Serverless containers at AWS re:Invent 2023

AWS re:Invent is the learning conference hosted by AWS for the global cloud computing community. This year the Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and the AWS Fargate teams share their best practices and tips to help you increase productivity, optimize your costs, and amplify business agility. Join us in Las Vegas from November 27 through December 1.

Come by the Amazon ECS kiosk in the Expo Hall or the AWS Modern Application and Open Source Zone to ask our experts questions about building modern applications on AWS, watch demonstrations, and meet with our open source teams. Stop by, say hello, have fun, grab a snack, and win prizes from the claw machine!

Sessions to attend

As in previous 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.

Breakout sessions

CON205 | Supercharge your business applications with Amazon ECS
(Nov 27, 4:00 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Summit 214)

Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it simpler to run highly secure, reliable, and scalable containers. Join Nick Coult, GM of Amazon ECS, to hear about how building with Amazon ECS can supercharge your critical business applications. Learn about the most recent advancements in Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate that can help you more quickly achieve your modernization goals. Also, find out how United Airlines transitioned from monolithic applications to microservices with Amazon ECS to modernize their applications and drive remarkable results.

CON320 | Building for the future with AWS serverless services
(Nov 29, 1:00 pm, Wynn, Level 1, Lafite 4)

AWS serverless services help organizations accelerate their path from idea to production, allowing them to build and run modern applications at scale, all while lowering costs and driving agility. Join Holly Mesrobian, VP of Serverless Compute at AWS, to hear about the innovations AWS is making with serverless compute and containers to help organizations achieve superior outcomes for their business. Learn about new advancements and recent launches in AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Step Functions, Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate, and more. Understand how organizations can take advantage of the operational excellence of AWS to achieve their modernization goals quicker.

CON209 | Optimizing for cost and performance with AWS App Runner
(Nov 30, 4:00 pm, Wynn, Level 1, Lafite 9)

Compute cost is a common consideration when organizations evaluate where and how to deploy their workloads. This session showcases how you can lower your total cost of ownership and improve agility for your applications with the fully managed capabilities of AWS App Runner. This session covers automatic scaling, continuous deployments, and managed runtime versions. Get concrete examples of how AWS App Runner can deploy from code, manage infrastructure, and reduce infrastructure overhead. Additionally, receive expert guidance on performance tuning with AWS App Runner, helping your applications run efficiently.

CON303 | Deploy gen AI apps efficiently at scale with serverless containers
(Nov 27, 5:30 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Forum 113)

More and more, organizations are looking to start deploying LLM models to solve for a variety of business use cases. In this session, review the various infrastructure options and integrations that can help you deploy LLM models using Amazon ECS: CPU inference, Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate, accelerated inference with GPU and Inf1, Amazon ECS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and associated storage and networking options.

CON307 | Reducing AWS Fargate startup times by lazily loading container images
(Nov 28, 11:00 am, Mandalay Bay, Level 3, South, Jasmine H)

This session dives deep into Seekable OCI (SOCI). Learn how, by using SOCI indexes with AWS Fargate, you can dramatically reduce the time taken to launch Amazon ECS tasks. Hear about SOCI best practices, learn how to verify that you are using SOCI for the right workloads, and consider different ways to automate the creation of a SOCI index for existing OCI container images.

CON313 | Deploying multi-tenant SaaS applications on Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate
(Nov 27, 2:30 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Forum 121)

There is a growing trend to build SaaS solutions on Amazon ECS. Developing multi-tenant SaaS applications requires addressing multiple concerns including tenant isolation, tenant onboarding, tenant-specific metering, monitoring, and other SaaS aspects. In this session, explore how to manage multi-tenancy aspects when deploying solutions on AWS Fargate.

