AWS re:Invent 2022 - Part Two
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 two 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:
Adam Selipsky Keynote
Presented on Tuesday 29th November, in Las Vegas and online.
Adam Selipsky, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Amazon Web Services (AWS), looked at how forward-thinking builders are transforming industries and even our future, powered by AWS. In this his second AWS re:Invent keynote, Adam highlighted innovations in data, infrastructure, and more that are helping customers achieve their goals faster, take advantage of untapped potential and create a better future with AWS.
Adam noted that this year there were over 300k attendees registered virtually worldwide. Yet physical attendance was down from 60k in 2019 to 50k this year.
Cost Reduction & Flexibility
Adam implied that it's tempting to cut back and slow down during times of uncertainty. However, when it comes to the Cloud, many of its customers know that it's better to lean in precisely because of economic uncertainty, not despite it. The Cloud is more cost-effective, and many customers save 30% or more.
Another capability, now more than ever, is flexibility, as it's challenging to plan in this uncertain environment. And with AWS, its customers don't need to worry about having too much or too little capacity - you can easily scale up and down as needed while paying only for what you use. This benefits your expenses and ability to serve your customers.
As an established business running on AWS, Airbnb was far more prepared than others when the bottom fell out of the hospitality industry in 2020. Airbnb quickly reduced its Cloud spending by 27%. When the world emerged from the worst Pandemic, it turned on the Cloud infrastructure it needed to restore operations and continue driving innovation.
This story resonates with some of our major customer workloads, including Jaguar Land Rover's Connected car platform and the Rail Delivery Group, whose systems manage the national rail infrastructure. Specifically, an instant benefit of utilising serverless technologies was that these cost reductions happened without the need for human intervention.
Innovation
Adam continued that innovation is still essential as customers want to develop new ways to operate efficiently and serve better. The Cloud helps you do this faster and more cost-effectively; you can be agile with fewer resources.
One study found that migrating on-premises workloads to AWS customers reduced time to market for new features by 43%, with many customers achieving over 60% savings while reducing their time to market.
The CEO suggested that a business should be ready for anything to operate efficiently, for flexible responses to unexpected circumstances, and for innovating.
The Cloud allows you to operate efficiently in lean times and be stronger than your competition, ready to accelerate when your business conditions change.
Analytics
As an AWS partner, this helps us complete our customers' transformation to a wholly serverless architecture leaving no legacy compute to manage around a solution's periphery.
Machine Learning
While analytics helps us understand what's going on today, Machine Learning (ML) allows us to predict what will happen in the future and build this intelligence into systems and applications.
AWS maintains the most complete set of ML and Artificial intelligence (AI) services.
Adam held off on any ML or AI announcements, not wanting to spoil the thunder of Swami Sivasubramanian in his upcoming keynote.
Integration
The CEO talked up the eutopia of a zero extract, transform, and load (ETL) integration future - simplifying combining data from multiple systems into a single database, data store, data warehouse, or data lake. This approach would vastly reduce the complexity and time of delivering data to analytics teams and no longer require manual effort. He announced the following new services:
This zero ETL integration approach makes it easier to generate insights without having to build and manage the ETL pipelines or manually move data around. Adam committed to doing more across all the AWS data stores.
Governance
Finding the correct balance between access and control is crucial, but it's different in every organisation. Implementing data governance across an organisation is complex; all sorts of people have different requirements.
Integrated with Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight, data consumers can be built to share data using partner APIs (such as Snowflake and Tableau) for seamless integrations securely. I envisage this becoming an exceptional service for creating innovation through data collaboration.
Insights
Amazon Quicksight was confirmed as the AWS analytics jewel in the crown for AWS. With QuickSight Q, anyone can ask questions in natural language and receive accurate answers with relevant visualisations that help them gain insights from the data.
I cannot wait to evaluate these lofty claims and see how this works in real business and operational use cases.
Adam stressed that AWS has the most comprehensive series of services to deliver an end-to-end data solution.
Security
Adan announced the following for an improved security posture in these growing areas.
I hope they backport some of this capability to their other container services, such as AWS Fargate and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), to shore up all containers hosted on its platform with a single native solution.
As a security-focused professional, Amazon Security Lake is particularly valuable to public and financial sector enterprises. I look forward to watching how this service expands over time; integration and momentum need to be maintained for it to succeed.
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Compute
Adam recapped Peter DeSantis's announcements regarding the new C7gn Amazon EC2 instance type powered by the new AWS Graviton processors.
He noted that many of the AWS managed services utilise the new chips driving better price performance for non-Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) workloads.
Since the Trainium chip and Trn1 machine learning (ML) instance, and HPC7g HPC instance were announced during the previous keynote, they will not be covered again.
Adam went on to announce the release of the following new compute resources:
With the Trn1, Infr1 and Infr2 instances for EC2, AWS is tracking exponential growth in this area while delivering the highest performance for ML training.
