Day 1
Keynotes are a way for tech conference players to showcase the latest and greatest product(s) they think will drive their business for the next few months – what will offer significant competitive advantage and benefit their customers. Now, Amazon Web Services may not cater to the same crowd as Apple – plenty of people here are certainly geeks, but many others are enterprise developers working for financial organizations, banks, healthcare companies, etc. So the next bright, shiny thing for them isn’t necessarily a sleek and shiny piece of hardware.
So what did AWS see as important enough to their business and growth to be included in the keynote presentation?
#1. First and foremost, AWS’s tremendous growth itself demonstrates that the sky’s the limit for what can be done on their infrastructure. AWS is experiencing explosive growth – including its base of customers and partners, as well as their technology portfolios, and the number of cool solutions being built on the platform – like stock exchange trading platforms, rich media content delivery, and even Hollywood CGI.
#2. Security is a hot topic. AWS is now as secure as on-premise infrastructures at the most demanding users out there, such as financial institutions and federal agencies. But they aren’t stopping there. AWS has shown commitment to being the most secure by successfully passing industry audits and certifications ranging from ISO to federal, to HIPAA, to movie industry standards. They are continuously adding more services and capabilities to allow customers complete control of security of the workloads they put on AWS. The fairly new CloudHSM is one example, a just-announced CloudTrail is another. Also, new SAML 2.0 support enables identity federation scenarios, greatly simplifying identity management on AWS.
#3. Last, but not the least: mobile and mobile workers. Building on already existing features forming the AWS MaaS stack – such as support for A/B testing, analytics, mobile identity management, and push notifications – AWS adds application streaming which, while not highly relevant to most of Coherent Solutions’ customers, shows the direction AWS is going. They are planning to fully commoditize much of the computing in the not-so-distant future. This expands into AWS WorkSpaces, with a brand new desktop virtualization offering.