Attended my first AWS re:invent conference. It was definitely a great experience. While the breakout sessions where okay, what I most enjoyed is the energy with 30k AWS enthusiasts in the building. And the re:play party was awesome – especially the performance by Martin Garrix.

On a more serious note, AWS continues to add new capabilities/services at a breathtaking speed and continues to build on its very dominant position in the Public Cloud space. Microsoft, Google and the rest have their work cut out to keep up. More important is, will they be able to match the developer following & enthusiasm that exists for AWS? Without that support not much can be attained. I still hold out hope that Google will continue to invest on their managed Kubernetes based Container platform, aligned more closely with open source technologies. Whether or not it is possible (or desired) to maintain cloud portability is a hard question to answer but one you should ponder before starting the journey. With the breadth of AWS services available it is often more easier to embrace them vs fighting it.

Some updates from reinvent…(and I definitely have missed a few others). For more details please go to the AWS site for the specific service. A few of the items below may be in preview mode as of this writing.

It was a great event with a lot of new features as usual. We (myself included) the fans of AWS were there cheering along. I am also a big fan of Google Cloud but have not spent the same amount of time on it, as I have on AWS. The one concern I have (and I could be wrong) is the cannibalizing of smaller vendors/products/opensource whenever AWS onboards a new service or the apparent disregard to the use of open source software when it is used to build new services (or I missed something). It is not clear to me how much AWS gives back to the open source community for non-AWS native source code. Regardless I hope I can make it back to AWS re:invent 2017 🙂