AWS re:Invent - The Future is Now

This past week, several of us had the pleasure of attending Amazon Web Service’s inaugural re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. In the weeks leading up to the conference, it wasn’t fully obvious to me just how big this show was going to be (not for lack of information, but mostly because I was focused on other things).

When I picked up my badge in the Venetian and walked through the enormous Expo hall, it struck me: IaaS, the cloud, is no longer a bleeding edge technology used by a few daring early adopters. The economics and flexibilities afforded are too big to be ignored - by anyone.

Attending sessions and talking to customers showed that, more than ever before, application architectures are distributed. The four design principles outlined in Werner Vogels excellent keynote on day 2 of the conference - Werner calls them “The Commandments of 21st Century Architectures” made it obvious that the cloud requires people to build their applications in fundamentally different ways from traditional on-premise applications.

While at the conference, I spent quite some time at the Sumo Logic booth, explaining and demoing our solutions to customers. Most of them run distributed systems in AWS, and it never took more than 2 minutes for them to realize why their lives would be much easier with a log management solution -- having a central tool to collect and quickly analyze logs from a large distributed app is essential to troubleshooting, monitoring and optimizing an app.

Once I started to explain how our product is architected, and started relating to the architecture principles Werner outlined, most people understood why Sumo Logic’s product can scale and perform the way it does, unlike some other “cloud washed” solutions on the market.

In addition to having a highly relevant set of attendees for us, the conference also was a great place to find other vendors who exist in the same ecosystem - we’ve begun several good conversations about integrations and partnerships.

The response from people we talked to was overwhelmingly positive. During the conference, we’ve seen a big increase in sign-ups for our Sumo Logic Free product. We will definitely be back next year.