In Las Vegas next week, from the 6th to the 9th of October, Amazon will be holding its AWS re:Invent conference, which CBR will be attending.

The event will showcase what Amazon Web Services is doing, what it has done and importantly what it is planning to do.

Although it is the dominant public cloud vendor, AWS can’t afford to rest on its laurels, with Microsoft and Google looking to catch up ad surpass it.

CBR has put together a list of what to expect from the conference.

1. Rackspace and Amazon

The story came out earlier this week that Rackspace is working with AWS to shift corporate onto the cloud service.

While neither company has commented, it is likely that this will be officially announced at the conference.

Rackspace has a similar deal with Microsoft in place, which sees the company work with customers in order to incorporate Azure technologies and provide managed services.

2. New features

AWS is constantly rolling out new features but expect a few big ones at the event. With Microsoft making a big push on its Azure platform with HDInsight, its analytics offering, this could be an opportunity for AWS to push in the same way.

While it already has some analytics capabilities, the event may see new features that perhaps align it more strategically with the likes of Hadoop.

The company has launched its Elasticsearch Service before the event, so expect some more talk about this. It is a real-time distributed search and analytics engine.

Document oriented, it doesn’t require a schema to be defined up-front.

The enterprise application side may also be an area for it to offer some new features.

3. Partners and collaborations

Every tech conference has a number of announcements around collaborative agreements to work together, this probably won’t be any different.

The Rackspace deal appears to already be in place, but more should be expected.

The AWS cloud is growing, which is partly due to its push into the enterprise segment. To back this drive, the company may showcase some high profile clients but it will also have to develop or highlight some advances in its profile.

This may include something along the lines of security products and new services. Work with systems integrators could also be something that will come out of the event.

4. Price cuts

One of the ways that AWS is staying on top is by having some of the cheapest prices around but more price cuts are likely.

While there may not be broad sweeping cuts, there may be some aimed at its most prominent products.

Having not lowered its prices in the past 18 months, the company could well be due one and if there isn’t one then questions will be asked as to why.

5. Internet of Things

Microsoft launched its Azure IoT Suite, Salesforce has created an IoT Cloud and Oracle is also making a push in this area.

AWS already has offerings in this field but it wouldn’t be too surprising to see a few announcements being made.

This could come in the form of a suite of services, more connectivity or better integration between services, which would allow for data to be more effectively accessed and used.