Five days every year, the industry takes a break from its usual competitive routine and turns its collective attention to Las Vegas, where Amazon Inc. sets the agenda for the next 12 months in the public cloud at its re:Invent conference. Last week’s summit was no different, with a slew of launches spanning all the major trends that will make an impact on its customers in the coming year.

Containers, containers, containers

Containerization became one of the central themes of the event after Jeff Bezos’ firm rolled out a major update to its managed implementation of the fast-rising virtualization technology. Partners were quick to pounce on the announcement, with application delivery startup Appcito Inc. and Shippable Inc. both pledging support for EC2 Container Service immediately after the news crossed the wire.

The latter outfit, which sells a continuous integration platform that promises to help developers produce code faster and more efficiently, also added integration with the new software repository introduced as part of the upgrade. The EC2 Container Registry provides a convenient environment for storing common application components like databases and operating system images.

When it’s time to launch a new instance, a developer can simply pull up their organization’s catalog and copy the necessary files directly through the configuration console. That kills two birds with one stone, speeding up the creation of containers while avoiding the risk involved in downloading components from external sources that could be infected with malware.

Upping the ante on security

However, there’s much more to protecting containers than merely ensuring the integrity of the code running inside. There’s also the matter of tracking users and defending against external threats,  which is what a startup called Threat Stack Inc. is trying to address with the improved iteration of its namesake security service that debuted at re:Invent.

New integration with Docker and Amazon’s event logging service enables organizations to set restrictions on the behavior of their cloud-based containers in order to prevent unauthorized configuration changes that could open the door to a breach. Threat Stack says that administrators are automatically notified when its software encounters suspicious activity to allow for faster incident response.

Old meets new

Accompanying all the container updates at the summit was the news that Teradata Corp.  is finally bringing its database to Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Support announcements are a dime a dozen in the retail-turned-cloud-giant’s ecosystem, but the availability of Teradata Database on EC2 holds special significance for a number of reasons.

Chief among them is its widespread use in on-premise data warehousing environments, many of which are moving to public clouds such as Amazon’s as organizations seek to reduce operational costs. Making the database available on the largest of the bunch is a natural response to that trend, especially now that increasing competition from alternatives like Hadoop is putting more pressure than ever on Teradata to be more price-competitive.

Photo via theCUBE