AWS Summit London 2015

One thing that was very clear from the AWS Summit in London this month was that they had outgrown the Excel venue. The queues to get onto the escalators and up to the breakout rooms after lunch were so large that most sessions started late. Later in the afternoon they switched all the escalators to up and the only way down was a large queue for the lifts.

There were nearly 4000 people in the room for the key notes and I think it’s fair to say that I’d never been anywhere with so many geeks before – almost all of them male.

The AWS Summit is an opportunity for Amazon to show off and in particular to present some compelling customer case studies. Although they were largely preaching to the converted as the vast majority of people there were already sold on AWS.

My key quotes and points from the summit were:

  • AWS has shown nearly 100% year on year growth in the past four years and they now have over 1 million active customers
  • AWS has five times the compute capacity than all the other 14 providers in the Forrester magic quadrants combined
  • IT projects fail because estimating is hard and customers change their minds
  • AWS allows you to make mistakes and change your mind without being locked into resources
  • AWS have gone from one machine type to seven machine families in nine years
  • move is towards smaller containers
  • containers are becoming immutable software pieces
  • Security in the cloud is stronger than on premise
  • broadest certifications and accreditations
  • security benefits from community network effect
  • Moving to the cloud is not a binary decision but hybrid IT is part of the journey not the destination