Up and Running with Apache MXNet Deep Learning on AWS

Deep Learning is a subset of Machine Learning that extends the concept of Artificial Neural Networks to uncover hidden patterns in unstructured datasets.

Join us to learn how to spin up a pre-built, Graphics Processing Units enabled Data Science environment using the AWS Deep Learning Amazon Machine Image, in just a few minutes. We will write a deep learning program with MXNet in a few lines of codes, using Python and the R programming languages. We will train the deep learning models on one, then multiple GPUs. Finally, we will discuss and compare deep and traditional Machine Learning models such as Support Vector Machines or Random Forest, and XGboost.

Breakthrough results can be seen in industry applications such as computer vision, robotics, healthcare, security, retail, and more. Apache MXNet is a fully-featured, flexibly-programmable and ultra-scalable deep learning framework supporting state-of-the-art deep models including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and long short-term memory networks (LSTMs). MXNet enables Data Scientists, Programmers, and Engineers to train and deploy deep models at scale, using their favorite language (Python, R, Go, Matlab, Scala, C++, more), with the same fast performance.

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Amazon Redshift Day  

9:30AM-10:00AM | Check-In

10:00AM-11:00AM | Getting Started with Amazon Redshift: Traditional data warehouses become expensive and slow down as the volume of your data grows. Amazon Redshift is a fast, petabyte-scale data warehouse that makes it easy to analyze all of your data using existing business intelligence tools for 1/10th the traditional cost. This session will provide an introduction to Amazon Redshift and cover the essentials you need to deploy your data warehouse in the cloud so that you can achieve faster analytics and save costs. We’ll also cover the recently announced Redshift Spectrum, which allows you to query unstructured data directly from Amazon S3. Level: 200

11:00AM-12:00PM | Best Practices for Migrating your Data Warehouse to Amazon Redshift: You can gain substantially more business insights and save costs by migrating your existing data warehouse to Amazon Redshift. This session will cover the key benefits of migrating to Amazon Redshift, migration strategies, and tools and resources that can help you in the process. We’ll learn about AWS Database Migration Service and AWS Schema Migration Tool, which were recently enhanced to import data from six common data warehouse platforms. Level: 200

12:00PM-1:00PM | Lunch (Lunch will be provided)

1:00PM-2:00PM | Deep Dive on Amazon Redshift: Analyzing big data quickly and efficiently requires a data warehouse optimized to handle and scale for large datasets. Amazon Redshift is a fast, petabyte-scale data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze big data for a fraction of the cost of traditional data warehouses. In this session, we take an in-depth look at data warehousing with Amazon Redshift for big data analytics. We cover best practices to take advantage of Amazon Redshift's columnar technology and parallel processing capabilities to deliver high throughput and query performance. We also discuss how to design optimal schemas, load data efficiently, and use work load management. Level: 300

2:00PM-3:00PM | Streaming Data Analytics with Amazon Redshift and Kinesis Firehose: Evolving your analytics from batch processing to real-time processing can have a major business impact, but ingesting streaming data into your data warehouse requires building complex streaming data pipelines. Amazon Kinesis Firehose solves this problem by making it easy to transform and load streaming data into Amazon Redshift so that you can use existing analytics and business intelligence tools to extract information in near real-time and respond promptly. In this session, we will dive deep using Amazon Kinesis Firehose to load streaming data into Amazon Redshift reliably, scalably, and cost-effectively. Level: 200

3:15PM-5:30PM | Hands-on Lab: Amazon Redshift: This self-paced enables you to test-drive Amazon Redshift and gain practical experience working with it. In this lab, you will learn how to configure and deploy a Redshift cluster, loading data into it, and query your data using an external SQL client. Level: 200

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NoSQL Day

9:30AM-10:00AM | Check-In

10:00AM-11:00AM | Deep Dive on Amazon DynamoDB: Explore Amazon DynamoDB capabilities and benefits in detail and learn how to get the most out of your DynamoDB database. We go over best practices for schema design with DynamoDB across multiple use cases, including gaming, IoT, and others. We explore designing efficient indexes, scanning, and querying, and go into detail on a number of recently released features, including DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), DynamoDB Time-to-Live, and more. We also provide lessons learned from operating DynamoDB at scale, including provisioning DynamoDB for IoT. Level 200

11:00AM-11:30PM | Accelerating DynamoDB with DAX: Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to a 10x performance improvement – from milliseconds to microseconds – even at millions of requests per second. DAX does all the heavy lifting required to add in-memory acceleration to your DynamoDB tables, without requiring developers to manage cache invalidation, data population, or cluster management. Level: 200

