Hello again from AWS re: Invent!
The second day of AWS re: Invent in Las Vegas started off with a great talk from Amazon.com CTO Dr. Werner Vogels. After a brief recap of yesterday’s announcements (Amazon Redshift and the S3 price reduction), Werner discussed the role of system architecture in today’s world of unconstrained, programmatic access to processing, storage, and network resources. He emphasized that new architectures must be scalable, fault-tolerant, high-performance, and cost-effective. His talk included guest speakers from Pinterest and Animoto, along with live, dynamic demos conducted by AWS Evangelists Matt Wood and Simone Brunozzi.
Werner announced a pair of new Amazon EC2 instance types, one for high storage applications and another for high memory applications. He also announced the AWS Data Pipeline.
New Amazon EC2 instances
Two new Amazon EC2 instance types will be made available to customers in the US East (Virginia) region in the coming weeks. High Storage Instances are a new Amazon EC2 instance optimized for customers that need high storage depth and high sequential I/O for applications like data warehousing, Hadoop and data-intensive HPC. High Storage instances will be available in a single size, High Storage Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge), and have 16 virtual cores, 24 hard disk drives, 48 TB of storage capacity, 117 GiB of RAM and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking.
Cluster High Memory instances are another new Amazon EC2 cluster instance type optimized for memory-intensive analytics and scientific computing. Cluster High Memory instances will be available in a single size, Cluster High Memory Eight Extra Large (cr1.8xlarge) and will provide customers with dual Intel Xeon E5-2670, 2.6 GHz processors, 240 GiB of memory, and two 120 GB SSDs. These new instances will also support Intel Turbo and NUMA for improved performance. Like other cluster instances, cr1.8xlarge instances support 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking.
AWS Data Pipeline
AWS Data Pipeline is a lightweight workflow orchestration service for data driven workflows. It’s designed to facilitate the creation and management of data driven workflows by providing data dependency management and scheduling logic as well as automatic retries and notifications if your processing steps fail or your data inputs don’t become available in the timeframe you were expecting. Data Pipeline allows you to chain your processing steps together in order to create complex workflows out of simple building blocks. AWS Data Pipeline is currently in a limited private beta. Learn more at the Amazon Web Services Blog.
Fireside chat with Werner Vogels and Jeff Bezos
As a special treat for the AWS re: Invent attendees, Werner Vogels interviewed Amazon CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos for almost an hour. Jeff spoke about everything from his investment in building a clock that can keep time for 10,000 years to what new entrepreneurs should think about as they start a business. Jeff also emphasized that his preferred business model is aligning a vendor’s interest with that of the customers. As an example, he cited the Kindle, and the fact that we make money when our customers use the device.
Jeff thinks long-term, and spoke of investing time and energy into long-lasting business principles instead of short-lived fads. He urged the attendees to focus on improving business attributes that would still be valid in a decade – lower prices, better performance, more flexibility, or greater reliability. He also spoke of innovation and how it happens at Amazon, making clear that innovation is a point of view, and that hiring people who are pioneers and explorers is essential. Tying this back to AWS, he said that the ability to spin up instances on demand allows entrepreneurs to increase their experimentation rate (and hence their innovation rate) many-fold.
The chat concluded with Jeff offering some advice to would-be entrepreneurs:
- Don’t chase today’s fad
- Be passionate about what you do
- Be a missionary, not a mercenary
- Start with the customer and work backwards
It’s been a great first AWS re: Invent and if you weren’t able to join us in person in Las Vegas, we hope to see you next year. You can check out all of the keynotes and many of our sessions on ourAWS re: Invent YouTube playlist.
Sincerely,
Amazon Web Services
