A Tale of Two Events, Make that Three, Wait…How about Four?

It is increasingly apparent that Kurzweil’s Singularity is sure getting near, if it is not here already 32 years too soon. Not a week goes by without missing or needing to attend a key conference, seminar, symposium, summit, with each having parallel streams, panels, exhibits, demos, social networking. Not only are we informed, entertained, fed, pampered, enlightened but we get access to post event content, diligent follow-ups, great summaries, blogs, analysis, pictures, all while tweeting and being tweeted with the play-by-play unraveling of the action and pinging of every event. We are to absorb and put in context all this knowledge, we also need to digest, interpret, analyze, identify the relevance to our work and environment, let alone project, extrapolate and derive rules, corollaries and actionable decisions emboldened by this wealth of new information. By the time this settles in our computing neurons, things change and data is so 2 minutes ago.. Now you see the genesis of my Kurzweil lament.

In the last few days, I attended four conferences and I missed four events that I wished I could participate in, if I would have been able to defeat the laws of space-time physics and had the luxury of availability at my disposal. It started with the Linley Mobile Conference followed by the EDPS Monterey event that I and others recently blogged about. This was followed by the Perforce Merge Conference in San Francisco, forcing me to miss Design West and Mentor’s U2U. This week it was AWS Summit and luckily I was able to attend. I have been a cloud fan before cloud was cool, so I was looking forward to it. In some cases the choice of what to attend was easy due to being a sponsor, presenter, or exhibitor. In others it was not as straightforward. Event envy creeps in and anxiety about what new new thing or insight was missed, and hopes rise of getting the recorded sessions and obligatory slide decks in a time delayed fashion.

The AWS Summit had armies of IT and cloud professionals basking in the wealth, breadth and depth of the cloud computing universe orchestrated by increasingly sophisticated implements, tools, pricing and business models rolled out by Amazon Web Services. Andy Jassy, SVP of AWS delivered a Keynote full of content, statistics and guest speakers showcasing accomplishments and results attained through the various AWS offerings.

The Columns above refer to: Replace CapEx with OpEx, lower overall costs, no more guessing capacity, agility/speed/innovation, shift focus to differentiation, go global in minutes.

Andy spelled out how Enterprises are using AWS and the cloud:

• Develop and Test Environments
• Build Apps for the Cloud
• Use Cloud to Make Existing On-premise apps better
• New Cloud App that Integrates Back to On-premise Systems
• Migrate Existing Apps to the cloud
• All-in like Netflix

He went on to outline how to choose a cloud partner

• Experience
• Breadth and depth
• Pace of innovation
• Global footprint
• Pricing philosophy

Great one-liners gleamed from the event:

• There is no compression algorithm for experience
• Sometimes you want to hug your server but it won’t hug you back

The keynote replay can be found here.

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