This week I will attend Amazon re:Invent for the first time. The annual conference encompasses the ever increasing number of AWS service offerings. The conference is a bit of a sprawling affair taking place in several of the larger Las Vegas hotels.

Much of what I’m hoping to see involves Amazon’s answers to their rivals for cloud workloads. AWS is the clear leader in cloud, Microsoft, Google, and even Oracle have recently made attempts to cut into Amazon’s market share. Microsoft has done an admirable job of leveraging enterprise connections coupled with some very nice cloud products to emerge has a worthy challenger. Google recently made some leadership changes at the top which observers of the space find intriguing. Finally, Oracle keeps pushing in terms of price to performance ratios. AWS has to keep the pedal to medal in terms of innovation to keep their lead position.

Going into this week, Amazon has made a ton of announcements; so many, in fact, it’s been difficult to keep pace with the updates. Despite the tremendous output, even more are expected this week.

Below are some areas where I hope to hear how AWS plans to push forward:

EC2 Pricing - Amazon frequently updates EC2 IaaS offerings with better price to performance ratios available from advances in processor technology from vendors such as Intel and NVIDIA. Amazon has also led the way in allowing for auction style pricing as well as other on-demand pricing options for customers.

IoT - Amazon has already provides a full suite of IoT management offerings. It’ll be interesting to see how these mature.

CI/CD - Amazon has a decent offering for CI/CD, yet many still seem to prefer 3rd party offerings. As CI/CD is is a key enabler of deploying cloud native workloads, I’m curious to see what Amazon has planned here.

Serverless / Function as a Service (FaaS)- AWS has been a leader in this space and they can continue to push the envelop in new directions. Amazon has had a few interesting ideas such as serverless databases. I’d love to hear more about this and to see how that concept has matured. Additionally, I’m looking forward to how Amazon makes using FaaS easier, more useful, etc.

Kubernetes (K8s) - Kubernetes has become the hot tech of the moment and almost everyone seems to have their own managed K8s service. IBM’s purchase of Red Hat seemed to be about Red Hat acquiring OpenShift maybe more than the famed Linux distribution. Even storage vendor Netapp has been out talking up a Kubernetes offering. Amazon can’t stay silent here given recent industry moves.

There are many aspects where Amazon can extend their position as the number one provider in cloud service. This week can go a long way to close out the year on top.