CON315 | Advancements in storage options for deploying data-aware apps at scale
(Nov 30, 2:00 pm, MGM Grand, Level 1, Grand 120)

As organizations look to broadly adopt containers for their compute, some workloads, such as big data and ETL jobs, need to fetch existing data, perform processing, and store this processed data for downstream use. To maximize compute efficiency, these workloads require storage that supports high transaction volumes and throughput. In this session, take a deep look at running data processing and storage-intensive workloads at scale without needing to worry about managing the underlying storage.far

CON318 | Boosting efficiency: How to realize 70% cost reduction with AWS Fargate
(Nov 28, 2:30 pm, Mandalay Bay, Level 3, South, South Seas E)

In this session, discover how a leading enterprise SaaS company, using AWS Fargate and AWS Graviton, transformed their data-intensive grid service. Learn how they achieved 70% cost reduction within 6 months, grow peak traffic from 1,000 RPS to 50,000 RPS, and increase deployment velocity from once weekly to twice daily using AWS CodePipeline. Explore their cell-based architecture strategies for improved scalability and efficiency.

CON322 | Reducing TCO and downtime by migrating to AWS Fargate
(Nov 29, 5:30 pm, Wynn, Level 1, Lafite 4)

Many companies, including large financial services organizations, are in the midst of cloud-enabled innovation through large-scale application modernization. These companies are often looking to lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) without compromising on their applications’ scalability, security, or operational efficiency. In this session, explore various pathways, such as AWS Fargate, that complex organizations utilize to migrate to serverless containers in a phased manner, while progressively reducing their cost burden. Learn about the key architectural decisions and best practices that can be used to successfully reduce overall costs in a highly regulated environment.

CON325 | Securing containerized workloads on Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate
(Nov 30, 11:30 am, Wynn, Level 1, Lafleur 2)

This session provides an overview of using Amazon ECS integrations with the AWS Cloud, using AWS security services, and the benefits of AWS Fargate’s single-tenancy architecture, to help you securely run containerized workloads. Dive deep into AWS Fargate’s security considerations and discover ways to improve your security posture against potential threats and events using AWS Fargate’s latest features.

CON401 | Deep dive into Amazon ECS resilience and availability
(Nov 29, 9:30 am, Mandalay Bay, Level 1, North, Islander G)

Every application architecture relies on underlying infrastructure, and many choose Amazon ECS as the foundation to build upon. Do you know how Amazon ECS is built? What design considerations are taken while building the service? How Amazon ECS can help you minimize an outage? In this session, learn how Amazon ECS can help you address your requirements for running resilient and reliable applications in the cloud. Dive deep into how Amazon ECS service architecture, design, and operational practices provide a secure and resilient foundation for your applications.

ENT212 | How Carrier Global is saving 40% with Windows containers on AWS
(Nov 30, 12:30 pm, MGM Grand, Level 3, Chairmans 370)
In this session, learn how Carrier Global used AWS technologies to transform legacy .NET code into a modern, event-driven application without refactoring. Learn how Windows containers on Amazon ECS were used to enable the architectural modernization and improve agility for feature delivery. Also learn how Carrier Global used various AWS services and features to reduce costs to run their Windows application by 40% and improve scaling performance by 70%.

Chalk talks

CON314 | Accelerating modern application development with Amazon ECS
(Nov 28, 2:30 pm, MGM Grand, Level 3, 301 | Dec 1, 10:30 am, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Forum 126)

Building architecture based on best practices helps organizations build performant, cost-efficient, and secure applications. This chalk talk provides insights into Amazon ECS best practices grounded in the AWS Well-Architected Tool Framework. After reviewing the essential best practices of each pillar, see how these best practices are actually applied to Amazon ECS workloads via whiteboarding examples.

CON316 | Amazon ECS auto scaling deep dive
(Nov 27, 2:30 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Forum 104 | Nov 29, 7:000 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Forum 123)

Auto scaling is a powerful function of Amazon ECS that provides the ability to increase or decrease the desired count of tasks in your Amazon ECS service automatically. In this chalk talk, learn about auto scaling mechanisms of Amazon ECS, like capacity providers and Amazon ECS Service Auto Scaling, including target tracking and step scaling, for Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate. Hear about actual use cases that highlight Amazon ECS auto scaling options with various metrics specific to different workloads.

