5 Things that I Loved About AWS Summit Sydney 2018
Wow, what a Summit!
The move to Darling Harbour really enabled a massive uptick in the number of people attending, and the talks and interactions with customers were amazing. It came round really quickly and the areas that really stood out for me were more focused on other things that happened during the conference than the technical announcements this year – some very close to home! Here are my top five:
1. Contino announce Nebulr acquisition
Well it's a phenomenal match, more can be read about the acquisition here. It's exciting news, and really allows Contino to accelerate the customer interactions we are having in region and look to grow the work we do with AWS as well.
2. NAB reveal support training of Australian engineers
The announcement around the new NAB guild to support the training of thousands of engineers in the use of cloud, (find out more here). With mass adoption of cloud now part of every company, it is approaches such as this that will ensure that teams have the appropriate skills to support nearly all applications living on cloud platforms in the future.
3. AWS customers show how they are using AI and ML
Finding about new uses of AI and machine learning, and the different uses customers are coming up with to support their businesses, during this first AWS Innovation Day I found extremely interesting.
The move to verbally interact with computer is already happening, with verbal interaction points already being in a large number of houses via Alexa and Echo. I like the idea of being able to walk round the house interacting with a virtual personal assistant that then can leave the premises with you, via your personal device.
4. AWS announce new services
These include:
- The new capabilities through the AWS and VMware partnership will be available in Q3 of 2018, I ran into Kit Colbert (VMware’s CTO of Cloud Platform) and had a chat with him around the capability, and demand globally seems to be very high.
- AWS Secrets Manager, this service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets.
- Machine Learning and AI: these tools simply goes from strength to strength. For instance, a video can now be run through the Amazon Rekognition, which can automatically produce a video of a specifically-selected person, called creating a face collection. AWS has also updated its Deep Learning AMI’s to be optimised for TensorFlow 1.7 for faster training.
5. How to keep up with technology
Speaking in front of around 1200 people, myself and co-speaker (Yun Zhi Lin) shared our combined 35 years of tech experience to reveal how much continuous learning is involved in keeping pace with the technology industry.
A quote from the keynote sums up why we should embrace the technology changes to ensure that we stay relevant:
“Technology is an ENABLER. Embrace the change, be creative, make it HUMAN. Rapid Change = Opportunity. Think DIFFERENT. Think BIG. We are only limited by our own IMAGINATION’.
Please reach out if you want to follow up with me to discuss how enable the transformation journey that your business must take!
