Top 5 Takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2019

… “bake” consistent machine images for years, and our “Machine Image Factory” solution accelerator was developed to efficiently address the need using tools such as Hashicorp Packer, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline. The reason this solution has been so popular is that by having your own library of images customized to your organizations requirements (e.g., security configurations, operations tooling, patching), you can release applications faster, with greater consistency, and without burdening your teams’ time or focus watching installation progress bars when they can be working on higher business value activities.

What’s great about AWS releasing this capability as a native service offering is that it is making a best-practice pattern even more accessible to organizations without confusing the business outcome with an array of underlying tools being brought together to make it happen.

#1. Outposts

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs and tools to virtually any data center, colocation space or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that need low-latency access to on-premises applications or systems, local data processing, and to securely store sensitive customer data that needs to remain anywhere there is no AWS region, including inside company-controlled environments or countries.

It’s 2019. Plants are now meat and AWS is hardware you can install in your data center. I will leave it to you to guess which topic has been more hotly debated, but among enterprises I talk to, Outposts has made its way into many conversations since its announcement at re:Invent 2018. Coming out of last week’s announcement of Outposts GA, I think we will be seeing a lot more of this service in 2020.

One of the reasons I hear clients inquiring about Outposts is that it fills a gap for workloads with proximity or latency requirements to manufacturing plants or another type of strategic regional facility. This “hyper-local” need echoes the announcement for AWS Local Zones, which presents a footprint for AWS cloud resources targeting a specific geography (Los Angeles initially).

Of course, regional data centers and other hyperconverged platforms exist to run these types of workloads already, but what is so powerful about Outposts is that it brings the cloud operations model back to the data center, and the same cloud skills that your teams have developed and hired for don’t need to be stunted to learn a disparate set of skills on a niche hardware vendor platform that could be irrelevant three years from now.

I’m excited to see how these picks and all of the new services announced play out over the next year. There is a lot here for businesses to implement in their environments to drive down costs, improve visibility and security, and dial in performance for their differentiating workloads.

Joe Conlin is a solutions architect at 2nd Watch.