AWS re:Invent 2022 - Part One
Introduction
For a decade - as long as Nasstar has been an AWS Partner Network (APN), the AWS global cloud community has come together at re:Invent to meet, get inspired, and rethink what's possible. The event is hosted in Las Vegas and is AWS's biggest, most comprehensive, and most vibrant event in cloud computing. Executive speakers advise how to transform your business with new products and innovations.
This article is part one of a series of blog posts covering this historical event, with insight and analysis by AWS Ambassador and AWS Technical Practical Lead, Jason Oliver.
Please see other posts in this series:
Peter DeSantis Keynote
Presented on Monday 28th November, in Las Vegas and online.
Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing, looked at AWS's latest innovations and how AWS continues to push the Cloud's performance boundaries. Peter provided a glimpse of how teams at AWS dive deep to engineer novel solutions across silicon, networking, storage, and compute without compromising on traditional trade-offs around performance, sustainability, or cost.
As a technologist with a long history in IT, I particularly enjoy catching this keynote as Pete shares a glimpse under the hood of the AWS infrastructure. This sharing is essential for us to understand how AWS builds its core platform attributes; how AWS deliver security, elasticity, performance, availability, cost and sustainability. These attributes are fundamental to how we develop and manage services on AWS.
Performance
Compute
AWS and Annapurna Labs design and build customised hardware to power its platform. Examples of this include AWS Nitro controllers and AWS Graviton processors.
Peter reviewed AWS Nitro, which offers differentiated performance and security. Every new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance introduced since 2014 now leverages this technology.
He announced the latest version, v5, of AWS Nitro, with twice the computational power, 50% more memory bandwidth, and a Peripheral Component Interconnect express (PCIe) adapter with twice the bandwidth. With general availability today, this latest version provides significantly improved performance, supporting a 60% packet per second (PPS) rate, with a 30% reduction in packet latency and 40% better performance per watt.
Peter announced a new Amazon EC2 instance type called the C7gn, which leverages this new architecture. It offers 200GBps network bandwidth and 50% better PPS so it will be ideal for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads such as weather forecasting, life science, and industrial engineering.
Also, a new Graviton variant, called Graviton3E, was announced with improved HPC performance through better floating point and vector math performance, a 35% improvement in HPL (a computational benchmark for algebra), a 12% improvement in GROMACS (a molecular modelling library) and a 30% improvement in common financial options models.
General availability of Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) Express for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance was announced, a purpose-built network interface to deliver an enhanced networking experience. ENA Express is a new ENA feature that uses the AWS Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol to improve network performance in two key ways; higher single flow bandwidth and lower tail latency for network traffic between EC2 instances.
These three innovations converge with the introduction of a new EC2 instance called HPC7g.
Wearing my environmental and security hats, what astounds me the most is that all this performance is produced with compromising security and while reducing power consumption - a technological marvel!
Networking
Peter moved on to networking and shared how AWS has completely redesigned the traditional network topology, moving from oversubscribed networks to densely connected multi-path networks, and removing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) protocol with their own AWS Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol. These changes provide lower latency and the highest throughput from the AWS network.
An unexpected consequence of this HPC-focussed innovation is that more common workloads will benefit in the following ways:
I expect SRD to become more intrinsic in the AWS platform over time, and I look forward to the next innovation that will be born of this new protocol.
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Machine Learning
As the demand for complexity and scale on training models increases, errors increase.
Peter announced the Trn1n instance - coming soon, the most cost-efficient, high-performance deep learning training in the Cloud, with 16 Trainium processors, 512GB of memory and 1600GBPs EFA network bandwidth. This new instance provides faster distribution training of ultra-large models.
Serverless Computing
Pete shared behind the scenes of how AWS Lambda operates with cached applications, cache hits and misses, and how to minimise the impact of the cold starts caused by a cache miss. Using a larger cache would reduce cold starts by 50%, which Firecracker helps address through smaller micro functions.
Peter announced AWS Lambda SnapStart - GA today, at no additional cost, a service to snapshot a fully initialised function to execute after that at an indestigutionable time, regardless of whether it is a cold start or not. Think of this as a boot-strapped instance vs an AMI with all dependencies baked in and ready to execute faster than processing the boot-strapping scripts.
I would imagine this will have a more significant impact on the larger runtimes and functions.
Sustainability
The Senior Vice President finished the evening with a topic we are both passionate about sustainability.
Improving efficiency is in every aspect of the AWS infrastructure, reducing the energy needed to deliver its services to its customers.
From the chip up, AWS Graviton remains its most power-efficient processor and is 60% more efficient for most workloads, and AWS Inferentia is the most power-efficient inference processor.
Amazon committed to powering its global operations with 100% renewable energy by 2030. And with the progress it has made since then, it is now on a path to achieve this by an incredible 2025. Since last year Amazon has announced another 3.6 Gigawatt of wind and solar projects, and today it announced another 18 renewable projects totalling 2 Gigawatts across the US and Europe.
In total, Amazon has enabled 12 Gigawatts of renewable capacity. When all of its renewables projects come online, an estimated 13.7 Metric Tons of carbon emissions will be avoided. In context, that is the equivalent of nearly 3 million cars in the US each year.
As someone who recently invested in a solar hybrid system for my home, I was interested in the Utility-Scale Energy Storage system announced for AWS to produce, manage and utilise renewable energy 24 hours a day.
Peter shared a long-awaited update to the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool coming soon, forecasting improvements from the various AWS renewable initiatives. I hope this will include the many of the updates we have been calling for since its release early this year.
Amazon is again trailblazing the industry and showcasing the art of the possible in this space with some commitment and leadership.
Close
I am excited to hear more from the executive speakers to advise how to transform your business with new products and innovations in the coming days.
About Me
An accomplished AWS ambassador, technical practice lead, principal Cloud architect and builder with over 25 years of transformational IT experience working with organisations of all sizes and complexity.
An SME in AWS, Azure, and security with strong domain knowledge in central government. Extensive knowledge of Cloud, the Internet, and security technologies in addition to heterogeneous systems spanning Windows, Unix, virtualisation, application and systems management, networking, and automation
I evangelise innovative technology, sustainability, best practices, concise operational processes, and quality documentation.