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Posts Tagged ‘aws’

AWS re:Invent 2017: Tuesday Night Live with Peter Desantis

November 29th, 2017 No comments

Tuesday Night Live Peter Desantis

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Peter is VP of AWS Global Infrastructure which he’s been doing for a year and a bit although he’s been at Amazon for 20 years. This slot has always traditionally been done by James Hamilton, AWS Distinguished Engineer & one of the super techies.

Talk on the street is that all the techie stuff they are likely to talk about in this session is actually the stuff AWS was using two years ago and now wants to talk about, they’re so far ahead that they keep some of their new cards close to their chest.

2017-11-28 19.11.17There was a cool warm up band.

Update on AWS Global Infrastructure

Write your app once and deploy to any region “going global has never been so easy”, said Peter.

He went through the history of the global expansion and how this is accelerating. They have announced plans to expand with 17 new Availability Zones in six new geographic Regions: Bahrain, China, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, and a second AWS GovCloud Region in the US.”

Just let that sink in, 11 regions in the first 10 years and 17 in two years, that;s massive scale.

He touted the AWS commitment for renewal energy. He continued drilling down into what regions look like with the make up of availability zones being separately powered and super redundently cabled together.

Machine Learning

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Categories: AWS, Cloud, re:Invent Tags: , ,

AWS re:Invent 2017: Serverless Architectural Patterns and Best Practices – ARC401

November 28th, 2017 No comments

Another session on managing serverless and the new architectural patterns required to make it a success. The idea of to create reusable serverless patterns with an continual eye on reducing costs.

2017-11-28 13.28.01The venue was spectacular, in the Venetian Theatre which is magnificent. Shows the importance AWS is placing on serverless where most of the other sessions are in smaller rooms at the Aria.

Drew and Maitreya went through a number of patterns, giving operational and security best practices.

This was a fly by the seat of your pants session, so many AWS services were talked about, you needed an AWS dictionary to know what some are. If you are an infrastructure person who manages an OS, this was a very busy but insightful look at what is possible.

Serverless Foundations

For running your apps you can do it yourself with EC2 and even Docker, have managed services like EMR, ES, RDS etc. and then there’s services with no OS which is how they’re defining serverless, so that’s things like API Gateway, Kinesis Streams & Analytics, DynamoDB, S3, Step Functions, Config, X-Ray and Athena.

They reiterated the “never paying for idle” line and its all built for HA and DR.

You need to be aware of cold start, instantiate AWS client and database client outside the scope of the handler to take advantage of container re-use. Schedule with CloudWatch Events for pre-warming. ENUs for VPC support are attached during cold start

Lambda Best Practices

  • Minimise package size to necessities
  • Separate Lambda handler from core logic,
  • Use environment variables to modify operational behaviours.
  • Self-contain dependencies in your function package.
  • Leverage “Max Memory Used” to right size your functions.
  • Delete large unused functions
  • Use X-Ray integration for great insights.

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AWS re:Invent 2017: Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users – ARC201

November 28th, 2017 No comments

Benjamin Thurgood from AWS

Cloud is awesome, you can scale your web app or site on demand! But where do you start when you’re planning for bi g numbers of users. Making some design choices up front can dramatically simplify your life later.

Benjamin showed how best to link together different AWS services and using the capabilities of the AWS platform.

Autoscaling is only the beginning, there’s a lot more to look at.

Use Native Sevices

First step is to use the AWS Global Infrastructure with Edge locations. Take advantage of the global AWS platfom so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Many native features available like Cloudfront, S3, DynamoDB, EFS etc.

EC2, EBS, RDS etc are scalable but you need to work a little harder.

Lightsail is an easy way to get started as a developer.

You can scale up but you’ll reach an end some time.

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Categories: AWS, Cloud, re:Invent Tags: , , , ,

AWS re:Invent 2017: The Day 1 Buzz

November 28th, 2017 No comments

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AWS Re:Invent kicked off in ernest today, 43,000 cloud makers and learners spread across 5 hotels, basically taking over Las Vegas. Its difficult to appreciate the size of the conference as you could be involved in part of the conference and be very separate from another area.

See my preview posts yesterday, AWS re:Invent 2017: The Show Preview as well as re:Invent 2017: The Day 0 Buzz for what I’m concentrating on.

This morning, the 1st proper day of the conference, I started off with a hot topic for all of IT at the moment, security. As I’m currently consulting in the financial sector, this session piqued my interest.

FSV301 – Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid

Kurt Gray from AWS and Jonathan Baulch from Fidelity Investments

This was a really great session with lots of useful tips. I wrote it up separately here:

AWS re:Invent 2017: Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid – FSV301

It’s a shame I had to leave a little early as I needed to head across Vegas because size of conference.

