AWS Storage Day 2020

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Transcript

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Catchpoint. Look, 80 percent of performance and availability issues don’t occur within your application code in your data center itself. It occurs well outside those boundaries, so it’s difficult to understand what’s actually happening. What Catchpoint does is makes it easier for enterprises to detect, identify, and of course, validate how reachable their application is, and of course, how happy their users are. It helps you get visibility into reachability, availability, performance, reliability, and of course, absorbency, because we’ll throw that one in, too. And it’s used by a bunch of interesting companies you may have heard of, like, you know, Google, Verizon, Oracle—but don’t hold that against them—and many more. To learn more, visit www.catchpoint.com, and tell them Corey sent you; wait for the wince.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief. I am Pete Cheslock. Corey, while being back from his paternity leave, is still not here. We are having too much fun. And by we, I mean I'm joined again with Jesse DeRose. Hey, Jesse. 

Jesse: Thanks as always for having me, Pete. 

Pete: It's so much fun to again chat with people outside of my little family unit, that we've just decided not to give this back to Corey. And luckily, Corey has many other podcasts that he does, he was pretty happy to give it away.

Jesse: I feel like you should never talk about your children that way, but he's got a plethora at this point. So, he's willing to kind of share the wealth.

Pete: Exactly. And if you notice, we have a new theme song that came out, I think it was last week was the first week that we brought in the new theme song, which is I think much in line with a previous episode where we talked about ’80s breakdancing movies that the new theme song kind of has that vibe to it.

Jesse: I hope you're wearing the Members Only jean jacket that I sent you, along with the shades to match the uniform.

Pete: Yeah. I mean, I was born in ’80, so the ’80s for me, I was very young. I'm kind of waiting for the ’90s movies to come around again because I want to rock out my JNCO jeans and my wallet chain. 

Jesse: [laugh], yes.

Pete: And all that good stuff.

Jesse: I am ready.

Pete: Exactly. Well, what are we talking about today? Well, earlier this week, AWS Storage Day 2020 happened on Tuesday. If you were a part of that, it was a free online event. As Amazon called it, a full day online event. Except it was only about four hours long, so kind of mailing it in on that one, huh?

Jesse: Can we start discussing that with our boss and say that a full day of work is technically just four hours? Can we just start working with that going forward?

Pete: Yeah, we'll just say it right now. So, hey, Corey, we're done for the day. Put in the old college four.

Jesse: [laugh]. That's what you say, “I put in the old college try. I just did my full day of four hours, according to AWS. So, this has been great. I'll talk to you tomorrow.”

Pete: Exactly. Well, Storage Day this year—it's the second year in a row if I'm remembering it correctly. 2019 was the last year they did that—and I feel like this kind of ties into the fact that there's just so many announcements that happened around re:Invent, that leading up into re:Invent, you have a lot of announcements to maybe soften the blow for a lot of folks. And Storage Day, really is just this whole day—well, four hours worth of a whole day—talking about everything related to storage. And we're talking about things like S3, EBS, EFS, FSx, for the five huge enterprises that probably use FSx. 

Although if you actually do use FSx, I'd be curious to hear about how you like it and what you think of it because we don't really hear a lot of people using it. But these are all the services, plus many more, that Amazon talked about as part of its Storage Day.

Jesse: Yeah, it was a really interesting discussion. I greatly appreciate that AWS broke out this discussion prior to AWS re:Invent, but they dropped a lot of knowledge on us all at once, and in, like, rapid-fire succession, I was really, kind of… not necessarily surprised, but there's a lot of information that they shared all at once. And I have to admit that after sitting through this presentation, I now have a greater appreciation for Apple's slow presentation style. As much as I hate it; as much as I hate sitting for an hour and a half for one announcement while they toot their own horn, I have to say that the buildup and getting me involved in the story and bringing me along with them. It works, it absolutely works. And it was kind of hard for me to pick up on all the things that went on during AWS Storage Day this year because there was a lot of things going on.

Pete: And honestly, the fact they give so much information is really amazing in, I guess, both their ability to tout, in many cases, minor feature changes that most SaaS businesses would just turn on and maybe blog about. But this is—obviously the engine of AWS is so good at discussing their wins. But you're right, it's just a huge amount. On Monday, Jeff Barr of course, wrote the blog post with a lot of these details, linking to countless other blog posts. And I think it really speaks to just how, probably every, or nearly every Amazon service ties into storage in some way. It's a huge, huge part of this ecosystem. 

Jesse: Absolutely. 

Pete: So, as you can imagine, there were so many new features that we're not even going to be able to cover them all throughout the course, but we did want to call out some of the big ones, or at least what we thought were the biggest ones, the most interesting new features, new product announcements that came out, and also just touch on some of the other things that we thought were pretty interesting as well. And yeah, there was a lot of fun stuff. I think the biggest one that was announced was the S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which is a class storage tier within S3, adds additional levels of archive access. So, if you imagine Intelligent-Tiering, you know, you have the automatic tiering of data from frequently accessed to infrequently accessed as things age out, they essentially automate that for you. So, as things are not accessed, you just start automatically paying less for them. And anything automatic in a cost savings world is going to help you save money. 

If you don't have to think about it and it just does it for you, it's fantastic. Well, Intelligent-Tiering added in these additional tiers—which they are Glacier—level tiers. They are additional places that your data can eventually move to as they start aging out based on a whole series of criteria. But there's caveats. There's more caveats now. 

Before, one of the interesting things that we actually learned as part of this—because it was buried in a pricing page footnote—is that when you store something into Intelligent-Tiering, there is a minimum storage time period that you will get charge...