This year's AWS Summit was a special edition, due to the restrictions and obligations associated with the organisation of physical events. To hear Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon or Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, you had to log in to follow their talks online. Our #InnovativePeople did it for you, here is what they retained from this 2020 edition.
One of the first topics in the opening keynote of the conference was the impact of the pandemic on cloud infrastructures. The crisis we have experienced has accelerated the digital transformation of companies and organisations, and clearly marks "the entry into a new technological era" , according to Werner Vogels.
The period of containment has highlighted new organisational and working models within companies of all sizes, where access to data and documents from the cloud is of paramount importance.
Supporting the world of healthcare, collaborative working and the increasing consumption of digital content during confinement
During this time, AWS has been there, ensuring the availability and quality of cloud services that support the applications of millions of businesses, start-ups, large corporations and government agencies. The cloud has been a major asset for all these companies, which have been able to adapt quickly to an unprecedented context.
"I think the last few months have really ushered in a new era of technology in which we've seen a fundamental shift in the way that everyone perceives not only the technology itself, but also how to access that technology, as well as how we build it," said the Amazon CTO.
In addition, AWS played a central role in providing tools in record time to meet the specific needs of healthcare actors (hospitals, medical institutions, healthcare personnel, etc.) to deal with the COVID-19 crisis.
Further evidence of the robustness and power of AWS infrastructure is the ability to accommodate the growing use of digital services such as video streaming during the containment period. This growth was massive as ReelGood.com estimates that the audience for SVOD sites in the US (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Disney) grew by 417% in the week of 13 April compared to the first week of March before the lockdown.
"In 2020 and the years to come, most organisations will transform into a fully cloud-based environment, where all workers will be able to access any application or service, from anywhere, at any time," said Werner Vogels.
The cloud has delivered on its promise of scalability. This is a critical issue in meeting the growing demand for access to hosted digital services. With machine learning capabilities, AWS is able to predict future traffic, allowing them to adjust their capacity to actual demand. Users are immediately redirected to the resources with the closest hosting. AWS Auto Scaling monitors user applications and automatically adjusts capacity to ensure that performance remains stable and predictable at the lowest possible cost to the user.
Werner Vogels emphasises one key point: when building software for the cloud, the architecture must be sound from the start. If developers neglect the fundamentals, they will come back to haunt them later on. Any solution is doomed to fail when the principles of robustness, security, data access and scalability are not anticipated and addressed properly at the design stage. The cloud provides unparalleled tools to address these challenges and scale.
The digital transformation of companies will be achieved through the cloud
Second highly anticipated keynote: that of Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services. The opportunity to come back to the reluctance that remains among some companies to abandon legacy proprietary infrastructures.
"There is still a segment of companies that try to fight gravity. They argue that they can still maintain an infrastructure cheaper than in the cloud... Often they are proud of the infrastructure they have built. Except you can't fight gravity: if something is really good for customers and businesses, it's going to evolve that way whether you like it or not," he explained.
Andy Jassy highlighted the force of inertia present in some companies. For him, the issue is not one of size, which would prevent large companies from innovating as quickly as smaller, more agile companies, but one of the will of the managers and the culture of the company.
The pandemic has highlighted the need for businesses to accelerate their digital transformation, and that of their processes and services. As the business environment becomes more decentralised and the workforce more dispersed, the cloud represents a tremendous opportunity to make this transition.
He emphasised the absolute necessity of using "builders", who have the necessary know-how to implement business solutions. Our teams of experts will support you as you move to the cloud and help you meet the challenges of governance and cybersecurity. To find out more, discover our Security, Cloud & Data offer.