11:30AM-12:00PM | Guest presentation: Amazon Fresh: Learn how the Amazon Fresh team used DynamoDB and other AWS services to quickly develop a new web application that provides customers a self-serve UI to request 1-click tote pickup without having to call customer service. Level 200

12:00PM-1:00PM | Lunch (Lunch will be provided)

1:00AM-2:30PM | Unleash the Power of Redis with Amazon ElastiCache: Redis has exploded in popularity to become the de-facto standard for in-memory key-value store used by customers for fast data storage. In this talk, we will discuss how to leverage Redis to achieve blazing fast performance in a variety of use cases – from database caching, to messaging, queuing, IoT and more. Both high-level architecture considerations and implementation (with code snippets) will be covered. We will also see how using Amazon ElastiCache makes it easy to power your Redis workloads in a robust, secure and fully managed way.Level 200 (requires understanding of database services)

2:45PM-5:00PM | Hands-on Lab: Amazon ElastiCache: In this lab you will create an Amazon ElastiCache Redis node and connect to it from an Amazon EC2 instance to run commands. You will then clean up your resources by deleting the stack. By the end of this lab, you will be able to create an Amazon ElastiCache cluster, authorize access to your Amazon ElastiCache cluster, connect to your Amazon ElastiCache cluster and run commands and delate an Amazon ElastiCache cluster. Level 200

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Amazon RDS Day

9:30AM-10:00AM | Check-In

10:00AM-11:00AM | Introduction to Amazon Relational Database Service: Amazon RDS allows you to launch an optimally configured, secure and highly available database with just a few clicks. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you to focus on your applications and business. We’ll discuss Amazon RDS fundamentals, learn about the seven available database engines, and examine customer success stories. Level 100

11:00AM-12:00PM | What’s New in Amazon Aurora: It’s been an exciting year for Amazon Aurora, the database with MySQL-compatible and PostgreSQL-compatible database engines. Amazon Aurora combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. In this deep dive session, we’ll discuss best practices and explore new features, including high availability options, new integrations with AWS services, and the performance management with Amazon RDS Performance Insights. Level 300

12:00PM-1:00PM | Lunch (Lunch will be provided)

1:00PM-2:00PM | What’s New in Amazon RDS for Open-Source and Commercial Databases: In the past year, Amazon RDS has continued to expand functionality, scalability, availability and ease of use for all supported database engines: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. We’ll take a close look at RDS use cases and new capabilities, splitting the time between open-source and commercial database engines. Level 300

2:00PM-3:00 PM | Migrating to Amazon RDS with Database Migration Service: Database migration doesn’t need to be difficult or time-consuming. Learn how AWS Database Migration Service provides an easy, secure migration from on-premises and Amazon EC2 environments to Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB and EC2 databases, with minimal-downtime. We’ll also see how the AWS Schema Conversion Tool automatically converts your schema and a majority of the custom code, so you can get up and running in the cloud quickly and inexpensively. We’ll discuss alternative data migration strategies for special use cases. Level 200

3:15PM-5:30PM | Hands-on Lab: Amazon Aurora and AWS Database Migration Service: This guided lab will give you hands-on experience with Amazon Aurora and AWS Database Migration Service. You will go through the basic steps to create an Amazon Aurora instance and connect to it. You will also use AWS Database Migration Service to migrate a MySQL Database instance on Amazon EC2 to Amazon Aurora. Level 200

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Introduction to AWS Compute Day  

9:30AM-10:00AM | Check-In (Breakfast will be provided)

10:00AM-11:00AM | Introduction on Amazon EC2: Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing and provides you with complete control of your computing resources. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. In this session, we will take you on a journey, starting with the basics of key management and security groups and ending with an explanation of Auto Scaling and how you can use it to match capacity and costs to demand using dynamic policies. We will also discuss tools and best practices that will help you build failure resilient applications that take advantage of the scale and robustness of AWS regions. Level 200

11:00AM-Noon | Getting the most Bang for your Buck with #EC2 #Winning: Amazon EC2 provides you with the flexibility to cost optimize your computing portfolio through purchasing models that fit your business needs. With the flexibility of mix-and-match purchasing models, you can grow your compute capacity and throughput and enable new types of cloud computing applications with the lowest TCO. In this session, we will explore combining pay-as-you-go (On-Demand), reserve ahead of time for discounts (Reserved), and high-discount spare capacity (Spot) purchasing models to optimize costs while maintaining high performance and availability for your applications. Common application examples will be used to demonstrate how to best combine EC2’s purchasing models. You will leave the session with best practices you can immediately apply to your application portfolio. Level 200