With the Hpc6a, Hpc6id and HPC7g instances for EC2, AWS offers HPC with the best price performance for any specific workload.
Adam discussed the challenges for simulation workloads, such as live weather forecasting or modelling an urban city to help improve traffic flow, safety, etc. These can be massive and highly complex and need speciality software to spread the computation out across multiple compute instances. To address this challenge, Adam announced the following service.
Organisations need more powerful and specialised tools to run each of their application workloads. And whether it's best price performance for general-purpose compute with Graviton, faster and cheaper training and inference with Trainium and Inferentia, or performant easy-to-use HPC instances and tools to do simulations. AWS is committed to innovating to help support its customers' needs.
Contact Centre
The CEO reviewed the success of Amazon Connect, which provides superior customer service at a lower cost with an easy-to-use cloud contact centre, with 10 million Connect interactions per day. He made the following Amazon Connect capability announcements.
It's impressive to see how this service is constantly evolving over time.
Supply Chain
Supply chains involve coordinating complex global networks of suppliers, parts, manufacturing sites, distribution facilities, and transportation providers. All trying to deliver the right goods to the right place at the right time at the cheapest cost.
The last two years have highlighted the importance of supply chain resilience; from baby formula shortages to ships circling ports unable to unload - the disruptions have been widespread and deeply felt.
Addressing supply chain issues around inventory is especially critical. Businesses must plan for supply chain disruptions, respond rapidly to ensure the proper inventory levels are available and keep costs manageable.
Managing inventory requires accurate and up-to-date visibility into your supply chains. And to get a complete view of your inventory and supply chain, you need to build custom integrations to collect and process a vast array of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and supply management systems.
This can introduce expensive consultancy engagements, long-term development cycles, and complex ongoing maintenance. And the scale and complexity of the data make it challenging to analyse and reveal problems in real time, forcing you to make decisions based on outdated or inaccurate information.
Even when you have identified the most impactful problems, you still need to figure out the best actions to solve issues like quickly rebalancing your inventory.
For 25 years, Amazon has tackled and answered many of these problems. Many AWS customers have asked whether they could take Amazon supply chain technology, AWS infrastructure and ML to help them improve their supply chain. So with that, Adam announced the following.
With AWS Supply Chain, customers get a unified view of their supply chain data, ML-powered insights, recommended actions and built-in collaboration capabilities so they can react quickly to unexpected issues.
AWS Supply Chain would be worthy of evaluation for any retailer, large or small, looking to shore up its operations and even help reduce its carbon footprint.
Like Amazon Connect, this is another example of AWS sharing the broader business functions and expertise of Amazon to help its customers at scale by leveraging its Cloud platform.
Clean Rooms
Adam said that customers want to combine disparate elements to develop something greater than the sum of its parts. Data clean rooms are protected environments where multiple parties can analyse combined data without exposing the raw data that have emerged as a solution.
But clean rooms take a lot of work to build. The complex requirements take months to develop, and once created, you have to continuously update the data while meeting the requests for new collaborators and data types. Adam announced the below service to address this need.
This service negates the need to move data out of AWS or load it into an external tool. AWS Clean Rooms reads data where it lies and applies the proper restrictions to help you maintain control over your data with an advanced set of privacy-enhancing controls. By analysing your combined datasets, you can generate insights to improve your understanding of your customers. AWS Clean Rooms includes cryptographic computing tools that let you keep your data encrypted even as queries are processed.
AWS Clean Rooms will be a game changer for organisations that need to efficiently analyse exchanged data, such as retailers and advertising agencies, where campaigns can be established without exposing private customer data.
Healthcare
Suppose you look at the innovation in health care. In that case, so much of it is enabled by the Cloud and the ability to derive insights from the increasingly complex multimodal healthcare data growing exponentially.
Over the past several years, AWS has invested in various healthcare services to help you make sense of health data, improve patient care, and securely store patient records. With purpose-built services like Amazon HealthLake, Amazon Comprehend Medical and AWS Transcribe Medical. AWS is continually finding new ways where the Cloud can improve healthcare and life sciences.
Customers are examining all types of biological data to improve health. They're studying DNA, our biological source code. They're studying RNA, the genetic molecules that help cells to make protein. And they're also exploring how these proteins interact to improve drug effectiveness.
The study of all this molecular data is called omics, including areas such as genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics. Building systems to process omics data is challenging and often slows scientific discovery.
A system has to store omic data that's cost-efficient and easy to access and should scale to compute millions of biological samples while preserving accuracy and reliability. It would need specialised tools to analyse genetic patterns across populations and to train ML learning models to predict diseases.
All this data is very personal, so you need to keep it safe, secure, and compliant - all while enabling researchers to collaborate and share results. Adam then announced the below.
I look forward to observing how this technology pushes the envelope on what is already a fast-paced sector for healthcare and life science innovations.
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.