CON317 | Amazon ECS networking deep dive
(Nov 29, 12:00 pm, MGM Grand, Level 3, Premier 320)

In this chalk talk, dive deep into networking mechanisms of Amazon ECS including different network modes and networking between Amazon ECS services using Amazon ECS Service Connect and Amazon ECS service discovery. Hear real-world use cases and common issues like IP exhaustion and different ways to solve for it by using ENI trunking and secondary CIDRs using Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate with Amazon ECS. This talk also explores implementing connectivity using AWS PrivateLink and its benefits.

CON319 | Building data pipelines for generative AI with AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda
(Nov 29, 10:00 am, MGM Grand, Level 3, 304)

With generative AI applications gaining more popularity, real-time data and scalable compute capacity have become the core of building foundation models and drive rapid advancement for businesses across industries. This chalk talk focuses on data and compute specifically across containers, serverless, and integration services. Explore use cases and how to effectively utilize serverless and container service offerings to build next-generation applications. Hear about practical use cases and see how different patterns, such as event-driven architectures and serverless stream processing, and Amazon EMR can greatly simplify and automate operations of your applications.

CON321 | Migrating containerized workloads to AWS Fargate
(Nov 28, 1:00 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Summit 221)

AWS Fargate helps organizations reduce the operational burden of deploying and monitoring their container workloads so they can focus on building applications and running their businesses. In this chalk talk, explore design considerations for migrating workloads from Amazon EC2 to AWS Fargate serverless compute running on Amazon ECS.

CON323 | Implementing observability for AWS Fargate serverless applications
(Nov 28, 4:00 pm, MGM Grand, Level 3, Premier 320)

As containerized workloads on AWS Fargate scale, maintaining effective observability becomes increasingly challenging. In this chalk talk, consider strategies and best practices for scaling observability with AWS Fargate deployments. Explore approaches for how to manage monitoring and logging at scale, including optimizing metric collection, log aggregation, and analysis. Dive into container-centric monitoring techniques, efficient log management, and how you can utilize AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS Lambda, and AWS Glue.

CON336 | From zero to production-ready apps in minutes using AWS App Runner
(Nov 30, 3:30 pm, Mandalay Bay, Level 1, North, South Pacific D)

Learn how to transform your existing applications into production-ready deployments on AWS App Runner within minutes. This chalk talk guides you through the seamless process of containerization and deployment while adhering to best practices in deployment strategies, network management, and secure handling of your secrets and configurations. Discover how AWS App Runner empowers you to effortlessly modernize your applications and harness the full potential of AWS Cloud infrastructure, reducing time to market and operational overhead. Join us to accelerate your journey from zero to production-ready applications with AWS App Runner.

CON407 | Deployment best practices for Amazon ECS services
(Nov 28, 1:00 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Academy 411)

Organizations increasingly run their applications as containerized microservices using Amazon ECS services. This chalk talk focuses on sharing best practices to safely and quickly roll out new application versions with Amazon ECS. The discussion includes the various tools you can use for Amazon ECS deployments (e.g., AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Terraform, AWS Command Line Interface [AWS CLI], and AWS Management Console) and best practices for safeguards you can use depending on the application type (load balanced or event driven) and infrastructure provider (Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate).

CON408 | Optimize workloads for speed and cost using Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate
(Nov 28, 5:30 pm, Wynn, Level 1, Latour 5 | Nov 29, 4:30 pm, Wynn, Level 1, Montrachet 1)

AWS Fargate is trusted to run mission-critical workloads around the globe and provides an array of features to help optimize and tune its serverless container workloads. Join this chalk talk to hear how to use new capabilities such as lazy loading of images with SOCI, right-sizing containers through AWS Compute Optimizer, using the alternative compression mechanism ZSTD, and more.

