AWS re:Invent Day 1 keynote
Quick notes from today’s keynote:
More instance types
Reaction: Yawn. These dont deserve a keynote — just a blog post may be. These are expected etc.
What would have made it cooler: Sustained use discounts, custom instances from a customer specific config
LightSail
This is good for them to onboard new class of customers like college students, small shops etc
Reaction: ok, not a big surprise
Athena
Reaction: Cool. Remove dependency on third party monitoring/parsing tools. Make it easy for me to analyze information from my environment
Machine Learning :
Lex, Polly, Rekognition
Polly and Recognition are a catch up to Google and they are late to the party. LEX is cool because its based on Alexa, which works flawless.
Reaction: What took you guys so long?
Aurora Postgres compatibility
Reaction: cool — helps increase adoption of Aurora
Greengrass
Reaction: Makes sense, but I am skeptical of adoption by device manufacturers. Time will tell if this will get traction or not.
Snowball Edge
Reaction: Yeah,concession to old school enterprises
This is likely because of customers pushing back hard on AWS to give them a private cloud option. This may be a compromise AWS agreed to by including some compute capability on the edge. I do believe due to pricing, most customers would not keep Snowball on-prem for too long. This still shows to me that AWS is bending to short term customer demands.
Snowmobile
Reaction: A truck driven by a human being? Welcome back to 1999
Why not partner with Otto and use a self driving truck. That would have been so much more cooler.
In Conclusion:
Based on announcements today, biggest disappointment for me was not changing the pricing model. AWS now has an unsustainable pricing model that’s a decade old and is not elastic in nature. I would have liked to see them be bolder here and evolve it.
I do believe AWS is entering an “Optimize” phase in their journey. They are figuring out how to deliver a stellar service to enterprises and not rock the boat too much. We can’t blame them for this. This is smart business.
Tomorrow’s key note will be interesting to see as rumors of innovation with Lambda are flying. I also think AWS may throw a bone to container folks.
Thats all folks — see you guys at the casino tonight — I will be the guy passed out on Vodka shots later tonight.
