AWS Summit New York: What You May Have Missed

The ability of Amazon Web Services to rapidly expand its offerings has pushed it far ahead of its competitors in the IaaS space, according to Gartner’s latest research. The public cloud company continued this pattern with several new offerings announced at its AWS Summit in New York on Thursday.

During the keynote, AWS CTO Dr. Werner Vogels brought CTOs from Lyft and Comcast, as well as a devops engineer from Sean Parker’s messaging startup Airtime, to share their successes with AWS, before introducing new AWS products and services.

Lyft CTO Chris Lambert outlined the journey that the ride sharing company has taken since its launch in 2012 when it had only three servers. Fast forward to today and it’s still 100 percent on AWS, but it has just completed 14 million rides in July 2016 – meaning a lot more infrastructure.

See also: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning

Lambert highlighted how Lyft uses autoscaling to help it save significantly on infrastructure costs, while Amazon RedShift Data Warehouse helped it launch Lyft Line – which is a huge part of its growth strategy moving forward.

Vogels said that the purpose of AWS Summit is education, and providing customers the opportunity to talk to one another to learn more about their AWS use cases.

Here are all the new AWS services and features:

• Amazon Kinesis Analytics: fully managed service for continuously streaming data using standard SQL; integrates with Kinesis Streams and Kinesis Firehose; automatically provisions, deploys, and scales the resources required to continuously run queries
• Elastic Block Storage Updates: AWS reduced the price of snapshot storage by 47 percent, and increased the number of IOPS customers can provision
• Application Load Balancer: According to Vogels, this service “gives you complete control over how to send traffic to individual components in your system.” AWS says that “web sites and mobile apps, running in containers or on EC2 instances, will benefit from the use of Application Load Balancers.”
• AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Update: AWS KMS users can now bring their own keys, giving them “local control over the generation and storage of keys” to “meet their security and compliance requirements in order to run their most sensitive workloads in the cloud,” AWS evangelist Jeff Barr says.
• Snowball Updates: AWS launched the Snowball Job Management API which allows users to build apps that create and manage Snowball jobs, while the S3 Adapter lets users access a Snowball appliance as though it were an S3 endpoint.

This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-events/aws-summit-new-york-what-you-may-have-missed