OpsCompass attended AWS Summit Chicago and our team had some subtle and not so subtle observations of the comprehensive, but brief conference of tech professionals. Amazon touts their conferences as “Bringing technologists together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS” and it is an accurate description of the attendees and content of the event. As a provider of compliance and governance software on AWS ourselves, the team had some interesting take-away’s from the day:
Security and Serverless
There were two words that surfaced everywhere from banners, to floor conversation, and session topics. Security and Serverless were all the buzz. Security in AWS is very much a subset of cloud governance and clearly customers are trying to bake more and more security into their DevSecOps processes. Serverless is growing incredibly fast as customers move apps from traditional virtual machine based architectures to distributed, cloud-based services like AWS Lambda. These aren’t the most revolutionary terms or topics, but it speaks to the growing cloud maturity of the typical customer. Just a couple of short years ago, the typical organization didn’t have expertise beyond virtual machines and the workloads weren’t critical enough for security to be a high priority – now, those organizations have matured into cloud-native apps that are mission-critical and need security.
The serverless focus really resonated with our own developers since our product, Helm, is a multi-tenant SaaS app built on services like AWS Lambda and DynamoDB, and customers use it for improving security, compliance, and overall governance. So we were fortunate enough to be at the nexus of the serverless and security enthusiasm and ended up having some great conversations.
Amazon is investing in their customers
An AWS Summit feels like a traditional, annual, multi-day conference. Except Amazon pulls these regional conferences off in one(!) day. To pull 6,000 people to each show means not only is Amazon willing to invest in these regional shows, but that their customers and prospective customers are eager to attend and learn more about their platform’s possibilities.
OpsCompass went to learn more about how to further leverage AWS’s latest services and tools, as well as orient our product around the latest capabilities, not get leads since this is really an educational event. We’re living in a cloud-first world.
Great place for techies to geek out
Our very informal poll indicated that 75% of people who were in attendance of AWS Summit Chicago are customers, users, or Amazon product pros vs salespeople. The conference had a feeling of excitement vs. selling: aka education.
In summary, if you have any interest in growing your AWS footprint, go to a future summit. Send your top cloud guys and they’ll leave eager to remove barriers and bring your organization into a new era of digital transformation.
See you all at the next one!
Related Links:
Helm: A Better Way to do Cloud Compliance
Policy and Governance in the Cloud vs On-Premise – What’s the Difference?
