AWS re:Invent has quickly become a must-attend event for those interested in cloud computing, devops, web and mobile infrastructure. In just its second year running, it’s the event for AWS services aimed at startups, large companies, developers, partners, and anyone interested in the cloud and its applications in AWS environment.

AWS re:Invent gives entrepreneurs and developers the knowledge and skills to build sophisticated, scalable applications in the cloud. Hottest entrepreneurs have built their businesses on gaming, mobile, web, and Big Data on AWS.

Agile in the cloud

During the event, Head of Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy pointed out that cloud’s boundary-free nature and limitless scalability bundled with agile dev/test principles can provide pace of innovation for enterprises. DevOps agile methodology and the cloud not only gives team to innovate, but they also innovate quickly.

A move to the cloud and focus on enterprise software development and testing brings instantaneous provision and de-provision of dev environments. Geoff Cubitt, co-CEO with Roundarch Isobar, talked generally on larger large enterprises where they have creative, technology, complex and sophisticated problems to build compelling and engaging users’ experiences.

Roundarch overcomes these problems by building web apps and mobile apps – keeping DevOps, user experience, digital strategy and creativity as the core component. The company has leverage AWS service to build redshif – an idea of creating a digital offering that’s both marketing and product, and has value for the customer

Matt VanBergen of CityTech said AWS infrastructure and innovation is providing best opportunity for software developers and architects to offer a turn-key solution without having to build our data centers. CityTech specialized primarily in general enterprise application development. By leveraging AWS, the company started getting into large scale web content management and development environment implementations. VanBergen noted the DevOps and cloud combination give the fundamental pieces of architecture and enabled the company to provide a managed hosting service for web experience management – specifically the Adobe platform.

AWS platform + DevOps

API is now widely used by developers, but their reliability is still an issue, since it is possible an unlimited number of problems with the myriad of devices and platforms that people use. Amazon tools in several ways manage reliability of APIs. A large number of cloud companies use elastic beanstalk, AWS opsworks, cloud formation and raw EC2 for ops to create tools to automate service oriented architecture. The key is to be able to repeat those deploys quickly.

Several new startups gained exposure at AWS re:Invent after adopting DevOps culture that had utilized AWS’s platform. Nitrous.IO helps developers streamline and manage their workflow when developing cloud applications in the cloud. Its infrastructure allows developer to speed up software development time by reducing the setup, distribution and management time. Nitrous uses AWS EC2 and EBS along with development environment templates for Ruby, RubyonRails, Python, Django, NodeJS and Go.

CardFlight, which provides hardware for mobile payments, is providing the middleware between the app developer and the company using Amazon’s EC2 for production for staging, RDS My SQL, S3, Node.js solution. Tim Saunders, Co-Founder and CTO at CardFlight, said the company makes mobile payments really simple and easy for developers to get mobile payments up and running within their custom applications. AWS sessions have really helped around security, encryption, and making PCI compliance easy and simple for the company to run.

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Another startup Koality uses AWS’s EC2 to decrease the time it takes to test software changes. This allows engineers to spend more of their time coding and less time waiting to see if their changes worked.  Jonathan Chu (CEO) and Jordan Potter (COO) from Koality said using the Koality platform for software testing, enterprises can increase their engineers’ productivity. Koality is an integration platform which automatically parallelizes the test suites across available virtual machines, prevents broken builds, works behind a firewall and optimizes spin-up and teardown of the VMs for maximum price efficiency.

Finally, Runscope launched Runscope Radar, a cloud-automated mobile backend service testing tool runs on AWS, using EC2, VPC, S3, Glacier and Route 53. The tool is designed to equip developers to understand their applications through the development lifecycle. Working with Radar, developer starts with a list of queries and adjusts the settings to determine if the API tests are based on actual requests received from applications to most accurately reproduce the real situation.