AWS Online Summit 2020: What do you need to remember?
This year, AWS organized a special edition, the 2020 AWS Online Summit, to comply with all the recent regulations and security measures regarding physical events. If you wanted to attend the speeches of Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon) or Andy Jassy (CEO of Amazon Web Services), you could register and log in to a new online platform, created especially for the occasion. You could follow their interesting sessions online.
Our #InnovativePeople were there and made sure to take down the most important things that were said to share with you.
One of the very first key topics that came up at the conference was inspired by the current circumstances we are experiencing: the impact of the pandemic on cloud infrastructures. It's a crisis that we've overcome by accelerating digital transformations in businesses and organizations, leading to what Werner Vogels calls "the entry into a new era of technology."
The era of containment has brought new business and work models to the core of companies, regardless of size. Access to data and documents in a cloud environment has gone from being a dream to being crucial to properly running your business in this day and age.
Accompany the world of healthcare, collaborative work and the growing consumption of digital content during confinement.
During this time, AWS has responded to the crisis by ensuring the availability and quality of cloud services that support the applications of millions of businesses, start-ups, large corporations and government organizations. The cloud has proven to be a major asset for all of these companies, as they have been able to quickly adapt to an unprecedented environment.
I think the last few months have really ushered in a new era of technology in which we've seen a fundamental shift in the way that everyone perceives not only the technology itself, but also how we access that technology, as well as how we build it.
In addition, AWS played a major role in providing tools, in record time, to urgently address the specific needs of healthcare stakeholders (hospitals, medical facilities, nurses, etc.) to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. Further evidence of the robustness and power of the AWS infrastructure is its ability to support the increasing use of digital services, such as video streaming, during this period of containment.
That growth has been massive. ReelGood.com estimates that audiences for SVOD sites in the U.S. (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and Disney) grew by 417 percent during the week of April 13 compared to the first week of March, before the lockdown.
In 2020 and beyond, most organizations will transform to a fully cloud-based environment, where all workers will be able to access all applications and services anywhere, anytime.
The cloud has delivered on its promise of scalability. This is a critical issue in meeting the growing demand for access to hosted digital services. With machine learning capabilities, AWS can predict future traffic, allowing it to adjust its capacity to actual demand. Users are immediately redirected to the resources with the closest hosting. AWS Auto Scaling monitors user applications and automatically adjusts capacity to ensure performance remains stable and predictable, at the lowest possible cost to the user.
Werner Vogels emphasizes one key point: when building software for the cloud, the architecture must be sound from the start. If developers neglect the basics, they will come back to haunt them later. Any solution is doomed to fail when the principles of robustness, security, data access and scalability are not anticipated and addressed properly in the initial design. The cloud provides unparalleled tools to address these challenges and move to the next level.
The digital transformation of companies will be based on the cloud
The second highly anticipated speech was from Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services. It was the ideal opportunity to come back to the reluctance that remains within some companies to abandon their old proprietary infrastructures.
We still see a segment of companies trying to fight gravity.
They insist that they can still maintain an infrastructure that is cheaper than what they would have in the cloud. They are often proud of the infrastructure they have built. The problem is that we can't fight gravity: if something is really good for customers and businesses, it will evolve whether we like it or not.
Andy Jassy pointed out the inertia present in some companies. For him, the issue is not size, which would prevent large companies from innovating as quickly as small ones, which are apparently more agile. It is the will of the leaders and the culture of the company that is at stake.
The pandemic has highlighted the need for businesses to accelerate their digital transformation, as well as that of their processes and services. As the business environment becomes increasingly decentralized, and the workforce becomes more dispersed, the cloud represents a tremendous opportunity to successfully make this transition.
Andy Jassy made clear the absolute necessity of using "builders" who have the expertise to deliver enterprise solutions.
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