AWS re:Invent 2018: What Are the Best Sessions for Enterprise DevOps and Cloud?

Date: November 26–30
Location: Las Vegas!

AWS return to Las Vegas once again for their flagship re:Invent conference in November. Already the largest global cloud computing conference, this year’s iteration is set to be their biggest yet, with 50,000 attendees spread over seven venues.

There are a gazillion different sessions and workshops (OK, there are 2,000), so we’ve taken some time to look through the agenda, and have made some recommendations to make the most of your time on-site, aligning to the five core pillars of enterprise transformation that we use with our clients.

Each entry has a link to the sessions we’ve recommended in the Event Catalogue, which you can find here and access with your event login.

(Want to discuss how you can improve your DevOps and Cloud capability at re:Invent? You can schedule a meeting with our team onsite here: book a meeting!)

Cloud Platform Build & Migration

Contino helps enterprises build secure, scalable and cost effective ‘enterprise grade’ cloud platforms. We then help our clients migrate their application workloads onto these cloud platforms, taking a value-driven approach to re-architecting and modernising applications as part of the migration.

If you’re embarking upon this journey yourself, make sure to take in the following sessions at re:Invent:

ENT206 - Building a Business Case for Your Cloud Journey

Favorable economics is the obvious compelling business case to move to the cloud, but it is only part of the total picture. When preparing a business case for migrating to the cloud, many organizations focus on improvements in total cost of ownership. However, the cloud can provide benefits in additional areas, such as technology optimization, cost of change, and business value. In this session, learn a framework and the tools that are available to create a compelling business case for a large-scale migration to AWS.

ENT225 - Creating an Effective Roadmap for Your Cloud Journey

The Cloud Journey Workshop is an experiential session that works through a representative use case of a company's cloud adoption journey. In this session, participants divide into teams, and each team makes practical recommendations for how to plan and execute their journey to the cloud so they can meet business expectations. By participating, you learn best practices on organization transformation, cloud foundations establishment, migration methodology, and application landscape optimization from AWS facilitators. You also have the opportunity to share tips with other AWS customers to make your cloud journey successful.

A pattern that we often see emerge when enterprises begin to adopt the cloud, however, is that they put the same processes and practices in place as they would have done in a traditional data centre scenario. Having an Enterprise Cloud Operating Model can help avoid this pitfall - take a look at our white paper on the topic here: Introduction to Enterprise Cloud Operating Models

Enterprise DevOps Transformation

DevOps represents a lean, value-driven operating model which describes a set of approaches to software delivery and IT operations at speed and scale - and goes hand-in-hand with the agility, scalability and reliability of public cloud. Typically, this involves modernising working practices, introduction of automation so that applications and infrastructure can be managed at speed and high efficiency - maximising security without introducing risk.

Here’s where you can get the lowdown on Enterprise DevOps at re:Invent:

DEV210 - Moving to DevOps the Amazon Way

DevOps is currently one of the most sought after engineering models. One reason is that it helps enterprise transformations. The Amazon transformation to DevOps was born out of the desire to be even more customer obsessed, more agile, and more innovative. Come and learn from our journey as we share the playbook that helped us successfully implement and adopt DevOps as well as the lessons we learned the hard way.

DEV305 - AWS DevOps Essentials: An Introductory Workshop on CI/CD Best Practices

In few hours, quickly learn how to effectively leverage various AWS services to improve developer productivity and reduce the overall time to market for new product capabilities. In this session, we demonstrate a prescriptive approach to incrementally adopt and embrace some of the best practices around continuous integration and delivery using AWS developer tools and third-party solutions, including AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS X-Ray, and AWS Cloud9. We also highlight some best practices and productivity tips that can help make your software release process fast, automated, and reliable.

DEV320 - Driving DevOps Transformation in Enterprises

In this session, learn how AWS is helping enterprises adopt the DevOps model and automation in their journey to the cloud. By using the DevOps principle to treat your infrastructure environments as code, you can automate and easily scale your lifecycle environments. Learn how services like AWS CloudFormation and AWS OpsWorks enable you to automate your instance provisioning and configurations as code, ensuring consistent, compliant, and scalable cloud infrastructure. Understand how OpsWorks is enabling enterprises to accelerate their migration to the cloud, leveraging popular tools like Chef or Puppet and their respective communities.

Using the data gathered from DevOpsMaturity.com – Contino’s tool for self-assessing DevOps maturity, we’ve collated a report summing up findings across the three key areas of people, process and culture. Check it out here: DevOps Maturity in the Enterprise

DevSecOps and Cloud Security

Put simply, DevSecOps is the integration of the development, IT operations and security and compliance parts of your organisation. It extends the core principles of DevOps (which emphasise constant collaboration between developers and IT operations admins) to include the cybersecurity and compliance team, too.

