Have no fear, cloud is here! .

This year I attended the biggest event AWS organises yearly, AWS re:invent in Las Vegas. Being on-site, amongst 53000 (!!!) other could enthusiasts and talking with clients, peers and people from AWS was not only a great learning experience but first and foremost a window to the future of computing in general.

I must admit AWS did great job making a venue this big work as well as it did. Working your way between the venues sprawled out between seven hotels was an ease compared to many other venues I’ve visited in the past.

During the discussions with peers and sessions I attended, one thing rose over everything else - cloud is here to stay. And you better be there to keep up!

During the daily keynote sessions, AWS made tens if not hundreds of new announcements from small new features in their current stack of products to entire new range of services. You can see all the new announcements from AWS’s site. 

A few worth mentioning include:

• AWS Security Hub, a new centralized place to see all security and compliance issues in AWS
• AWS Outpost, this could be really interesting if pricing is done right: Bring AWS services to virtually any datacentre thus making hybrid cloud solutions a real possibility
• In the ever-interesting area of Blockchain, AWS made two new product announcements: Amazon Managed Blockchain and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database, both to help you get most out of opportunities in Blockchain
• AWS RoboMaker, a new set of tools to help developers create new robotic applications

And dozens more.

I have been a lover of cloud computing for quite some time now, but this event truly opened my eyes to the sheer number of services and innovations only one cloud vendor brings. No single company or provider can ever keep up with the pace of innovation these big ones have. Everyone needs to partner up and create an ecosystem of players to work with. I had long talks with our customers, prospect customer and competitors alike. There’s more than enough work for everyone and with openness and collaboration between companies from different industry verticals, there’s huge unused potential in enhancing the use of data and cloud services to better serve the business needs of companies of all sizes.

Oh, and yes, I had some ironed shirts with me, but ended up wearing my Enfo hoodie or t-shirt and blazer more or less the whole week. The atmosphere was really laid-back there.

The mobile revolution back in the days started from Nordics. Now with AWS and Google opening data centers in Nordics, why not do the same with data-driven cloud revolution?

Juha Kukka works as a SVP Sales Finland at Enfo