 10–15-minute lecture delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a 45–50-minute Q&A session with the audience. The goal is to foster a technical discussion around real-world architecture challenges.

STG329: Migrate business-to-business gateway traffic for real-time insights

Migrating your network of business partners can be challenging because you don’t want to disrupt existing integrations. Come to this session to learn how to migrate your business-to-business integrations to Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS using AWS Transfer Family, AWS Storage Gateway, and Amazon AppFlow. Use the transacted data as part of your AWS Cloud-based data lake and analytics platform for real-time insights into your business operations.

Date: Thursday, December 2
Time: 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM
Location: Level 1, Montrachet 2, Wynn
Speakers: Michael Ingardia, Smitha Sriram

PRO TIP: If you’re walking to another session across campus, account for at least 30 minutes to get there.

STG323: Building an Amazon S3 data lake to improve request performance

Many organizations are racing to become more data driven, and speed to insight is the differentiator. Join this chalk talk to learn how to provide a scalable, cost-effective, and interactive platform for querying large-scale datasets in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Discover how this eliminates the need for complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs to prepare data for analysis and delivers most results within seconds.

Date: Tuesday, November 30
Time: 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Location: Level 4, Lando 4206, Venetian
Speakers: Raja Sekhar, Oleg Lvovitch

Workshops

Two-hour, hands-on sessions where you work in teams to solve problems using AWS. Workshops organize attendees into small groups and provide scenarios to encourage interaction, giving you the opportunity to learn from and teach each other. Each workshop starts with a 10–15-minute lecture by the main speaker, and the rest of the time is spent working as a group. Come prepared with your laptop and willingness to learn! AWS will provide credits.

STG335: Launch and run Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file systems in minutes

Amazon FSx offers fully managed, like-for-like features of popular third-party file systems without requiring changes to code. In this workshop, explore Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, which provides the familiarity of popular ONTAP data access and management capabilities, with the scalability, agility, and security of AWS. FSx for ONTAP allows you to run high-performance file storage without changing how you manage your data. Walk through the setup and management of the service, key features like multi-protocol access and replication, and best practices to help simplify and accelerate your network-attached-storage migration journey to the cloud.

Date: Wednesday, December 1
Time: 12:15 PM – 2:30 PM
Location: Level 1, Summit 216, Caesars Forum
Speakers: Shrinath Kurdekar, Darryl Osborne

STG307: Redact data as you work using Amazon S3 Object Lambda

Amazon S3 Object Lambda works with your existing applications and allows you to add your own code so you can use AWS Lambda functions to automatically process and transform S3 data before returning it to an application. This enables different views of the same object depending on user identity—for example, restrict access to confidential information or disallow access to PII data. In this workshop, learn how to use S3 Object Lambda to modify the object during the GET so you no longer have to store multiple views of the same document.

Date: Monday, November 29
Time: 7:00 PM – 9:15 PM
Location: Level 1, Alliance 307, Caesars Forum
Speakers: Rafael Marcelino Koike, Lee Kear

Beyond sessions…..

AWS has a peculiar culture, and that is reflected in some of the quirky events outside of the educational content. Don’t forget to leave room on your calendar for:

Tatonka Challenge: Amazon’s chicken wing eating contest
Ping pong tournament
Broomball
Fun runs
LGBTQ+ happy hour
Time to explore our partner expo, including the AWS Village and hundreds of AWS partners there to help you learn more about how their solution can benefit your business.
Meetings with your professional network. Let people know you’ll be at re:Invent through LinkedIn and ensure you’re taking advantage of the entire cloud computing industry being in the same city!

Can’t make it to Las Vegas? Join us virtually for free.

If you can’t make it to Las Vegas this year, you can register to virtually attend our live keynotes and leadership sessions for free. You’ll also have the opportunity to view breakout sessions on demand. And AWS Training and Certification is offering digital training, exam readiness, and many more resources virtually. Virtual registration is included for all in-person attendees. Register now.

Don’t forget to regularly check back to our channel for recaps of all re:Invent sessions after the event, and be sure to follow our AWS Storage Twitter account for the latest and greatest in cloud storage.