AWS re:Invent 2019

Software Natives was at AWS re:Invent 2019, one of the largest IT conferences of its kind with over 50,000 attendees! The variety of topics is correspondingly overwhelming: From “classic“ cloud topics to “Industrial IOT“ (IIOT) to the ubiquitous “serverless“ topics. With over 200 services, AWS offers solutions for every industrial sector.

The event was correspondingly interesting and instructive for us!

In a 2-hour workshop, we developed an integrated IIOT solution: An industrial device sent temperature values to an edge computer, which then transferred the data to the cloud, where it was persisted, evaluated by a machine learning algorithm and the results graphically displayed.

In a speech on robotics it was demonstrated how the coordinates of robot movements are captured and persisted in the cloud in order to be able to play back their processes afterwards with a 3D model. The robot models look exactly like their physical counterparts. Analyzing the interaction of the robots helps to uncover and eliminate unwanted dead times and other weaknesses in the common process.

Serverless was ubiquitous and seems to become an important part of many services. Serverless allows so called “functions“ (AWS Lambda) to be fully automatically rolled out to production in seconds. This is even faster and easier than is already the case with container technology. The whole thing also works for industrial applications, again with the help of edge computing. The biggest advantage of functions is the gain in agility: new software features can be very efficiently implemented and deployed. This improves the lead time for new features enormously!

With almost 3,000 presentations and sessions, project management topics were not neglected. Mark Schwartz, author of several books on the topic, explained that DevOps can be initiated by all three layers: From the CEO level, from the middle management level, as well as from the developers themselves. He tried to illustrate this with good examples and valuable details.

For us it was a very instructive event and we are happy to pass on the collected knowledge to our customers!