There was plenty of enterprise love going on at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week, but Amazon CTO Werner Vogels also made sure to highlight the amazing things that startups like GitHub, PagerDuty, and NuoDB are also doing with AWS in a CTO-to-CTO fireside chat yesterday.
Vogels sat down separately with NuoDB CTO Seth Proctor, PagerDuty CTO Andrew Miklas, and GitHub CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath in front of a packed house to talk about what’s happening behind the scenes at these quickly growing companies.
GitHub’s Chris Wanstrath makes a point to Amazon’s Werner Vogels.
Although the technology being offered by each of the three startups may be different, one common theme that came out in each conversation was the challenge associated with supporting customers in different locations around the globe.
“As people increasingly build systems across multiple geographies, we’re encountering more and more legal concerns,” said Proctor, citing German data privacy laws as an example. “When you want to provide a service globally, you need to really think about how you protect your data and stay in compliance with all the different laws.” To address such needs, NuoDB offers a Web-scale distributed database that includes multi-region support.
For PagerDuty, the operations performance platform that integrates with New Relic’s alerting capabilities, global laws and compliance also came up as an area it addresses for its customers. However, one of the key topics of discussion with Miklas centered around DevOps. The biggest change that he’s noticed in DevOps? “It’s catching on in more industries,” said Miklas. “DevOps used to be this thing that only startups talked about, but now enterprises are trying to adopt that mentality.” And where does the speed associated with DevOps come from? Tooling and processes, said Miklas. “You just can’t do daily deploys without having a DevOps mindset.”
GitHub is also no stranger to the challenges of distributing data globally. Well-known in the industry for its distributed development approach (check out Wanstrath’s talk about the benefits of having a remote workforce in this FutureStack13 video), GitHub not only operates on a global scale internally, but also externally, powering GitHub.com for its millions of customers around the world. “We’re trying to change the way the world builds software,” said Wanstrath. In an effort to encourage greater GitHub adoption outside the open source community, the company announced a new version of GitHub Enterprise that runs on AWS earlier this week.
A number of other exciting announcements came out at re:Invent and it’s been a blast for New Relic to participate again as an event sponsor. Look out for an AWS re:Invent recap next week!