Workshops

CON201 | Unlock generative AI potential with Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate
(Nov 29, 3:00 pm, MGM Grand, Level 3, Premier 311)

Generative AI has the potential to impact multiple aspects of your digital business. In this workshop, learn how to combine the power of AWS generative AI services with serverless container services to build sample applications from scratch. The approach taught in this workshop can be used to add intelligent search and discovery capabilities to a wide range of unstructured data, such as application logs, documents, or customer notes. You must bring your laptop to participate.

CON202 | AWS Fargate or Amazon EC2: Which launch type should I be using?
(Nov 27, 5:00 pm, MGM – Grand 117 | Nov 29, 12:00 pm, Venetian, Level 3, Lido 3006 | Nov 30, 11:30 am, Mandalay Bay, Breakers I)

Many organizations choose AWS Fargate for its simplicity and ease of use because it removes the operational overhead of managing Amazon EC2 instances. However, some users ask how moving to AWS Fargate affects the workload. In this workshop, explore the CPU, memory request, and limit settings on Amazon EC2 compared to AWS Fargate to help determine the right launch type for your workload. Learn the difference in behavior when a workload operates outside the requested resources. Dive deep by simulating real-world application behavior through synthetic load generation. You must bring your laptop to participate.

CON304 | Exploring service discovery options with Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate
(Nov 27, 2:00 pm, Wynn, Upper Level, Cristal 1)

Service discovery plays a crucial role in building resilient and scalable microservices on AWS Fargate. Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate offers multiple service discovery options, each with its own unique features and trade-offs. In this workshop, dive deep into the various service discovery options available, which provide a comparative analysis to help you make informed decisions. Explore Amazon ECS Service Connect, AWS Cloud Map, and Application Load Balancer, considering their benefits, limitations, and use cases. Through practical examples and best practices, learn how different service discovery options can simplify the management of dynamic and containerized environments. You must bring your laptop to participate.

CON403 | Seekable OCI (SOCI) for lazy loading container images with Amazon ECS
(Nov 28, 2:00 pm, MGM Grand, Level 1, Grand 123)

Seekable OCI (SOCI) is a technology open-sourced by AWS that enables containers to launch faster by lazily loading the container image. In this workshop, get hands-on with SOCI. Learn how to create SOCI indexes for existing container images and how index generation can be automated in the cloud. Then, practice deploying workloads to Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate, considering how launch times are reduced by lazily loading container images. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Builder’s sessions

CON301 | Build cost-optimized workloads on Amazon ECS
(Nov 27, 2:30 pm, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Alliance 315 | Nov 29, 10:30 AM, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Alliance 311 | Nov 30, 1:00 PM, MGM, 350 | Nov 30, 3:30 PM, MGM, 353)

Optimizing for cost is a key consideration when designing or improving workloads. In this builders’ session, explore how to gain granular billing visibility on Amazon ECS, right-size workloads, and use auto scaling, AWS Graviton, and Spot Instances to optimize costs further. This session is applicable to builders whose organizations are just beginning their Amazon ECS journeys as well as those who are already using Amazon ECS workloads at a production level. This is a hands-on session intended to empower you to apply these concepts to your workloads. You must bring your laptop to participate.

CON324 | Architecting Amazon ECS workloads for data protection & compliance
(Nov 27, 2:30 pm, MGM Grand, Level 1, Terrace 151 | Nov 28, 3:30 pm, Mandalay Bay, Surf A | Nov 29, 4:30 pm, Wynn, Level 1, Latour 7 | Dec 1, 9:00 am, Caesars Forum, Level 1, Academy 416)

Many organizations running containerized workloads need to ensure they are meeting stringent data protection and compliance requirements, including those pertaining to the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules for securing protected health information (PHI) data. This builders’ session focuses on how you can use Amazon ECS and other AWS services to run container applications containing PHI. Learn best practices with Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, AWS Fargate, Amazon GuardDuty, and more. 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 are 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 2023! For more learning resources, visit Amazon ECS to get started.