Aws Re:invent 2017

Are you using the AWS X-Ray service to gather insights into your distributed applications and want to learn how to do more? Or are you still learning about the service and want to understand its full power and potential? This session is a deep dive into the AWS X-Ray service and how the API's can be used to derive new and interesting insights. The session will walk through the creation of a custom analytical application, and show code samples that will be available to all attendees. An initial short overview of the service will be provided, but is recommended that for those unfamiliar with the AWS X-Ray service they attend an introductory session.

DevOps is everywhere, but too often, people think they can buy “DevOps in a box” and just sprinkle some tools and automation over your broken or slow (or even super-fast AWS) stack. But we all know that software delivery is still hard. So what is this crazy DevOps thing, and why and how does it make things better? In this session, Jez and Nicole talk about what they've found working with dozens of organizations and conducting the largest DevOps research studies to date, covering over 23,000 data points across 2,000 organizations around the world. We start with the outcomes that companies care about: organizational performance, software delivery performance, and software quality. We then define what DevOps is, how you measure it, and how the best, most innovative teams and organizations are using it to drive improvements in performance and quality.

In this session, we walk you through a hypothetical incident response managed on AWS. Learn how to apply existing best practices as well as how to leverage the unique security visibility, control, and automation that AWS provides. We cover how to set up your AWS environment to prevent a security event and how to build a cloud-specific incident response plan so that your organization is prepared before a security event occurs. This session also covers specific environment recovery steps available on AWS.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Neural machine translation uses deep learning to deliver more accurate and more natural sounding translation than older statistical and rule-based translation algorithms. Amazon Translate enables translation at scale so that you can easily translate large volumes of text efficiently to handle tasks like localizing content for international users and facilitating real-time cross-lingual communication. Join this session to learn more and find out how you get can started with Amazon Translate, today!

Amazon.com enables all of its developers to be productive on AWS by operating across tens-of-thousands of team-owned AWS accounts, all while raising the bar on security, visibility and operational control. Amazon has been able to achieve these seemingly conflicting ideals by automating setup and management of these accounts at scale using AWS Management Tools such as CloudFormation, Config, CloudTrail, CloudWatch and EC2 Systems Manager. In this session, discover more about how Amazon.com built ASAP using AWS Management tools, and understand some of the decisions they made as their usage of AWS evolved over time. You will learn about the design, architecture and implementation that Amazon.com went through as part of this effort.  

In this session, you learn how to enable governance, compliance, operational, and risk auditing of your AWS account. Approaches discussed include a combination of continuous monitoring and assessing, auditing, and evaluating your AWS resources. With AWS management tools, you can view a history of AWS API calls for your various accounts, review changes in configurations and relationships between AWS resources, dive into detailed resource configuration histories, determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines, and give developers and systems administrators a secure and compliant means to create and manage AWS resources.

A surprising trend is starting to emerge among organizations who are progressing through the cloud maturity lifecycle: major improvements in revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and mission success are being directly attributed to improvements in security and compliance. At one time thought of as speed bumps in the path to deployment, security and compliance are now seen as critical ingredients that help organizations differentiate their offerings in the market, win more deals, and achieve mission-critical goals faster. This session explores how organizations like Jive Software and the National Geospatial Agency use the Evident Security Platform, AWS, and AWS Quick Starts to automate security and compliance processes in their organization to accomplish more, do it faster, and deliver better results. Session sponsored by Evident.io

Do you know how your applications will behave when things go wrong, either naturally or artificially? See how Expedia uses Amazon EC2 Systems Manager to perform automatic resilience tests as part of CI/CD pipelines, giving application owners confidence they are prepared for the worst.

Managing AWS and hybrid environments securely and safely while having actionable insights is an operational priority and business driver for all customers. Using SSH or RDP sessions could lead to unintended or malicious outcomes with no traceability. Learn to use Amazon EC2 Systems Manager to improve your security posture, automate at scale, and minimize application downtime for both Windows and Linux workloads. Easily author configurations to automate your infrastructure without SSH access, and control the blast radius of configuration changes. Get a cross-account and cross-region view of what's installed and running on your servers or instances. Learn to use Systems Manager to securely store, manage, and retrieve secrets. You can also run patch compliance checks on the fleet to react to malware and vulnerabilities within minutes, while still providing granular control to users with different privilege levels and full auditability. You will hear from FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, on how

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has emerged as an essential element of organizational DevOps practices. Tools such as AWS CloudFormation and Terraform allow software-defined infrastructure to be deployed quickly and repeatably to AWS. But the agility of CI/CD pipelines also creates new challenges in infrastructure security hardening. How do you ensure that your CloudFormation templates meet your organization's security, compliance, and governance needs before you deploy them? How do you deploy infrastructure securely to production environments, and monitor the security posture on a continuous basis? And how do you do this repeatedly without hitting a speed bump? This session provides a foundation for how to bring proven software hardening practices into the world of infrastructure deployment. We discuss how to build security and compliance tests for infrastructure analogous to unit tests for application code, and showcase how security, compliance and governance testing fit in a modern CI/CD pipeline. Session Sp

