Head of Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy and an impressive handful of invited guests took the stage on Wednesday to give the keynote address at this year’s AWS re:Invent conference. While the speakers’ backgrounds were widely varied, from finance, to journalism, to CGI in today’s biggest action films, it was very well played that each one of them expressed one common fact that clearly resonated with the 9,000+ people in attendance.
It’s a really exciting time to be agile in the cloud.
Jassy and his fellow speakers repeatedly pointed out that when organizations of any size combine the cloud’s boundary-free nature and limitless scalability with agile dev/test principles, the “pace of innovation” begins to ramp up at speeds that are difficult to predict by even the most optimistic member of any team.
You could see heads nod when Jassy mentioned that agile and the cloud are not only how forward-thinking teams innovate; they allow innovation to happen quickly, especially when the “shackles of on-premises infrastructure” have been removed.
One thing I was really impressed to hear become a topic throughout the keynote was the focus on enterprise software development and testing. Enterprise projects are large; they require a great deal of security, compliance, and governance by IT departments. A move to the cloud may come with some resistance by those currently in charge of maintaining these resources, but a cloud services provider that takes security seriously should be able to alleviate any concerns regarding the security of data or entire environments.
I was also happy to see a focus on the cloud’s ability to allow users to instantaneously provision, and de-provision, dev/test environments. The speed that this can be done acts as a key business prop to making businesses more agile, and therefore, more profitable. This is an action that should take mere seconds, not hours, days, or weeks..
Along with the focus on how agility ties directly into some of the cloud’s biggest assests, Jassy also touched on the option of a hybrid cloud—especially for those developing enterprise software and applications. It may not make sense for some organizations to move everything to the cloud, and those who require keeping some information onsite can still utilize agile development by shifting out those environments where, for instance, collaboration would thrive.
Amazon’s AWS portfolio was proudly projected numerous times for all in the crowd to see, and while other cloud service providers might not be able to claim NASA, Spotify, Pinterest, and the CIA as customers of their own, they all serve as the answer to one of Jassy’s questions to the audience. “Why does agility matter?”
His response? “Because enterprises can’t afford to be slow anymore.” No, they absolutely cannot—not when agile, and the cloud are right there for the taking.
To learn more about how Skytap helps organizations build better software faster with agile development, check out this short video.
