AWS re:Invent—What do Black Friday and Cyber Monday Have in Common?

With the genesis of Amazon Web Services, enterprises of all sizes can now take advantage of the public cloud to deliver significantly more agility and control. With AWS, elastic infrastructure is easier to attain, and usage spikes are an afterthought.

Only days apart, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are arguably the two biggest days in retail. They’re what make “web scale” a requirement for leading eCommerce organizations throughout the world. For months in advance, IT operations teams map, plan and prepare for the impending shopping crush. It’s capacity planning at its finest. And beyond eCommerce, a move to the cloud is prudent for many businesses that may encounter major traffic events like a security attack or a runaway product success.

History of the AWS Cloud

From the humble beginnings of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) put public cloud on the map. AWS continues to invest heavily in innovation, helping both the public and private sector harness the power of cloud computing. Ironically, during Cyber Monday, the largest eCommerce day of the year, AWS is kicking off its largest event of the year—AWS re:Invent—which showcases the latest and greatest AWS has to offer, as well as the transformational journeys of its clients.

AWS re:Invent 2018

For the past several years, AWS re:Invent has been the showcase of large web scale in the public cloud, and 2018 will be no different. AppDynamics is excited to return to showcase our strong partnership with AWS and tell the stories of our joint customers. Plenty of very impressive sessions will take place across the Las Vegas Strip from a wide ecosystem of clients and vendors sharing challenges, triumphs, and best practices.

Join AppDynamics at re:Invent

During the show, you’ll have an opportunity to network with 50,000 of your closest friends, as well as attend workshops, sessions, parties and everything in between. It is Vegas, after all.

As part of your AWS re:Invent experience, please stop by and learn from experts and customers at the AppDynamics Theatre, located in booth #810. No matter where you are in your cloud journey, we’re confident you’ll learn something new, be better prepared to migrate to the cloud with confidence, and monitor your workloads once you’ve arrived.

We will be running continuous sessions throughout the show (every half hour) that will cover the shift of cloud workloads to severless and containers, maturing DevOps capabilities and processes, and the impending shift to AIOps.

AIOps: Fix Before Failure

Here’s one more term for your enterprise software buzzword bingo: AIOps—the adoption of artificial intelligence in IT operations. Continuous improvement of your platforms without administrator intervention is closer than you think. With advancements in visibility, insight and action, the AppDynamics Platform can now take action for our customers—making AIOps a reality, not a buzzword.

The Cloud’s Best Friends

Serverless and container technologies are not new, but thanks to advancements in the AWS stack around Lambda, ECS/EKS and Fargate, the adoption of these underlying concepts is exploding. In Gartner’s bimodal IT model, both mode-one and mode-two organizations can benefit from AWS services. Join our experts to make sure you’re maximizing your investment in the latest and greatest AWS has to offer.

See AppDynamics on Stage

AppDynamics Senior Solutions Architect Subarno Mukherjee is leading an AWS Session, “Five Ways Application Insights Impact Migration Success,” on Tuesday at 10 AM PT, November 27th at The Venetian. Come learn how application insights impact migration success. No matter where you are in your cloud journey, you’ll have a great opportunity to learn from our experts and customers.

Time to Party?

AppDynamics and AWS are throwing a fantastic Happy Hour after Thursday’s sessions close and before the re:Play party. If you’d like to get in on the action, contact your AWS or AppDynamics account manager and we’ll add you to the list. It’s not a party you’ll want to miss!

Looking to re:Invent

We’re really excited to see you at AWS re:Invent. Be sure to sign up for our AWS Session and stop by booth #810. We’ll be active on our social channels (Twitter / Instagram) during the event as well. Hopefully you’ll make a guest appearance. See you there!

Cloud Migration won’t happen overnight

There is a massive difference between migrating some code to the cloud and migrating an entire application to the cloud. Yes, the heart of any application is indeed its codebase, but code can’t execute without data and there lies the biggest challenge of any cloud migration. “No problem,” you say. “We can just move our database to the cloud and our code will be able to access it.” Sounds great, apart from most storage services in the cloud tend to run on cheap disk which is often virtualized and shared across several tenants. It’s no secret that databases store and access data from disk; the problem these days is that disks have got bigger and cheaper, but they haven’t exactly got much faster. The assumption that Cloud will offer your application a better Quality of Service (QoS) at a cheaper price is therefore not always true when you include application tiers that manage data. Your code might run faster with cheaper and elastic computing power, but it can only go as fast as the data which it retrieves and processes.

Applications were failing long before Cloud came along

I’m fed up of reading about Cloud outages, largely because all applications are created and managed by the most dangerous species on the planet – the human being. Failure is inevitable in regards to everything the human being creates or touches, and for this reason alone I see no news in seeing the word “outage” in IT articles with or without Cloud mentioned.

What gets me the most is that applications, infra-structure and data centers were slowing down and blowing up long before “Clouds” became fashionable. They just didn’t make the news every other week when applications resided in “data-centers”–ah, the good old days. Just ask anyone who works in operations or help desk/app support whether they’ve worked a 38 hour week; I guess the vast majority will either laugh or slap you. If everything worked according to plan, IT would be a really dull place to work, help desk would be replaced with OK desk, and we’d have nothing to talk about in the office or pub.