A perspective on AWS roadmap and selected recent announcements (primarily based on impressions from Re:Invent 2018, slightly updated in December 2019).

1. AWS re:Invented
December 2018 (Updated: December 2019)
Alex Glikson
Architect, SaaS Security

2. AWS re:Invented
2
(Managed)
Open source
Beyond public cloud
Beyond IaaS
Beyond software
EC2, S3 (2006)

3. AWS re:Invented
3
(Managed)
Open source
Beyond public cloud
Beyond IaaS
Beyond software
RDS
● mySQL, Postgres
EMR
● Hadoop, Spark
Elastic Beanstalk
● Django, Tomcat, etc
ElastiCache
● Redis, memcached
ES
● Elasticsearch
EKS
● Kubernetes
SageMaker
● Jupyter,TensorFlow
MSK
● Kafka
MCS
● Cassandra
EC2, S3 (2006)
Firmware, network, processors, accelerators

4. Beyond Software: Firmware (Nitro)
4

5. Beyond Software: Network
● 100 Gbit network (HPC, Gaming, etc)
5

6. Beyond Software: Processors
● ARM-based servers (Graviton, Graviton2)
○ Scale-out workloads: containerized microservices, web servers, development environments
○ per-vCPU performance improvements over the M5 instances:
■ HTTPS load balancing with Nginx: +24%
■ Memcached: +43% performance, at lower latency
■ X.264 video encoding: +26%
■ EDA simulation with Cadence Xcellium: +54%
6

7. Beyond Software: Bare Metal
7

8. Beyond Software: Accelerators
● AWS Inferentia: ML inference chip
○ AWS Inferentia will support the TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, PyTorch, as well as ONNX
○ https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/inferentia/
○ Each chip provides hundreds of TOPS (tera operations per second) of inference throughput
8

9. AWS re:Invented
9
(Managed)
Open source
Beyond public cloud
Beyond IaaS
Beyond software
Firmware, network, processors, accelerators
On-prem DC
Edge network
Home
IoT
Satellites
Robots
EC2, S3 (2006)
RDS
● mySQL, Postgres
EMR
● Hadoop, Spark
Elastic Beanstalk
● Django, Tomcat, etc
ElastiCache
● Redis, memcached
ES
● Elasticsearch
EKS
● Kubernetes
SageMaker
● Jupyter,TensorFlow
MSK
● Kafka
MCS
● Cassandra

10. Beyond Public Cloud: Outposts
● Extends AWS on-premises, fully managed. GA Dec 2019.
● VMware Cloud or native AWS (connects to closest AWS region control plane)
● EC2, EBS, ELB, single-tenant runtime services (RDS, EMR, ECS/EKS, etc)
○ NO “serverless” (regional) services (for now) - DynamoDB, Aurora, Kinesis, Lambda, etc
■ Opposite direction that the general trend. S3 will be available in 2020.
○ On-prem=reserved+dedicated?
■ These services are priced by EC2/EBS/network resources - not “pure” pay-per-use
10

11. Beyond Public Cloud: Edge Computing
● Develop in the cloud, run anywhere
○ IoT/network/home appliances (Greengrass)
○ Embedded systems (FreeRTOS)
○ DeepLens
○ RoboMaker
○ DeepRacer
○ Ground Station
○ Loca Zones, Wavelength
11

12. 12

13. AWS re:Invented
13
(Managed)
Open source
Beyond public cloud
Beyond IaaS
Beyond software
Firmware, network, processors, accelerators
On-prem DC
Edge network
Home
IoT
Satellites
Robots
Serverless-First
(PaaS)
AI/ML
(PaaS, SaaS)
EC2, S3 (2006)
RDS
● mySQL, Postgres
EMR
● Hadoop, Spark
Elastic Beanstalk
● Django, Tomcat, etc
ElastiCache
● Redis, memcached
ES
● Elasticsearch
EKS
● Kubernetes
SageMaker
● Jupyter,TensorFlow
MSK
● Kafka
MCS
● Cassandra

14. Beyond IaaS: Serverless-first
● After 10+ years, PaaS paradigm finally becomes mainstream
○ Motivation:
■ The more application stack layers you
delegate to a 3rd party (as a managed
service), the more you can focus on
delivering value (business logic)
○ Hypothesis:
■ Majority of newly developed applications
will be “serverless” (PaaS, FaaS, SaaS)
● Compute, Workflows, Data
14

15. Beyond IaaS: Serverless-first - Compute, Workflows
● Lambda
○ IDE integration, Layers, Custom runtimes, Provisioned concurrency, Firecracker
○ WebSockets (API Gateway), Notifications for async invocation (“destinations”)
● EKS on Fargate
● AppSync (GraphQL proxy)
○ “Resolvers” for DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Aurora, Lambda, etc; pipeline
● Step functions (‘state machine as a service’)
○ Seamless integration with Lambda, DynamoDB, Batch, Fargate, SNS, SQS, Glue, SageMaker
○ Transaction vs high-throughput
● Glue (ETL)
○ Serverless Spark jobs, Python jobs (preprocessing)
15

16. Beyond IaaS: Serverless-first - Data
● Glacier Deep Archive
○ Data can be retrieved within 12 hours
○ $1.01 per TB-mo
● FSx for Windows
● FSx for Lustre
● Aurora Serverless, Data API
● DynamoDB transactions, auto-scaling
● Timestream (time-series DB)
● Blockchain (Quantum Ledger Database)
16

17. Beyond IaaS: AI/ML
● Hardware
○ EC2 P3dn Instances
○ .
○ .
○ .
○ Elastic Inference (GPUs on-demand)
○ Inferentia chip
17

18. Beyond IaaS: AI/ML
● SageMaker
○ Neo, optimized TensorFlow, Dynamic Training (MxNet)
○ RL (incl. RoboMaker, DeepRacer applications)
○ Marketplace
○ Ground Truth (labeling, Mechanical Turk)
● ML-powerd SaaS (with pay-per-use APIs):
○ Comprehend Medical, Textract
○ Personalize, Forecast
○ Predictive Auto-Scaling, Compute Optimizer
18

19. AWS re:Invented
19
(Managed)
Open source
Beyond public cloud
Beyond IaaS
Beyond software
Firmware, network, processors, accelerators
On-prem DC
Edge network
Home
IoT
Satellites
Robots
Serverless-First
(PaaS)
AI/ML
(PaaS, SaaS)
EC2, S3 (2006)
RDS
● mySQL, Postgres
EMR
● Hadoop, Spark
Elastic Beanstalk
● Django, Tomcat, etc
ElastiCache
● Redis, memcached
ES
● Elasticsearch
EKS
● Kubernetes
SageMaker
● Jupyter,TensorFlow
MSK
● Kafka
MCS
● Cassandra