Attendees shuffling in to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' keynote bright and early on Day 3 of the AWS re: Invent conference, looked anything but bright. I suspect their sluggishness had a bit to do with the re: Play party the night before, which featured laser tag, photo booths, karaoke, and of course unlimited drinks. Nonetheless, when Vogels took stage, everyone seemed to perk up.
In typical Amazon fashion, several new announcements were made during the keynote, including Amazon Data Pipeline, a new orchestration service for data-driven workflows (complete with a drag and drop interface that reminds me of our beloved CA AppLogic solution), and new EC2 instance types: cluster high memory and high storage. And perhaps my favorite Vogels quote of the morning in reference to the traditional data center: "I've tried hugging a lot of servers in my life and believe me, they don't hug you back. They hate you."
Later in the day, CA Technologies hosted a session on CA Automation Suite for Clouds Powered by Amazon Web Services - a new solution announced that morning. There was a good deal of buzz and excitement surrounding our Amazon partnership and the team spent a lot of time fielding questions and inquiries about this new solution on the show floor and during the session. This solution opens both CA Technologies and Amazon to a whole new enterprise customer base that wants to bridge the gap between on-premise and public cloud environments. I think most would agree, hybrid is the future of cloud. Stay tuned for interviews with the CA Technologies folks that made this solution possible.
And finally, the fireside chat with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos capped off an extremely successful week in Las Vegas. With standing room only - by far the most attended session of the show - Vogels interviewed Bezos about everything from innovation, to entrepreneurship, to the application of lean in Amazon's customer service practices. And if that wasn't enough, he even talked about his special project, Blue Origin that aimed to make space travel easier and more affordable. Talk about a full plate!
So with the conference coming to an end, I'll leave you with one last parting quote that Bezos stressed in his keynote: "innovation requires the willingness to fail". It's a good sentiment to keep in our minds as we head home and get back to work finding new ways to innovate in the ever evolving world of cloud.