Cloud, Data, and Political Protests Mark the 2022 AWS Summit

It was an surprising day at the Javits Center. What began with a sudden change in the keynote lineup at the AWS Summit right here in New York wound up with a cascade of protesters disrupting the proceedings.

CTO Werner Vogels had been booked to ship the opening keynote at the occasion, however Martin Beeby, principal developer advocate for Amazon Web Services (AWS), took the stage as an alternative. It was then introduced that Vogels had referred to as out sick from the summit and Beeby stepped in, main off with the standard rundown of providers and assets at the cloud supplier’s disposal. “We have 84 availability zones across 26 geographical regions,” Beeby stated.

His presentation included notes on Amazon’s funding in renewable vitality, nearly 16 gigawatts of it from such sources as photo voltaic and wind initiatives throughout 19 nations. Beeby additionally mentioned how the legacy of early innovations affect future improvements, citing how the width of railroad tracks turned a consider the improvement of rocket boosters for house journey as a result of the rockets needed to be moved by rail. “Decisions you make in the past stick with you for a long time in lots of interesting ways,” he stated. “Business constraints can date back to decisions you made years before.”

Beeby associated that to choices corporations make about the cloud, which can have long-term influence on future purposes. He additionally mentioned how the ever-growing circulate of knowledge generated by programs, typically in terabytes and petabytes of knowledge, may be processed by way of cloud assets. “The cloud has changed the way that we do business, the way that we can store vast amounts of information,” Beeby stated.

The first full hour of the keynote ran just about on observe, together with extra dialogue of knowledge technique, scalability, flexibility, and safety. “We want to try to become a more data-driven organization,” Beeby stated.

Protesters Take Action at AWS Summit

Everything modified when protesters took motion in the closing half-hour of the keynote.

Listen to “DOS Won’t Hunt: Cloud, Data, and Political Protests at the AWS Summit” on Spreaker.

In the midst of Beeby’s dialogue of machine studying, a protester stood up straight behind me, so shut I felt him brush by my proper shoulder as he rose.

“When will Amazon answer to the thousands of people demanding Amazon Web Services stop profiting from violence across the world?” the protester shouted. “Your platform powers racist policing, mass deportations, and war!”

This echoed the disruption of Vogels’s keynote at the 2019 AWS Summit, the place comparable questions had been shouted at that occasion.

On Tuesday, the protester cited Amazon’s participation in Project Nimbus, the migration of serious elements of Israel’s authorities IT infrastructure to the cloud, a contract collectively awarded in 2021 to Amazon and Google. Concrete particulars about Nimbus are a bit arduous to search out, however one in every of the complaints raised by some shareholders — and even some staff at Google and Amazon — is the mission would transfer a lot of Israel’s public cloud to assets inside its personal borders and authorized jurisdiction, doubtlessly assuaging worldwide boycotts and different strain on the nation stemming from its ongoing battle with Palestine.

At first, Beeby halted his remarks till the protester was led away by occasion workers, ready till the shouts died down earlier than persevering with.

But that was simply the starting. Other protesters stood up one after the different elsewhere in the viewers. Each time, they too, had been led away by occasion workers — solely to be adopted by one other heckling protest. One protester repeatedly shouted, “No more tech for ICE and police!” earlier than being picked up and bodily faraway from the venue. (ICE is the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement company.)

This sequence repeated a number of occasions with Beeby halting, typically directing protesters to talk with Amazon representatives away from the keynote house, then trying to renew his presentation.

The final protester to disrupt the keynote stood up at the tail finish of the speech to shout: “Civil rights organizations from across the country wrote a letter to Amazon Web Services calling on the company to end its plans to host the dangerous Department of Homeland Security HART [Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology] biometric database,” the protester stated. “This database will fuel mass surveillance and discrimination.”

Such public clashes might proceed as home and international authorities entities flip more and more to personal sector expertise suppliers to replace, revamp, and overhaul their IT assets. AWS and friends corresponding to Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle steadily compete for these doubtlessly profitable contracts, typically difficult one another in court docket over the approach such contracts are awarded.

At Tuesday’s occasion, Beeby apologized to the viewers for the disruptions, every of which solely lasted a few minutes, and continued with the remainder of his presentation.

Outside the Javits Center, a small group of protesters remained to proceed their vocal, but peaceable, outcry aimed toward AWS. Not the first time the firm has handled criticism about its enterprise practices and not prone to be the final time such subjects come up, although a lot of the viewers at the summit was lower than supportive of the protesters.

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