Noon-1:00PM | Lunch Break

1:00PM-2:00PM| Introduction to Amazon EC2 Spot: Amazon EC2 Spot instances provide acceleration, scale, and deep cost savings to run time-critical, hyper-scale workloads for rapid data analysis. In this session,you will learn best practices on how to scale big data workloads as well as process, store, and analyze big data securely and cost effectively. Lunch will be provided. Level 300

2:00PM-3:00PM | Deep Dive on Amazon EC2 Systems Manager: Whether you are a traditional enterprise exploring migrating workloads to the cloud or are already “all-in” on AWS, performing common tasks of inventory collection, OS patch management, and image creation at scale is increasingly complicated in hybrid infrastructure environments. Amazon EC2 Systems Manager allows you to perform automated configuration and ongoing management of your hybrid environment systems at scale. This session provides an overview of key EC2 Systems Manager capabilities that help you define and track system configurations, prevent drift, and maintain software compliance of your EC2 and on-premises configurations. We will also discuss common use cases for EC2 Systems Manager and give you a demonstration of a hybrid-cloud management scenario. Level 300

3:15PM-4:15PM | Introduction to Amazon Lightsail: Amazon Lightsail is the latest addition to the AWS family of compute services and the fastest way to get your next cloud server up and running. For a low price that starts at $5/month, Lightsail offers a bundle of resources and services that let you jumpstart your cloud project in a few clicks. The new, intuitive Lightsail console makes it simple to manage your virtual resources, letting you focus on code, not system administration. Come to this session and learn how Lightsail can get you started on AWS quickly and efficiently. Level 200

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AWS Backup and Recovery for Enterprise Organizations

Come see how Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage solutions are designed to deliver secured, scalable, and durable storage for businesses looking to achieve efficiency and scalability within backup and recovery environments, without the need for an on-premises infrastructure. AWS's broad range of storage solutions for backup and recovery are designed for many of your workloads today. This flexibility allows you to focus on your business' needs, and eliminates the challenges around figuring out what storage systems to purchase and pay for only what you need. AWS doesn't require capacity planning, purchasing capacity in advance, or any large up-front payments. You get the benefits of AWS storage solutions without the upfront investment and hassle of setting up and maintaining an on-premises system. AWS security certifications such as SOC1 allow you to remain compliant with your data. Standards such as AES 256, which enables encryption of data at rest, ensures no one can view your data.

AWS supports several methods for loading and retrieving data, including: the public Internet; a direct network connection with AWS Direct Connect; the AWS Import/Export service where AWS will import data into S3; and for backups of application data, the AWS Storage Gateway helps you backup your data to AWS. AWS storage solutions allow you to choose in which region your data resides to minimize latency and costs, as well as address regulatory requirements. You have complete control of your data. With 11 regions and a variety of availability zones, which spreads your data across designated AZs for more protection, you have flexibility for where your data is stored. Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier automatically replicate data across multiple data centers and are designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability. AWS storage solutions are designed to deliver robust data protection so your business never has to worry about where the data is.

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Amazon Container Day

10:00AM-11:00AM | Getting Started with Docker on AWS: AWS is an elastic, secure, flexible, and developer-centric ecosystem that serves as an ideal platform for Docker deployments. AWS offers the scalable infrastructure, APIs, and SDKs that integrate tightly into a development lifecycle and accentuate the benefits of the lightweight and portable containers that Docker offers to its users. This session familiarizes you with the benefits of containers, introduce Amazon EC2 Container Service, and demonstrates how to use Amazon ECS to run containerized applications at scale in production. Level 100

11:00AM-Noon | From Monolith to Microservices: Maintaining monolithic apps is a complex task, requiring developers to spend months learning the details of the system’s architecture and where a single change cause cascading failure. Microservices architecture de-couples monolithic systems, increasing agility and removing points of failure. In this session, we will explore the reasoning and concepts behind microservices and show how you can transform monolithic apps into microservices. We will discuss how containers simplify building microservices-based applications, and we will walk through a number of patterns used by our customers to run their microservices platforms. We will also dive deep into some of the challenges of running microservices, such as load balancing, service discovery, and secrets management, and we’ll see how Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) can help address them. Level 200

Noon-1:00PM | Lunch (Lunch will be provided)

1:00PM-2:00PM | Container Orchestration with Amazon ECS: As customers build and run production microservices architectures based on containers, having powerful tools to manage the placement and scheduling of these workloads is critical. Amazon ECS allows customers to focus on building their application and removes the need for managing the cluster management software entirely. This session will focus on the capabilities of the new ECS task placement engine, the built-in ECS schedulers, and explore how customers can build custom schedulers using the ECS event stream and Blox, a newly announced open source scheduling framework that gives developers additional choice and control in how they manage containers in production. Level 300

