Data Expedition, Inc.
News
Articles, events, announcements, and blogs
Data Expedition, Inc.
News
Articles, events, announcements, and blogs
Data Expedition, Inc. attended the Amazon Web Services (AWS) New York Summit at the Javits Center on July 11, 2019. We've been attending this particular regional Summit for many years now and the growth over the past several years has been tremendous. In many ways, it feels like a mini re:Invent, AWS' annual customer/user conference held in Las Vegas that is now almost too big with over 50K attendees in 2018 compared to just over 13K attendees my first year attending in 2014. Well, this year's NY Summit has followed a similar trajectory with attendance at roughly 11,500, over 120 sessions, and more than 125 partners exhibiting in the expo hall. Some argue the intimate feeling those first few years of both re:Invent and the NY Summit are long gone and they might be right in that assessment. However, in looking at AWS' overall reach and growth in essentially creating and owning this thing we call cloud, is it really any surprise?
In terms of content, there were quite a few announcements that are nicely summed up, as always, by AWS' Chief Evangelist, Jeff Barr found here.
The bulk of announcements really seemed to center around better use and management of your AWS deployments. There are around 200 different instance types now available to end users, 66 Availability Zones within 21 geographic Regions and more on the way. Given these numbers, again, is it really any surprise that AWS is trying to educate and provide users better tools to manage and use more of their services in the most efficient way possible? Of course not.
The one thing that struck me, though, in repeated conversations throughout the day with AWS customers, partners, and those starting to stick their toe in the cloud water (what's taking you so long?), was the idea of how to get started. Specifically, this notion that they want to harness all of the "good" and scale that comes with AWS, but how do they get started - to the point where they're wondering how do we even get all of our existing data and the ongoing data sets generated daily, some relatively small and others quite large, into AWS to take advantage of all it has to offer. Granted, there is a reason I was having more of these kinds of conversations than others might have been since we specialize in moving data faster with a particularly strong focus on AWS and S3. But even in a casual conversation over our boxed lunch, I met an individual with one of the largest advertising agencies on the planet and they still have many workflows that are localized, using their existing data centers versus AWS. In talking with him and peeling back the layers of launching on cloud, he admitted he hadn't even really given much thought to how to first get their data into AWS. He just assumed they'd figure it out as they went along. Mind you, this is their chief architect responsible for the company's cloud strategy! It naturally reminded me of a saying coined around here back in at least 2016, perhaps earlier, and first blogged about in early 2017:
"Simply put, you can't do anything in the cloud until your data gets there, and nothing you do there matters until you get your results out."
While there are countless services being rolled out at regional AWS Summits and re:Invent each year, the fundamental challenge of how to get your data into AWS still hasn't really changed much since we first launched on AWS' Marketplace back in 2013. And that challenge is how to get your data into AWS S3 as fast and inexpensively as possible. In our minds, the answer is easy: Data Expedition's CloudDat.
CloudDat is available for trial on AWS Marketplace or by contacting us directly to discuss your cloud workflow and migration needs. We'll also be attending AWS re:Invent, December 2-6, 2019, in Las Vegas if you'd like to meet up in person.