What Can We Expect at AWS re:Invent?

AWS re:Invent 2017 is rapidly approaching, taking place Nov. 27 to Dec. 1 in Las Vegas, NV, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t join others in making some predictions as to what the cloud giant will be announcing. I’m basing most of my predictions on the fact that AWS recognized early on that developers are the new kingmakers, and thus many new offerings will be focused on making developer usage of AWS as simple, yet powerful, as possible.

Upgrades Around Artificial Intelligence and Lambda

The obvious megatrend areas where we’ll see new and additional services will be around AI and Lambda (aka: “Serverless”). There has already been a report that AWS is making a substantial upgrade to its data warehouse offering, Redshift, code-named “Ironman,” to provide machine learning support to power AI capabilities on top of massive data stores.

Their Lambda (“Serverless”) offering has reportedly been gaining a significant amount of user traction, so it will be interesting to see if they reveal any metrics around that. The simple guess is that AWS will add more programming languages support to Lambda.

Greater Adoption of Kubernetes

Kubernetes awareness and adoption has been on a meteoric rise, and given the fact that AWS recently announced greater involvement with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), I expect them to announce a service with full Kubernetes support, that, once again, makes developer adoption as seamless as possible. If this happens, it will be interesting to see what happens to their EC2 Container Service.

Addressing Developer Needs

Given the heavy push of their Alexa platform, I would expect a developer-centric offering that provides an easy way to build voice support into any application, which I also expect will include some type of tie-in with AI and Lambda.

Additionally, given the core “DevOps roots” of AWS, additions to services such as CodeStar and CodePipeline would not be a surprise and align with its quest to make developer consumption of AWS services as frictionless as possible.

Finally, I hope that there are some additional security enhancements announced, especially around S3 buckets given the recent number of security events, and more seamless data encryption offerings.