SRV213 – Thirty Serverless Architectures in 30 Minutes

Chris Munns from AWS

Unfortunately I was in the walk up line for this one and despite my dash across Vegas, they only let in 20 people so missed out on the session, a shame, I hope its posted afterwards.

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Categories: AWS, re:Invent Tags: , ,

AWS re:Invent 2017: Build a Multi-Region Serverless Application for Resilience and High Availability Workshop

November 28th, 2017 No comments

Steven Challis & Derek Felska from AWS were the workshop leaders and it was very hands on, basically up to you and anyone else you wanted to team up with.

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This is one of the reasons to actually attend a conference, you get to do things in person and interact with other people rather than watching a recorded session or just follow a step by step plan when you can’t confer.

Intro

Availability and fast performance is key to user experience. Building a global application from the start is traditionally extremely difficult. Think before serverless how you would have to manage a global fleet of EC2 instances, load balancers, databases and storage. You would need to be a DNS guru and keeping your compute generic yet regionalised was super tough. Enter serverless and the promise was there but Lambda needed a whole lot of hacking to get functions to fire based on geographical access.

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In the workshop we set up a fictional company called www.wildrydes.com (would you use a ride sharing company called this!). This wasn’t just a normal rider sharing company though, the drivers were unicorns! They needed a customer support application which customers can use to report any issues, be it lost property or a grumpy unicorn! As the service was global and needed to be built, serverless was touted as the ideal platform to use as much as possible (of course, it’s re:Invent!). We needed to lash together Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Route 53, CloudFront and S3 for better availability. Cognito Federated Identities was also used for user authentication.

The workshop was also to highlight the new “API Gateway regional endpoints” feature which was recently released.

There’s no reason to feel left out though, you can go through it all at: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-workshops/

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AWS re:Invent 2017: Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid – FSV301

November 27th, 2017 No comments

FSV301 – Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid

Kurt Gray from AWS and Jonathan Baulch from Fidelity Investments

AWS has obviously spent a huge amount of effort building security into the very fabric of its cloud offerings. Enterprises still hesitant to use public cloud as they’re concerned about the security implications of AWS in my opinion are thinking old school. They are often taking the processes and procedures that they currently use on-prem and applying it to AWS rather than looking at all the new possibilities which are often more secure than they can do themselves.

AWS famously has touted the security split of “security OF the cloud” which is AWSs job and “security IN the cloud” which is the customer’s responsibility, however AWS has a huge number of tools to help with the IN part.

Kurt and Jonathan went through some of their learning about best practices and pitfalls. There are a number of governance patterns to avoid even though they may seem logical at first but may limit scale and throttle getting stuff done. This is all bundled under the banner of DevSecOps on a massive scale.

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Categories: AWS, Cloud, re:Invent Tags: , ,

AWS re:Invent 2017: The Day 0 Buzz

November 27th, 2017 No comments

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I flew yesterday from London to Las Vegas and with it being Thanksgiving Weekend, the airport was rather quieter than expected which made for a pleasantly quick immigration experience. The streams of travellers inbound to one of the most important IT conferences of the year has given Vegas some more buzz today.

I wrote a comprehensive Preview Blog Post: AWS re:Invent 2017: The Show Preview with my reasons for why I’m here, what I hope to get out of it and some crystal ball gazing about what I expect we’ll see.

I buffeted up big time for breakfast this morning as I didn’t have much conference stuff on. Marvellous glutonny. Smile

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Registration

I then registered which was painless and had a DJ playing which was nice and lively.

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Robocar Rally

2017-11-26 18.21.01This was an interesting “session”. The idea was getting behind a keyboard for a hackathon for getting your hands dirty with deep learning, IoT, AI and autonomous cars, sounds like a fun mix.

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Categories: AWS, re:Invent Tags: , ,

AWS re:Invent 2017: The Show Preview

November 27th, 2017 No comments

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Scaling Up and Out

re:Invent has turned into a vast conference, dwarfing many other IT get togethers, 50,000 people expected with an unmanageable schedule spread across 5 hotels. Even if you can walk quickly, its at least 30-45 minutes walk between quite a few of the venues.

This is the first time I’m attending re:Invent so the rush of excitement of a new event is invigorating for me.

I’d love to meet up with anyone who is here so please get in touch via @julian wood

AWS seems an unstoppable machine and that’s not in any way to say it should be stopped. Its rare a single company rises so spectacularly to create a major new part of an already established industry. 10 years ago this new thing called EC2 was a curiosity, now its old hat as services like Lambda become the new compute engine.

