Final thoughts from reInvent

In my first blog post I listed some questions I wanted to explore so it seems like I should go back to them after a week of immersion in the madness.

(Jen Lasher at the re:Invent party)

Q1: Large scale transistions

I learnt a lot on this subject and it was heavily pushed by AWS. Details are in my writeup from Wednesday. Other links are the AWS Migration Hub and the Migration Acceleration Programme

tl;dr cost savings aren’t there for us yet to do a lift’n’shift as we get such high discount levels on hardware/software but many business are moving wholesale and then doing optimisation afterwards. I’m only aware of one UK HE (Staffordshire) which has closed its data centres and moved everything to Azure. It took them a year of doing nothing much else but they are really pleased with the result.

Q2: Serverless and development

See Tuesday’s post.

There’s also the Serverless Application Model for specifying setups and SAM Local for local testing

tl;dr huge potential here

Q3: Managing complexity

This one came up in various hallway and bar conversations. I talked to a couple of UK public sector orgs who are moving large scale to AWS and none of them had a really good answer to the organisational side of things yet.

The other thing I’ve become convinced of over the week is that we would need to work with partners to do any large scale move and that something like Cloudability will be essential for cost control

Q4: HE

There was the session on Alexa in HE but apart from that I didn’t meet anyone else from UK HE. The conference is so ludicrously vast that meeting people without a specific arrangement isn’t going to happen, but my feeling is that there was some public sector but very little education.

Q5: Cost control

As mentioned above, something like Cloudability will be essential for cost control, but with a platform like that, it looks manageable.

Final thoughts

It’s been a great event and I’ve learnt loads. Expect an Alexa skill coming up soon 😀