This week was the final AWS Summit for the Cohesive Networks team. We’ve been to this year’s London, Chicago, and New York Summits in 2017 and had a few thoughts from the events.

AWS Summits recap

London, at the end of June, was the first summit for the Cohesive team. The biggest trend I noticed was the marked difference in conversations for the AWS Summit in London last year. Last year, I noticed most attendees were just starting to consider cloud and AWS and had not actively started using any IaaS technology. This year, by contrast, so many conversations jumped right into cloud use cases, from network connectivity concerns to encryption in transit. Not only are people using cloud but they are seeing the need for VNS3’s enhanced network and security.

I had a long talk with a pair of website and app developers who wanted to segment their AWS subnets for added network security. Another wanted to add more VPN endpoints to his VPC regions. Several conversations about VNS3 also involved Azure, which was a big surprise. Not only are Londoners actively using AWS but they are already embracing a multi-cloud hybrid approach.

One thing that was unique and helpful in London was their Marketplace seller “passport” promotion. Attendees visit 10 booths of AWS Partners that sell products on the AWS Marketplace. Each booth signs the passport and has a chance to chat with attendees who are looking to earn some AWS credits. Once attendees earn 10 signatures, they can turn it in to the AWS Marketplace staff to get $100 of AWS credits. Granted, most just stopped by for a quick hello and signature but it was a great way to meet active AWS users in the crowd in addition to the brave souls who stopped to have a longer conversation.

Next stop, Chicago at the end of July. Most of the Chicago Cohesive team was on hand which was a very good thing since the expected crowd of 5,000 was well over 7,000 from our estimates. After hearing rumors of AWS Summit not coming back to Chicago, it was good to see such a big crowd and a 2 day event.

Personally, the best part of the Chicago Summit was getting to see so many local AWS users and partners. I organize the AWS Chicago user group , so many group members stopped by the Cohesive booth just to say hi. AWS account reps and technical leads based in Chicago are becoming more active with the local AWS users. After a long time of not being able to meet with AWS employees in person in Illinois, it’s great to shake hands with real people from Amazon.

Final stop, New York Summit. This summit was probably a victim of poor timing. A Monday conference in August in NYC is an odd choice. I suspect attendance was lighter than hoped for since everyone I know was taking a last-ditch vacation before school starts up again. Nonetheless, most attendees had connections to banking and financial services and knew they have serious security challenges to solve.

It is always nice to have happy customers walk up and introduce themselves. We had a few in New York immediately say “I use VNS3 and it’s great!”

I assume AWS Summit attendees are interested in cloud, IaaS, and AWS in particular so it’s not a full view of the cloud user market. Just from comparing last year to this year in London and Chicago, AWS users are advancing into more technical user cases with cloud, far beyond dev/test and new projects. Attendees at each event had complex use cases for connecting existing data centers, extending cross-region networks, and encrypting data as it travels in shared environments.

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AWS re:Invent Rewind Chicago Recap

Yesterday, the AWS Chicago user group started the New Year off right with Amazon’s re:Invent rewind event. Amazon hosted and organized in their new Chicago offices.

An hour long keynote from the famous Jeff Barr started the afternoon off. Mr. Barr sped through all the major product announcements and features from the reInvent keynotes, and even some of the new changes that didn’t make the cut for the big stage. Snowball and the semi-truck full of data named Snowmobile were a bulk of the news, with an illustration in Legos.

I’m glad Jeff Barr went though other recent announcements as well – namely the new Ohio, Canada, and London regions. With the flood of announcements at re:Invent this year , I missed a few products and new integrations. There were price reductions for S3 services, Lightsail for virtual private servers in AWS, burstable-performance instances in the t2 family, DDoS protection service AWS Shield , and AWS X-ray. Check out the AWS site for re:Invent videos, podcasts, and highlights. And as always, read Jeff Barr’s excellent blog for news and in-depth tours of features.

One thing I missed during reInvent was the IPv6 support for EC2 instances, starting in the new Ohio region. Along with the longer instance IDs, the IPv6 support should help with the explosive growth in AWS usage. On a similar note, our long time customers will probably be interested to know that AWS users can now migrate unassociated Elastic IP Addresses from EC2-Classic to EC2-VPC and back. It can potentially help people upgrading those ancient VNS3 instances to the latest and greatest 3.5.2 and 4.0.4 versions out now.

Breakout Groups – the Future of AWS?

After the keynotes, the event split into a few different sessions. We had the tough choices of deciding between topics like Serverless, AWS Lambda, IoT, and microservices on ECS. Judging from how full the rooms were, Serverless was the most popular choice.

At the end of the afternoon, my favorite part were the lighting talks. 4 different Amazon Solution Architects (SAs) presented on what they clearly knew about and wanted to talk about. Some were repeats from talks at reInvent, which was great for me since I didn’t get to check out many sessions while holding down the Cohesive Networks booth. I really enjoyed that the lightning talks were done by Chicago-based SAs.

The first talk, and one of my favorites, was on how to incorporate Lex into products. It was a reInvent repeat, and our SA did both a run though of slides and a live app demo of Flixter, a movie finding bot that could adapt to real-time showtime data, multiple input questions, and changing the request for tickets.

The other great talk was the final lightning talk. Jeremy Cowen, a Chicago SA, demo’d the Simple Beer Service. The service uses IoT inputs to measure the sound, activity and flow of an office kegerator. If there are several beer pours and a lot of noise around the kegerator, SBS operators can find out if there’s an office party in progress without having to leave his or her desk!

Now we just need Jeremy to come demo it on our office kegerator next. Check out Simple Beer Service on GitHub here.

VNS3 is a top AWS Marketplace tool for cloud users, according to a new list released by CloudEndure. Their yearly “Game of Clouds” map highlights the top 75 cloud network, application, and developer software.

We’re proud to be a part of a great map with some of our own partners and customers. Cohesive Networks’ VNS3 Network Appliance is available on the AWS Marketplace, and listed in The Top 76 Products on the AWS Marketplace for 2017. With 10 5-star reviews, VNS3 is ready to help your cloud network and connectivity use cases.