Year after year, techies, devops and newbies come together in the month of May to the Mumbai Exhibition Center (NESCO) to exchange and gather knowldege, product information, training and certifications from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Delegates to AWS Summit is increasing by 45% year on year, and is named as the “largest IT event in India”. This year online registrations crossed 15K for the Open summit. The event is across two days where the first is specifially for the partner network, and the second one is for general public.
AWS Summit 2019, held in Mumbai (14 & 15 May) had 100+ content sessions with about 40 breakout sessions across 8 tracks. The session area was surronded by exhibition areas with multiple zones. A certification lounge specifially for certified delegates with business class treatment was available. The breakout sessions gave emphasis to migration, bfsi and media. Also there was a program for AWS Women in Tech day.
Every year the delegates coming to the AWS Summit comprises of system integrators, developers, start-ups, enterprises and SMBs. The community or user groups have a reported strength of about 40K across 20+ user groups in 10+ cities. AWS Training and Certification has trained more than 260K people and certified more than 75K already.
The AWS Summit had an exclusive area where AWS in house builders demonstrated some proof of concepts, which include Smart Car Parking, Security Automation, Intelligent Car Damage Accessor, Digital Dermatology, Virtual Personal Banking Assistant, Keyboardless KYC.
The twitter wall which shows tweets with #AWSSummit on a big screen, though been there for many previous events, was an all time big one and the tweeters were heavily inspired to increase the tweet count. On an average there was 400+ tweets every hour.
AWS Services are being used by millions of active customers over 190 countries around the world, including hundreds of thousands of active customers in India. Companies are migrating their critical workloads to the AWS cloud to effect cost savings, induce innovation, and speed up time-to-market. As commented by AWS spokes person, Indian customers are scaling heavily, and transforming the services to their customers.
AWS customers include: Ashok Leyland, Air Asia, airbnb, Goibibo, Bajaj Capital, Bombay Stock Exchange, Capital Float, Clevertap, Future Group, Hindustan Unilever Limited, Hotstar, India Today, LimeRoad, MedLife, MakeMyTrip, Nazara, Practo, PolicyBazaar.com, RazorPay, redBus, Shaadi.com, ShareChat, Tata Sky, Wynk, Zeta, and many more.
These customers have either migrated their legacy applications from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud or are developing new cloud-native applications. They are using AWS services and paying as they consume instead of buying and deploying their own infrastructure.
See for instance with Ashok Leyland who is the fourth largest bus manufacturer in the world with $4 billion in annual revenue: they moved their infrastructure from another cloud to the AWS platform. Speaking at the AWS Summit, Venkatesh Natarajan, Chief Digital Officer and Senior Vice President – IT, Ashok Leyland said changing customer demands are driving innovation at the company.
The Amazon Partner Network (APN) is very important in the AWS success story. The APN constitutes of hundreds of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs) around the world. The partner acceptance in India is growing rapidly since they started office in India. APN Members build and deliver innovative solutions and services utilizing the AWS buliding blocks and managed services.
Analyzing the service enhancements by AWS into Indian market, we can know that the demand is ever increasing. Addition of third zone at Mumbai, increased edge locations and increased regional edge cache capacity are a few of them.
Breakouts sessions of FSI were very insightful and were adequately representing the key trends in the Financial services segments. All the sessions were pointing out the immense acceptance of Cloud as a platform to quickly build IT capabilities and how those become pillars for business expansion, to solve customer satisfaction challenges, and helped in building new business verticals within short span of time.
The Sessions by HDFC Life team was the best example to show how an internal team can become product development experts by marrying the benefit of business eco system understanding with organisational priorities and build cutting edge products in shorter timelines. The bouquet products developed shows that, AWS cloud as a platform has various dynamic offerings to resolve challenges to compress the development cycle of a product drastically.
The sessions by Bajaj Finance team, and many Cloud technology solution partners were all highlighting the 170+ services available in the AWS eco system to rapidly build and deliver business solutions and how being agile brings considerable value to a business. The confidence showcased and case studies explained were ample reasons to bestow confidence in AWS platform’s ability to match highest expectations in terms of scalability and stability.
The concluding session was a panel discussion, attended by veterans of industry were highlighting the major disruptions in technology front and how those will define the trends in Financial business landscape in India. Many of the global trends were expected to be implemented in India soon in banking, NBFC and fintech businesses. The imminent threat to banks from fintech companies were looming large on it’s face and it’s high time for banks to prepare for digital only banking brands/ platforms to stay relevant and on top of this business. The interconnectivity between various platforms still remain a major hurdle due to various compliance and policy matters, even though technology is acting as a strong enabler.
The trend in FSI sessions were clear, the CISOs who seen cloud as a new kid on the block had all changed their mindset and looking towards as a matured man waiting to explode it’s potential in resolving many challenges that plagued the industry for long. AWS is positioned as the leader in this block with it’s futuristic and over the top technology solutions.
Breakout sessions on Media was emphasising on the use of CloudFront the Content Delivery Network, its enhancements and additions. AWS has invested in creating a new availablity zone in Mumbai with additions in CloudFront PoPs. The enhanced lambda at edge will provide dyanmic capabilities to the CloudFront running at the edge. The presentation more or less covered Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF – Web Application Firewall, AWS Shield, Lambda@Edge. The showed how AWS is driving innovation at the Edge to enable media industry to deliver scalable and secure customer experience. Customers can now accelerate delivery of content, get more control over traffic and avail higher level of detection, protection and mitigation against large and sophisticated attacks. This clearly shows that more and more Media houses will be onboarding applications to the AWS cloud.
Media and Entertainment companies are increasingly taking advantage of the scalability, elasticity and security of the AWS Cloud to enable their businesses in new ways. This session covered the key trends shaping Media and Entertainment industry both in India and globally. They shared examples of media industry customers who are using AWS Services to drive transformational change. Highlights of recent announcements from AWS that influence the Media and Entertainment space were also part of the presentation.
Team from Innoval were expecting to get much more, whereas most of the best practices suggested were in practice by our team for over two years. Take this opportunity to mention some of the implementations. Cloud Front and serverless using Lambda with our OptiMedia front end and backend, as well as our XeMarks. Transcoding video for operator previews using Lambda and ffmpeg, thumbnailing media files on arrival at s3 storage, extracting media information and content for indexing, DynamoDB stream triggers and lambda for account updates are some of the features integrated into our applications which are built around a custom DataLake. Where as OptiVisitor utilizes the virtualization platform AWS Fargate and MariaDB cluster on EC2. Most of our landscape is deployed using aws-cli or cloud formation such that any beta or AtoB testing can happen on a new environment with shortest time and devops involvement.