AWS re:Invent and the 5 fronts of the cloud arms race

For the last six years running, the most important event in cloud computing has been AWS re:Invent, where the market leader announces its latest improvements. This year, 44,000 people descended upon a very crowded set of Las Vegas venues spread across multiple hotels for breakout sessions, certification exams, a diverse expo floor, and the all-important keynotes where the newest offerings were announced. Increasingly, the public cloud arms race is being waged on four fronts, with a fifth quickly emerging. All five had a healthy set of announcements--here are some of the highlights. AWS started the cloud revolution with its S3 object storage service in 2006, which was quickly followed by its EC2 compute offering and a set of other IaaS products.