AWS re:Invent: Zenoss Predictions vs Reality

By: Brian Wilson The Zenoss team just finished another successful AWS re:Invent. This conference has been an industry highlight for me personally for the past several years, and 2016 was no exception. AWS continues to impress with their pace of innovation and overarching technology leadership, a key driver in the age of Digital Transformation. Additionally, what we experienced at AWS re:Invent underscores the fact both the Zenoss team and you, our customers, are making the right choice to base infrastructure and platform decisions on AWS. Our SaaS offering for monitoring, has leveraged AWS for years and continues to take advantage of as many existing and constantly expanding AWS services provided. Check out our recent press release: Zenoss Software-as-a-Service Business Exceeds 100 percent Growth. Many of our existing clients stopped by our booth including Greg Smith, Associate VP of Enterprise Operations, from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC). He gave a great talk about their monitoring journey with Zenoss hosted in, and monitoring, AWS. I look forward to hearing from him again at GalaxZ 17 and encourage you to attend the premier IT monitoring event of the year. (Insider tip: Register before December 16 to take advantage of  the half price offer using this code: ZnGZtrn17.) Now, how well did I do on my predictions? 1. Hybrid is real Nailed it. We heard Andy Jassy, AWS CEO, tell an audience of 30,000+ that the conversation has never been cloud or on premise infrastructure, it has always been about cloud AND on prem. While I might argue that AWS has been fairly silent on this topic in the past, it was clear that they mean it now. Here are just a few of the many validation points: • The VMware announcement a few weeks ago allowing vSphere to span on prem and AWS resources is the most direct expression we have seen. • AWS Glue, a fully managed new service database service, covers both cloud and on prem JDBC databases. • AWS Greengrass brings the power of IoT to devices disconnected on prem. • The new Snowball Edge now includes compute capacity, effectively delivering a cloud resource onsite. In fact, one use case they called out was Ohio State oceanographic research at sea. By shipping a cloud container (literally!) on to the ship researchers can seamlessly collect and analyze data on board the boat, and then return to shore to integrate it into the AWS cloud. • AWS Snowmobile is a 100 PB data transfer device mounted on an 18 wheeler. The cloud literally driven to you. If that’s not hybrid, I don’t know what is. Check it out - https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ I expect to see continuing advancement in technology to enable, support and drive more, not less, hybrid infrastructure. 2. Amazon will Announce a Partnership with Cisco. Nope. But Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware did join Andy Jassy on stage to talk about how the VMware/AWS partnership was natural, powerful and overdue for the enterprise. As I mentioned, this is a direct expression of how hybrid the world of infrastructure is today. Expect to see more cozying up of AWS to Enterprise system integrators, large scale vendors and technology in the spirit of VMware. 3. More Price Cuts and More Regions. Sort of. While regions and AZ’s continue to expand, the big reveals were around increased granularity in compute containers, and more small and larger versions. Think of the spectrum of services and imagine more colors on each end and more shades of existing colors across. 4. Something Else Cool for Analytics/Machine Learning. Booyah. I thought we would see an Analytics and Machine Learning focus, and we certainly did! A whole host of announcements were made about voice recognition used in Alexa (Lex) and text recognition (Polly) being released on the AWS cloud for use by developers. A new image recognition service called Rekognition was released that should be widely adopted. These are extremely powerful tools, used by Amazon to recommend products for you to buy on the Amazon store and what to watch on Netflix, now available for developers to build into their applications. Really exciting technology! I am so proud of the long-standing Zenoss partnership with AWS to deliver enterprise monitoring on such a powerful, flexible and innovative infrastructure platform. Most of our new clients are choosing to deploy either Zenoss on their own AWS assets or ours in ZaaS, and many of our existing clients are in the process of moving to our Zenoss as a Service (ZaaS) platform. The reason is simple: leveraging AWS allows you to focus on the monitoring and availability of the services your business needs, not managing infrastructure of your monitoring platform. Reach out to us to learn more!