2:00PM-3:00PM | Continuous Delivery to Amazon ECS: Keeping consistent environments across your development, test, and production systems can be a complex task. In this session, we will explore how developers can build effective CICD workflows to manage their containerized code deployments using Amazon EC2 Container Service, Amazon EC2 Container Registry, and AWS CodeStar tools. We will walk through best practices for CICD archiectures used by our customers to deploy containers to AWS and we will also deep dive ino topics such as creating an accessible CICD platform and Blue-Green deployments. We'll also demo how you can easily use AWS to create a CICD pipeline and deploy containers on Amazon ECS. Level 300

3:00PM-3:30PM | Break (Snacks will be provided)

3:30PM-5:30PM | Workshop: Deploy a Deep Learning Framework on Amazon ECS: Deep learning is an implementation of machine learning that uses neural networks to solve difficult and complex problems, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and recommendations. Due to the availability of deep learning libraries and frameworks, developers have the ability to enhance the capabilities of their applications and projects. In this workshop, you learn how to build and deploy a powerful deep learning framework called MXNet on containers. The portability and resource management benefit of containers means developers can focus less on infrastructure and more on building. The labs start by demonstrating the automation capabilities of AWS CloudFormation to stand up core infrastructure; as an added bonus, you use Spot Fleet to leverage the cost benefits of using Spot Instances, especially for developer environments. Then, you walk through creating an MXNet container in Docker and deploying it with Amazon ECS. Finally, you walk through an image classification demo of MXNet to validate that everything is working as expected. Note: This workshop focuses on containerizing MXNet. The features of MXNet and capabilities of deep learning in general are vast, and there are recorded sessions from re:Invent that dive deeper on these topics. All you need to participate is a laptop and AWS account. Level 300

8 Things We Learned From Running BuzzFeed on Amazon ECS  

Containerization is everywhere now, and choosing an orchestration path (ECS, Kubernetes, Swarm etc) can be confusing. BuzzFeed will share what led them to picking ECS and have learnt along the way. A year and a half ago, BuzzFeed was feeling the pain of having a 10 year old monolithic web application with it taking days to deploy and validate each release. Switching to a service orientated architecture would address part of the problem, but also meant the deployment workflow must be be right too - it should be easy and enjoyable. During a week long “hack week” last year, BuzzFeed built a platform as a service on top of ECS. This has been a game changer - they now operate over 200 services and average more than 150 deploys per day. Sri Ray, Staff Site Reliability Engineer and Andrew Mulholland, Director of Engineering, Site Reliability at Buzzfeed will share their experiences from successfully using ECS at scale and how it's changed how they operate.

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Serverless Day

9:30AM-10:30AM | Building Serverless Web Applications: What if you could build a web application that could support true web-scale traffic without having to ever provision or manage a single server? In this session, you will learn how to build a serverless website that scales automatically using services like AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon S3. We will review several frameworks that can help you build serverless applications, such as the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM), Chalice, and ClaudiaJS. Level 200

10:30AM-12:30PM | [Workshop] Serverless Real-Time Data Processing for Unicorns: In this workshop you'll learn approaches for real-time data processing using serverless architectures. You’ll help Wild Rydes (www.wildrydes.com), the world’s leading unicorn transportation startup, build data processing infrastructure to enable its operations personnel to monitor the health of their unicorn fleet instantly. You’ll use services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Athena to accomplish this. Level 300

12:30PM-1:30PM | Lunch (Lunch will be provided)

1:30PM-2:30PM | Serverless Orchestration with AWS Step Functions: AWS Step Functions is a new, fully-managed service that makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Step Functions is a reliable way to connect and step through a series of AWS Lambda functions, so that you can build and run multi-step applications in a matter of minutes. This session shows how to use AWS Step Functions to create, run, and debug cloud state machines to execute parallel, sequential, and branching steps of your application, with automatic catch and retry conditions. Learn how easy it is to create Step Functions state machines and activities using CloudFormation Templates, and then start them with Amazon API Gateway. We share how customers are using AWS Step Functions to reliably orchestrate and scale multi-step applications such as order processing, report generation, and data transformation–all without managing any infrastructure. Level 300

2:30PM -3:30PM | Distributed Serverless Stack Tracing and Monitoring: When you’re running a large, multi-faceted serverless application with AWS Lambda, how can you effectively diagnose issues in your application’s performance? In this session, we’ll show you how to peek under the hood of your function executions so you can determine where performance issues are occurring in your serverless application. We’ll demonstrate a live demo of a new service, AWS X-Ray, which is a distributed tracing service that helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications. We’ll show you how you can use X-Ray to diagnose your serverless applications using dynamic stack tracing, call analysis, and the X-Ray service graph which visually depicts service calls made to your application. Level 400



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