AWS re:invent 2018 – Day 5 – Final day

On Friday, it’s the last day for AWS re:Invent convention in Las Vegas. I didn’t know in advance what to expect because I have to admit that even if I started to use AWS, there is still a lot to learn. And that’s why I personally think working with technology is interesting, it’s always moving and there is always something new to investigate or learn.

This morning, I attended a very interesting session about the life of a Cloud Ops Engineer with 2 people from AWS speaking about some scenarios that may happen (or already happened) in daily life of system engineers. I was quite surprised on 1 scenario where the starting point to analyze a failure was the billing console. But imagine, you get a call from a customer because the application is down and you don’t have lots of informations about it. In AWS, you pay for the services you use so you can find some resources directly on the bill. Then you can pull the string and follow different resources to get a better view. Then CloudTrail can help to see what was changed on the resources because it keeps track of API calls.

Knowing some keys services and enabling them can help a lot operation/devops team to support applications in an AWS environment: CloudTrail, CloudWatch, GuardDuty or few of them. Using CloudFormation or tools to provision the infrastructure can also help to detect drifts when there is an issue. It definitely worth waking up this morning.

I ended the conference with a new launch session about running on Amazon RDS with VMware on local datacenter. It allows customers to give the offload the management part to AWS while keeping the data on site. AWS will provide a bunch of control machines built by AWS and VMware which is AWS partner. These machines will connect using a private VPN to control machines in AWS Cloud infrastructure. Currently supporting PostgreSQL / MySQL and planning to support SQL Server and Oracle. It will be a BYOL (Bring Your Own Licence) model so it will interesting to see how to licence that environment. Aurora is not supported and with what I learned this week about the storage architecture I think it will be a difficult challenge.

With Amazon RDS on VMware and AWS Outpost which has been announced in the keynote, AWS is giving solutions for customer want to use Cloud but keep data in local datacenter. Oracle proposed Cloud at Customer to achieve a similar goal. Oracle proposal is built on hardware (engineered systems) provided and maintained by Oracle when AWS ‘ solution is built on VMware. But many companies are already running successfully VMware on their own hardware so the “fight” will be interesting.