Monday 27/11
Monday was the first day of the annual AWS conference re:Invent. A massive 50.000 cloud enthusiasts have gathered in Las Vegas to hear the latest cloud industry innovations and to connect with other enthusiasts.
My first session of a very long day was the Public Sector Breakfast. Whilst having breakfast with people from the public sector and Amazonians talking about the adoption of cloud, both technically and legally with the recent announcement of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. The public sector is not always seen as the most innovative industry, but a presentation about the Mars Perseverance Mission, using AWS technology, proves the opposite!
Participating in the AWS for Software Companies Executive Forum gave a few interesting insights on the two majors trends in the software industry:
GenAI as an accelerant – the adoption of GenAI is going 3x as fast as SaaS in the first 5 years after being introduced. This not only drives the demand because of the new features and functions made available by GenAI but more importantly, it dramatically changes the engineering process of software.
Unprecedented increase in cost of capital – this drives the demand of SaaS as a delivery model: 45% of the 70% growth in software spend in 2023 compared to 2018 is directly related to the growth of SaaS. On top of that 10% because of hardware being replaced by software.
The EXPO floor opened late afternoon and was the ideal opportunity to investigate potential new partners and talk to existing partner such as Flexera, who is showcasing its FinOps offering.
We had to cut the visit to the EXPO short as the highlight of the day was about to start: the keynote Monday night live by Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing. In a very exiting speech, Peter announced the launch of three new products:
Amazon ElastiCache Serverless makes it faster and easier to create a cache and instantly scale to meet application demand—without needing to provision, plan for, or manage capacity
Next-generation, AI-driven scaling and optimizations in Amazon Redshift Serverless deliver better price-performance for variable workloads
Amazon Aurora Limitless Database powers petabyte-scale applications with millions of writes per second
The full announcement is available here.
Next to that, we had a sneak peek at the future: quantum computing. Peter shared some recent breakthroughs in the development and what that actually means: exciting times ahead!
Last stop for the day was the MongoDB’s Emerald VIP Reception, a good moment to go over the day as there is so much food for thought. Mongo, thank you for the invitation and hospitality. We called it a night early as today is going to be more intense.
