Super Powers: AWS re:Invent 2016
Amazon knows how to throw a party. They hired the best DJ in the world, literally — Martin Garrix. The re:Invent Party was an experience I’ll never forget. Walking in, you are handed an activity map, showing the locations of the digital lounge, beer garden, dance floor, and play zone including a laser dome, ball pit, bubble soccer, climbing wall, and a labyrinth. But once I got to the DJ area, I was mesmerized. I stood in the crowd and soaked in the music, the lights, and the special effects. It was truly a performance. Even though I traveled alone and didn’t know anyone there, I felt connected, surrounded by thousands of other like minded people celebrating at this amazing event. AWS CEO Andy Jassy captured the sentiment best saying simply “it is awesome to be here.”
The conference was sold out at 32,000 attendees and occupied most of the Venetian and the Mirage resorts. Everywhere you went it seemed like Las Vegas was invaded by swarms of cloud enthusiasts all wearing the black and blue AWS hoodie given to us on our first day. Fredric Paul from New Relic put it well saying “The whole event has the palpable buzz of a celebration of a successful, growing industry that feels like it’s on the right side of history.”
The theme of Andy Jassy’s keynote was that AWS gives you super powers, and I think it’s true. You have access to essentially infinite resources. As a single developer you can build something over the weekend that you can deploy globally, that can auto scale to handle any amount of volume, store any amount of data, and initially cost next to nothing. Want to cut your teeth on a 128 CPU server with 2TB of memory? Spin it up right now, it’s yours for $13.34 per hour. Where else would most of us ever even have access to a machine like that? How about a fleet of them on the spot market for up to 90% off? Need to accumulate 100GB of storage per day? No problem, write it out to S3 for just $0.03 per GB per month, and know you’ll never run out of storage space. Werner Vogels, CTO of AWS put it this way — “One of the things the cloud has done is democratize access to technology power.” Just knowing that I can affordably access any resources I need challenges me to tackle something of scale.
Better yet, as Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, astutely pointed out, “you don’t get points for using servers, you only get points for serving users”. With serverless architecture, you can put together entire solutions on inherently scalable building blocks that can serve millions of users, but only cost as much as a Starbucks coffee until it starts to get some traction. The cloud really has given us super powers.
Jassy wrapped up his keynote with a few words on the next 10 years. Because AWS has grown so substantially in its first 10 years, would the the next 10 will have less invention? “I believe the next 10 years will have markedly more innovation,” Jassy said. Apparently, the cloud is just getting started. Instead of debating wheather companies would use the cloud or not, Jassy said “They will spend all their time using the cloud and its massive capabilities to build new business that we never imagined before.” He continued saying “This is a world that I want to live in. And this is a world that I think is very exciting to everyone in this room.” I had a blast at re:Invent, and left pumped up and ready to go build something.