Why I’m here

I’m coming to AWS self funded so don’t have a company/vendor agenda I need to follow, I can truly see what interests me! My plan is to first of all see what’s new. This isn’t just about announcements although those are important but more how AWS develops into a service provider specifically for enterprises. Cloud is a new way of doings things yet enterprises have been doing things in a particular way for a long time, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes it is plain old toxic heritage IT!

I’m also investigating how enterprises change themselves to do cloud properly, taking advantage of the flexibility and scalability of public cloud and also how AWS updates itself to service enterprises better. This is a complicated dance which needs a lot of back and forth fancy foot work from both sides. I’m expecting more enterprise features, plenty of compliance, governance and security as a service. The recently announcement of PrivateLink as a new way to connect your VPCs to AWS services with more control is a nod to enterprises that’s don’t want all their stuff near the internet by default. AWS is working hard to ensure enterprises can take advantage of all the clever cloud stuff they have to offer.

Secondly I’m watching the serverless space very keenly and expecting a huge focus on Lambda. I’m not being hyperbolic by stating the serverless/FaaS pattern is the future of compute. A new cloud operating model where all infrastructure is abstracted, business processes as pure code without restrictions on scale, billed per invocation giving you financial super-powers.

What could be coming?

AWS releases new features and major updates to existing ones in an unprecedented manor. Just last week, more than 30 announcements were made and that’s before re:Invent and the big picture announcements likely reserved for the show. Make sure you subscribe to the excellent Last Week in AWS mailing list by Corey Quinn

At this stage its a guessing game as to what they might be, but certainly more IoT, ML, AI and buckets of enticing delicious serverless. I’m expecting some Blockchain as a Service and likely Kubernetes as well.

Amazon is also a remarkable company in the way it is able to erm. reinvent itself. This isn’t just an AWS thing but AWS certainly helps all of the rest of Amazon be incredible agile, be able to continually experiment, use its own platform as a sensing engine, rely on real data to make decisions and cannibalise itself. Lambda has been built to cannibalise EC2.

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Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: NetApp

July 21st, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

NetApp is one of the grand daddy’s of the storage industry. I first encountered NetApp 16 years ago. I was struck how relatively easy it was to use and set up. Having unified management across all its devices made learning it simpler than many competitors and the knowledge stayed relevant as in time you upgraded to the bigger, better, faster, more option. I loved that NetApp championed the use of NFS for VMware early on even though you often had to purchase an additional NFS license. I worked for a company that was one of the very first VMware on NFS on NetApp at scale customers. LUNs are yuck (still) and NFS provided so many advantages over the clunky block based alternatives of FC and iSCSI. NetApp was at the forefront of virtualisation and I was happy to see it soar.

In the decade since it seems it spent way too many cycles trying to integrate other things and landed up spinning its wheels when others caught up to the ease of use and in many cases surpassed in performance and flexibility. NetApp had SnapShots, SnapMirror and secondary storage before many others and being able to move data around easily was very attractive, however everyone else caught up. Arch competitor EMC combined with Dell and HPE split up and then bought Nimble and SimplVity.

SolidFire

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Categories: CFD2, Tech Field Day Tags: , , , ,

Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Gigamon

July 21st, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Gigamon is an established vendor which provides network traffic visibility. In its simplest form it is a large network tap. You chose what traffic you want to inspect more closely and run it through Gigamon’s devices. Gigamon then can hand off to other vendor products to then analyse the data. It could be security scanning with an intrusion detection system or watching traffic for data loss prevention or seeing if you have a bot net running internally.

In terms of virtualisation inspection, Gigamon already has its GigaVUE solutions which provide visibility into virtual workloads running in VMware networking with ESXi and NSX as well as OpenStack KVM powered clouds. Its Cloud Field Day so of course Gigamon is heading to the clouds and has recently announced the Gigamon Visibility Platform for AWS.

Enterprises love the simplicity of cloud networking, create a VPC with pretty much all the address space you need. Connect via an API and easily connect servers and clouds together. Nothing can communicate unless you specifically say it can so some of your firewalling is already taken care of and all the config can be more easily managed as code. Amazon looks after all the underlying compute, network and storage so you don’t have to, sounds great. It can be easy to think you then don’t have to worry about more security at the network level. Well, you may have permissioned a web server to be able to talk to an app server but how do you know what is actually running across port 443. What if the web server is in AWS but your app server is on-prem?

Visibility Platform for AWS

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Categories: AWS, CFD2, Cloud, Tech Field Day Tags: , , , ,