Amazon Web Services Inc. released a number of product announcements on Thursday, but it was the audience in New York City that became an unplanned part of the company’s AWS Summit event.

Protesters disrupted traffic outside the venue and interrupted a keynote presentation by Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels (pictured), vocalizing demands that the company sever ties with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

“Security had to take many of them out for the first half-hour of the keynote,” reported Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the conference. “I thought he handled it respectfully.”

Miniman was joined by guest host Corey Quinn, and they discussed announcements made by Vogels during his keynote and the company’s focus on event-centric architecture (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

EventBridge now available

Despite the disruption, Vogels announced general availability of Amazon EventBridge, a serverless event bus designed to let customers easily integrate AWS services with software as a service applications. The SaaS elements can be hosted anywhere, according to the AWS announcement.

“By looking at what EventBridge is and the fact that anyone who wants to can integrate it into their applications, you absolutely could wind up with a deep native integration coming from another large hyperscale cloud provider,” Quinn said. “The only question is: Will they?”

The EventBridge processing model forms the basis for AWS CloudWatch Events, AWS’ internal monitoring solution. The goal is to gather metrics and give users different ways to present them.

“It all ties back to events,” Quinn said. “CloudWatch Events is what’s driving a lot of things like EventBridge, and the idea of an event-centric architecture is really what we’re trying to see software develop into.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit NYC event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit NYC. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Amazon