Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service.

Amazon has launched a series of local Amazon Web Services summits across in key cities across the world. Capitalizing on the re:Invent conference in November of last year, the AWS summits are a great forum for local AWS users to learn about featured AWS services and meet partners exhibiting at the event itself.

The AWS Summit in San Francisco a number of days ago lived up to this expectation. Here are 5 insights from Amazon senior VP of web services Andy Jassy’s keynote, and the exhibition itself.

It’s all about the enterprise

Adoption of the public cloud by the enterprise was a key message through the introductory keynote.  In sharp contrast to the keynotes delivered in re:Invent in November, Andy Jassy emphasized the public cloud as part of an enterprise’s IT and cloud strategy as opposed to a complete alternative to on-premise and virtual private cloud.

Andy highlighted use cases of AWS services that the enterprise can use to both move workloads to the AWS cloud as well cooperate between on-premise and AWS environments.

Security = priority #1

Jassy stated that AWS is committed to providing a secure public cloud, highlighting the addition of advanced security controls, certifications and accreditations.

No doubt this was a direct message to enterprise level CIOs that are considering moving small variable workloads to the public cloud, but need to deal with security and compliance risks that run deep into their respective organizations.

Redshift, redshift, redshift

The keynote contained many use cases and examples of using AWS RedShift, a data warehousing and data analysis solution.

Based on an hourly pricing model, RedShift enables AWS customers to analyze large volumes of data with their existing business intelligence tools.  The RedShift use case was a common theme throughout Andy Jassy’s address, use cases delivered throughout the keynote, and breakout sessions. RedShift follows in the footsteps of enriched AWS services such as OpsWorks and Trusted Advisor.

Cost is still the driver for onboarding new business

Throughout the keynote Jassy championed many organic AWS services, as well as solutions provided through the AWS Partnership Network that enable companies to scale once on the AWS cloud.  Despite this, low cost is still king.

Just as Werner Vogel discussed cost savings in the beginning of the New York City keynote, Jassy emphasized that AWS lowered prices 31 times in the absence of competitive pressure to do so.  In line with the success of the Amazon.com model, Jassy implied that that AWS will continue to reduce prices.

Jassy also offered examples of customers reducing costs by using solutions beyond EC2, highlighting that Foursquare reduced their analytical cost by 50 percent with AWS.

Launch of the AWS Certification Program

Jassy also shared the launch of an AWS program that certifies solutions architects, SysOps Admin, and developers.

To qualify, applicants must complete an exam that covers both proficiency in AWS as well as general IT knowledge and experience.  The program should complement and reward AWS users who have championed both onboarding and scaling AWS within their organizations by mandating and regulating their skill sets throughout the career.

In other words DevOps and other AWS users can add AWS certification alongside experience and proficiency in code, such as Ruby and Python.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service designed for cloud users. Offering a business view into a company’s public cloud operations, Newvem actively tracks cloud health in order to help reveal and solve cloud irregularities related to cost, security, utilization and availability.  Follow Cameron at @cameronperon

The service, which has already been tested in beta by web startups such as Flipboard, big data stalwarts such as NASA, and massive streaming media service Netflix — an Amazon competitor — is available today in limited preview. It’s designed for companies with datasets in the hundreds of gigabytes to the petabyte range, and it’s intended to reduce the price of big data warehousing and analysis by an order of magnitude.

“Enterprises are tired of paying such high prices for their data warehouses and smaller companies can’t afford to analyze the vast amount of data they collect (often throwing away 95% of their data),” Amazon’s VP of database services, Raju Gulabani said in a statement.

With RedShift, Amazon promises to reduce data storage costs below $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions, it says. Amazon’s talking about data warehousing companies such as Teradata, but also about its own solutions, saying that RedShift is just 10 percent of the cost of existing Amazon Web Services solutions.

On-demand pricing starts, Amazon announced, will start at $0.85 per hour for a 2-terabyte data warehouse, which will scale linearly up to a petabyte. In other words, more data doesn’t mean a better deal. Customers who choose to purchase reserved instances to guarantee access get lower pricing: $0.228 per hour, which translates to under $1,000 per terabyte per year.

But it’s not just about the cost. It’s also about speed.

“Our internal tests have shown over 10 times performance improvement when compared to standard relational data warehouses.” Gulabani added. “Having the ability to quickly analyze petabytes of data at a low cost changes the game for our customers.”

Customers can buy in at the 2TB level — a single RedShift node — and scale up to one hundred 16TB nodes, a total of 1.6 petabytes. Amazon, of course, handles all provisioning, backup, and maintenance tasks. All data is continuously backed up to Amazon S3, the company said.

Amazon worked with data analytics technology company ParAccell to build the new solution. ParAccell enables high-performance analysis of massive datasets — more than a thousand JOINs in an SQL database, for example — and features real-time mid-query integration with Hadoop and other technologies.

It looks like the data storage and management industry just changed again.

Image credit: Star Wars