Lukasz's Blog

Reflections on ReInvent 2017

This years AWS ReInvent was bigger than ever before - the conference spanned five different hotels/conference centres along the Las Vegas strip so getting your daily allocation of steps in was no challenge. Roughly 43,000 people attended the event this year! If you’ve attended ReInvent in previous years you would know that there is a fair amount of walking involved - this year really kicked it up a notch with people shredding shoes in a matter of days

Physical exercise and footwear aside this year event provided what seemed like an endless list of new services in almost every category. CEO Andy Jassy kicked things off with his keynote presentation which riffled through a bunch of new service announcements. They key ones for me were:

• Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), a managed Kubernetes service running on top of AWS. Simplifying running and managing containers.
• Aurora Serverless—on-demand, auto-scaling Amazon Aurora. This service eliminates the need to provision instances, automatically scales up/down, and starts up and shuts down automatically. It was very clear that AWS is keep to liberate customers from the tyranny of their existing database vendors (leave you to guess who they mean…)
• In the Machine Learning space Andy introduced Amazon SageMaker (leverages open source Jupyter project). SageMaker provides built-in, high performance algorithms, but doesn’t prevent users from bringing their own algorithms and frameworks. SageMaker also greatly simplifies training and tuning, and helps automate the deployment/operation of machine learning in production.
  
• DeepLens, the world’s first HD video camera with built-in machine learning support. This technology is incredible - I attended the workshop session and walked away with a DeepLens unit so expect more detail on this front in the coming few weeks/months.
  
• Amazon Translate, which does real-time language translation as well as batch translation.
  

Andy’s keynote focused on what ‘builders’ wanted and how they would build the organisations and societies of the future. It’s very clear that AWS is trying to take the heavy lifting out of technology, making it simpler for anyone to be a builder.

It’s very clear that AWS is sticking to it’s ‘customer obsessed’ mantra, not only in terms of how it delivers services to its customers but also in the types/range of services its bringing to market for AWS users to utilise to improve the experience of their customers. Investments in voice technologies, AI and machine learning are all geared towards re-inventing how organisations interact with their customers.

In contrast Werner Vogels’ keynote was light on service announcements and more focused on 21st century architectures and how technology will shape (and will be shaped) by the world in the coming 5-10 years. Werner’s presentation also showcased a number of female techies doing some impressive things in their respective organisations/industries - pretty inspiring stuff.

Werner did announce a couple of key services which stood out for me:

• Alexa for Business is a fully managed service for Alexa voice-controlled devices at work.
  
• AWS Cloud9, a cloud-based IDE which AWS acquired last year. Cloud9 is a clean and feature rich IDE but the ‘killer app’ is collaboration. You can invite other AWS users to join your project for pair programming sessions with a nice little chat box to help you work through bugs (it comes with a full debugger for solo projects as well).
  
• Lambda language support for .Net and Go meeting a long requested feature request.

Serverless architectures and services were definite a headline topic this year. A number of the presentations included case studies of AWS customer leveraging serverless technologies to deliver on-demand applications and services. This is consistent with the AWS strategy of ‘business rules being the only thing you will need to code’ in the future.

One of my special interest categories this year was around artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s clear that AI/ML will bring about unprecedented workforce/job changes in the coming decade. I think a lot of people assume that AI is coming when in reality it’s already here and getting better every day.

A number of services announced were intended to make AI/ML accessible to a wider user base - to take it out of labs and into the hands of people building front-line products and services. These AI/ML developments - paired with things like DeepLens - will pave the way for potentially changing the way we interact with technology in every aspect of our lives.

Cloud adoption still seems to be variable - based on the people I talked to and the round-table sessions I attended. Many organisations are still pursuing the ‘lift and shift’ approach with variable benefits. There are organisations re-engineering their processes and applications as part of the move to cloud but they are still the exception. Worryingly I was actually part of a couple of round-table sessions where some people seemed to be advocating for the on-premise model as a better option.

On a global scale what we are doing around cloud adoption in New Zealand still seems to be on par with what leaders in other parts of the world are doing.

In terms of logistics, you could perhaps argue that ReInvent got too large this year. The travel times between venues were high and I know lots of people missed sessions they wanted to attend due to travel times or popular sessions not offering any walk up spots. From what I remember the 2016 event (which was all at the Venetian) seemed to flow more smoothly with fewer frustrations from attendees. Perhaps it’s time to split ReInvent into two events - one in the US and one in Europe?

Chatbot Sam

I think a common misconception is that citizens (customers) want to have an ‘experience’ when dealing with government agencies. As a customer of a range of agencies what I really want is a pain-free experience that let’s me do what I need to get done in the most expedient manner possible. Get in, get it sorted and get out - as quickly as possible, no experience thanks!

Part of a creating what I refer to as a ‘low friction experience’ is understanding how your customers already utilise online/digital services and slipstreaming in as much as possible with that. The idea of meeting the customer where they are at, rather than setting up another whole new channel for them to engage with.

We know the majority of our customers are part of one or multiple social network platforms. We also know that most of them would list ‘talking to another person on the phone’ as one of their least preferred ways of getting anything done. Based on that it makes solid sense for us to develop a chatbot interface we can deploy on the various social network platforms.

Enter Sam - Sam is our self-service chatbot which provides some very basic functionality but due to the magic of cloud only took hours (not days or months) to set up. Sam is currently in early beta but can help you look up your student number, reset your password and provide you with information on the exam and results publication timetable.

Sam is built on a combination of Amazon’s Lex and Lambda services. Lex provides the chatbot front end whilst Lambda does the behind the scenes functions like interacting with the database hosted on AWS to look up student numbers and other information. We have currently deployed Sam on the Facebook platform meaning it integrates seamlessly with Facebook pages and works on both desktop and mobile devices.

Sam is a pretty basic chatbot - it works based on key terms and rules - however it provides some really good self-service functionality given that it took just a few hours to set up.

The next iteration of Sam will combine Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Learning to provide a much richer set of functionality as well as the ability to learn from the conversations it has. We also intend to use Amazon Poly to support Speech Input.

For me Sam re-enforces the power of the Cloud. Five years ago the investment required - and lead times to implement - would have probably seen the idea dead in the water. Today we can deliver a whole new friction-less channel to our customers in a matter of hours.

We are shifting away from running technology to delivering digital services and that’s the exciting opportunity for organisations who are ready and willing to embrace the Cloud.

CEOs need to be challenging their CIOs and IT departments to deliver these same sorts of customer-focused solutions; I’m convinced that will move the cloud adoption conversation forward in most organisations that may be ‘stuck’ in the enterprise IT paradigm.