5 Recommended AWS re:Invent Breakout Sessions for Scalability and Optimization

by Ofir Nachmani
November 7, 2013

I’m OnDemand is heading to Las Vegas for Amazon’s official cloud show – AWS re:Invent. In my honest opinion, the show is the most significant conference in the cloud and IT industries, and includes a number of fantastic educational sessions. To navigate the sessions, Amazon has provided conference attendees with a great tool that helps them sort through more than 286 sessions (up from 150 last year).

Looking through the list of sessions (the schedule builder is very useful), I quickly discovered that trying to figure out which ones to attend was not as easy as I’d though. I found that first, selecting a re:Invent theme would narrow down my choices. While tagging my favorite sessions and building a schedule, I realized that I am attracted to the practical case studies that discuss scalability and optimization. If you, too, find these topics of interest, be sure to check out, ‘How Adobe Deploys’, ‘The Netflix Isthmus and Active-Active Case Study’, ‘Why Scale Matters’ (by James Hamilton one of the AWS creators), and ‘Choosing the Right Instance’, among others.

I will be holding interviews for AWS re:Invent exhibitors to get their take on the event, explain more about how their offering assists AWS users and adds value to the AWS ecosystem, as well as share more about the foundation of their business values. Learn more

While the number of options may seem a bit overwhelming, the substantial increase from last year’s event, simply reflects the cloud’s growth potential for the future…and how important it is for us to stay up to date. See you in Vegas!
Check the following my recommended five AWS reinvent sessions:
1)       [ARC313] Running Lean and Mean: Designing Cost-efficient Architectures on AWS // PlanGrid case study
“Dive deep into techniques used by successful customers to reduce waste and fine-tune their AWS spending, often with improved performance and a better end-customer experience. Some techniques covered in this session: Learn how to make the most of Auto Scaling, develop an effective Spot Instance strategy, and optimize for your daily traffic cycles…”
2)       [CPN201] More Nines for Your Dimes: Improving Availability and Lowering Costs using Auto Scaling and Amazon EC2 //The Weather Channel case study
“Running your Amazon EC2 instances in Auto Scaling groups allows you to improve your application’s availability right out of the box. Auto Scaling replaces impaired or unhealthy instances automatically to maintain your desired number of instances (even if that number is one)…”
3)       [SVC202] Asgard, Aminator, Simian Army and more: How Netflix’s Proven Tools Can Help Accelerate Your Start-up // Mr. Adrian Cockcroft, The Famous Netflix Architect
“In this session, we’ll cover how an emerging startup can leverage the different open source tools that Netflix has developed and uses every day in production, ranging from baking and deploying applications (Asgard, Aminator), to hardening resiliency to failures (Hystrix, Simian Army, Zuul), making them highly distributed and load balanced (Eureka, Ribbon, Archaius) and managing your AWS resources efficiently and effectively (Edda, Ice)…”
4)       [ARC305] How Netflix Leverages Multiple Regions to Increase Availability: An Isthmus and Active-Active Case Study // Netflix case (always interesting cases)
“..Using the principles of isolation and redundancy, our destination is a fully redundant active-active deployment architecture where end users can be served out of multiple AWS regions…”
5)       [CPN212] Application Optimized Performance: Choosing the Right Instance
// The Intel case study
“… looks under the hood at the different types of processors that comprise Amazon Web Services instances and shares insights from Intel IT and industry best practices for right-sizing infrastructure for different application characteristics and capabilities.”