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AWS re:Invent 2022 — My Seasonal Highlights
The world is asynchronous. The world is event-driven. — Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com
It required a world stage to propagate asynchrony and event-driven architecture in our modern era of cloud computing. And that’s precisely what Dr. Werner Vogels delivered in his keynote at re:Invent 2022.
As a cloud-scale conference, re:Invent serves a different purpose to different people. It is a stage to bring and sell ideas, show technology directions, showcase innovations, incubate business visions, listen to the community, learn from the experts, create business opportunities, and of course, criticize when things fall short of expectations!
In this brief article, I focus on the things that I liked and will help with the future of serverless and its adoption.
Intellectual re:Invent
As Werner mentioned in his keynote, many thought-leaders of software architecture have been advocating for event-driven computing and building loosely coupled applications for years. Thanks to cloud and serverless, what many of us pushed aside as hard to achieve with previous generation technologies is now available as a commodity for everyone. Hence the urge to shift our minds to change our thinking!
As I was making room to accommodate new books, the following two-decade-old book on Java Message Service (JMS) caught my attention. JMS might have a new name, but it had the basic concepts for building event-driven applications.
Messages, queues for point-to-point communication, events, and topics for publishing and subscribing (pub-sub) were all there. Cloud and serverless rejuvenated these fundamentals with readymade building blocks, i.e., managed services. Instead of hand-coding with JMS APIs, we compose our applications using managed services!
Though it may sound like we have come a full circle, the scale of applications we build, and the speed of development are beyond comparison. Hence the theme of asynchrony and event-driven architecture struck a chord with me immediately.