In this session, we cover an integration of Amazon Lex with a contact center solution. We demonstrate how an Amazon Lex chatbot can be inserted into an interactive voice response (IVR) workflow in a contact center, enabling users to interact with the chatbot using natural language. We walk through a ready-to-deploy integration that includes building the bot, setting up the IVR, and managing the call routing. We also describe the best practices for selective routing based on user intent, exchange of information between the chatbot/IVR, and handover to a human agent.  

Chaos Engineering is described as “the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.” Going beyond Chaos Monkey, this session covers the specifics of designing a Chaos Engineering solution, how to increment your solution technically and culturally, the socialization and evangelism pieces that tend to get overlooked in the process, and how to get developers excited about purposefully injected failure. This session provides examples of getting started with Chaos Engineering at startups, performing chaos at Netflix scale, integrating your tools with AWS, and the road to cultural acceptance within your company. There are several different “levels” of chaos you can introduce before unleashing a full-blown chaos solution.  We provide a focus on each of these levels, so you can leave this session with a game plan you can culturally and technically introduce.

Learn how Mapbox improved and leveled up their Amazon ECS monitoring by using Amazon CloudWatch Events and custom metrics. We cover the events that kick off data collection, which enables our team to track the trillions of compute seconds happening every day on Mapbox's ECS clusters. The result of the data collection includes custom metrics and alarms used to inform stakeholders across Mapbox about detailed ECS usage, so development teams and finance alike can easily put a price tag on each container.

AWS provides a killer feature for security operations teams:  Access Advisor. In this session, we discuss how Access Advisor shows the services to which an IAM policy grants access and provides a timestamp for the last time that the role authenticated against that service. At Netflix, we use this valuable data to automatically remove permissions that are no longer used. By continually removing excess permissions, we can achieve a balance of empowering developers and maintaining a best-practice, secure environment.

There is a constant tension between empowering teams to be agile through autonomy and enforcing governance policies to maintain regulatory compliance.  Hear from Nathan Scott, Senior Consultant at AWS and James Martin, Automation Engineering Manager at 3M on how they have achieved both autonomy and governance through self-service automation tools on AWS. Learn how to avoid pitfalls with building the CI/CD team, right sizing and how to address. This session will also feature a demo from Casey Lee, Chief Architect at Stelligent on the tools used to accomplish this for 3M, including AWS Service Catalog, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodePipeline and Cloud Custodian, an open source tool for managing AWS accounts.

Using the DevOps model to treat your infrastructure environments as code enables you to automate and scale your development and production environments. Companies such as Puppet and Chef have built popular infrastructure automation solutions and have a thriving community interested in helping others succeed. AWS OpsWorks helps you succeed in using Puppet and Chef on AWS by removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting. In this session, discover how OpsWorks helps you focus on the core task of configuration management using Puppet and Chef, by setting up and maintaining your environment in just a few clicks.

In this session, you learn pragmatic steps to integrate security controls into DevOps processes in your AWS environment at scale. Cyber security expert and founder of Alert Logic Misha Govshteyn shares insights from high performing teams who are embracing the reality that an agile security program can enable faster and more secure workload deployments. Joining Misha is Joey Peloquin, Director of Cloud Security Operations at Citrix, who discusses Citrix's DevOps experiences and how they manage their cyber security posture within the AWS Cloud. Session sponsored by Alert Logic

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, making it easy to develop applications that use high-quality speech to increase engagement and accessibility. Get a glimpse into successful applications that use Amazon Polly text-to-speech service to enable an app to talk to its users. Attendees will benefit from understanding real-world business use cases, and learn how to add feature-rich voice capabilities to their new or existing applications.

This example based session will educate you on how to develop cross-platform .NET Core applications on AWS. Through demos, we will provide a walkthrough on how to deploy .NET Core applications using various AWS infrastructure services including Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Additionally, we will showcase how to accelerate the release of your applications with the AWS's CI/CD toolchain, with services such as AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodeBuild.

Cisco's video solutions were historically designed for on-premises dedicated hardware deployments. Typically, major releases occurred annually or bi-annually. The release process lacked the ability to absorb frequent changes and adapt to rapid market trends. This session looks into how Cisco's IVP Solution team evolved a production system from its monolithic design into a microservices platform, leveraging cloud services, automated deployments, and delivery pipelines. Through this transition the team adopted a biweekly deployment cadence. This ultimately enabled a fast-paced migration to an AWS environment, using AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service.