Register for the following sessions to learn more:

SEC332 - Adding the Sec to Your DevOps Pipelines

DevSecOps is the premise that everyone in the software development lifecycle is responsible for security. DevSecOps aims to embed security in every part of the development process.

WPS307 - DevSecOps: Instituting Cultural Transformation for Public Sector Organizations

In this in-depth, interactive workshop, we examine how different public sector customers achieve this shift and analyze common success patterns. We address key points such as continuous compliance, integrating security, and removing people from the data to vastly improve the organization's security posture over traditional operating models. Takeaways include a blueprint for building a DevSecOps operating model in your organization; an understanding the security practitioners' point of view and embracing it to drive innovation; and ways to identify current operating characteristics in your organization and use them to drive a strategy for DevSecOps.

Cloud-Native Software Development

One of the most significant factors that drive value in an enterprise’s cloud adoption journey is in the modernisation of application development. Contino help companies move to cloud native-architecture and software development practices in order to accelerate time to market and maximise organisational agility.

For sessions at re:Invent that shed some light on developments in the cloud-native space, consider registering for the following:

ARC212 - Trends in Digital Transformation

As industries digitally transform their existing business models to fend off competitors or disrupt new markets, they find their IT to be a limiting factor. In this session, we cover the trends of disruptions and opportunities of digital transformation, and the evolution of IT monoliths to microservices and now cloud native services. We also explore dependency management, or “lock in,” through a “choosing, using, and losing” mental model. Finally, we explore chaos architecture as an evolving method for exposing weaknesses before they become real problems.

DEV337-R - [REPEAT] Set Up a Serverless App Using React and AWS Amplify

Through this demonstration, see how easy it is to build a fully functional and secure cloud-native application in hours rather than in days or weeks. This demo includes the use of AWS Cloud9, a cloud-based IDE, to build a fully serverless cloud native application in React using the AWS Mobile Hub via the AWS Mobile CLI and AWS Amplify.

ENT317 - Lifion's Cloud Transformation Journey

Lifion is ADP’s next generation platform, born in the cloud and built on an ecosystem of containerized microservices. Initially developed entirely on EC2, Lifion is undergoing a cloud native transformation and embracing AWS managed services. We will discuss our strategic architectural objectives, transformational journey as well as our learnings in adopting Kinesis, Aurora, Dynamo DB, and ElastiCache at scale.

Check out Carlos Nunez’ post, ‘You’re Already a Software Company!’ for a general take on on this topic.

Data Platforms and Analytics

At Contino, we’re seeing more and more customers seek to drive competitive advantage by maximising use of existing data, whether to enable ‘best next action’ by extracting data from silos and legacy data warehouses, or to drive better-informed decision-making with real-time data analytics.

If data is an area of interest for you, make sure you register for the following sessions:

ANT310 - Architecting for Real-Time Insights with Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to speed up the time it takes for you to get valuable, real-time insights from your streaming data. In this session, we walk through the most popular applications that customers implement using Amazon Kinesis, including streaming extract-transform-load, continuous metric generation, and responsive analytics. Our customer Autodesk joins us to describe how they created real-time metrics generation and analytics using Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Elasticsearch Service. They walk us through their architecture and the best practices they learned in building and deploying their real-time analytics solution.

DAT206-L - Leadership Session: AWS Database and Analytics

We’re witnessing an unprecedented growth in the amount of data collected and stored in the cloud. Getting insights from this data requires database and analytics services that scale and perform in ways not possible before. AWS offers the broadest set of database and analytics services to process, store, manage, and analyze all your data. In this session, we provide an overview of the database and analytics services at AWS, new services and features we launched this year, how customers are using these services, and our vision for continued innovation in this space.

ANT202 - Modern Cloud Data Warehousing ft. Intuit: Optimize Analytics Practices

Most companies are overrun with data, yet they lack critical insights to make timely and accurate business decisions. They are missing the opportunity to combine large amounts of new, unstructured big data that resides outside their data warehouse with trusted, structured data inside their data warehouse. In this session, we discuss the most common use cases with Amazon Redshift, and we take an in-depth look at how modern data warehousing blends and analyzes all your data to give you deeper insights to run your business. Intuit joins us to share their experience modernizing their analytics pipeline.

Contino helped JetStar, a Qantas group airline, move to a fully-enabled Data Insights platform on AWS. To find out more, take a look at our case study: Contino Helps Jetstar Move to a Fully-Enabled Data Insights Platform.

See you in Las Vegas!

Contino will of course be in attendance during the week - if you want to discuss anything DevOps and cloud we’d love to meet you! You can schedule a meeting with our team onsite here: book a meeting!