This week is the AWS re:Invent Conference being held in Las Vegas, NV. I thought I would share with you some of the highlights of today’s keynote by Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS in this AWS re:Invent 2016 day 2 highlights post. This years theme was SuperPowers. You may ask how does this tie in with Cloud Computing. Well, it was quite interesting I would encourage you to watch the recording. The recording is viewable at the link below.
In addition, on Tuesday evening James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer, held a Tuesday Night Live session where he talked in depth about the AWS region/AZ/datacenter architectures along with some other interesting talks about how companies like NASA/JPL are utilizing AWS to discover the universe. The recording can be viewed here.
Highlights
Below are the major announcements around new services and offerings that are either available today or coming soon.
- Regions/Availability Zones – 14 geographic regions around the world with 38 availability zones available today with 4 more regions and 9 availability zones planned for 2017. The new regions will be:
- Montreal
- London
- Paris
- Ningxia
- 4 new EC2 instances with greater capacities announced in the T2/R4/C5/P2 families.
- Amazon Lightsail – virtual private server made easy.
- F1 instance with FPGAs to support hardware acceleration.
- Amazon Athena – perform ad hoc queries against s3 storage directly without the need for clusters.
- Amazon AI Platform
- Rekognition (yes, thats how its spelled) – service for recognizing and analyzing objects and faces in images.
- Polly – text to speech service that supports 24 different languages.
- LEX (technology that fuels Amazon’s own Alexa service) – speech recognition service that is integrated with Lamda and other services.
- Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible edition
- In the IoT space Amazon announced a new service called Greengrass that allows for local compute, messaging, and data caching for connected devices. Several Smart Device manufactures will be embedding this in their devices.
- Snowball Edge – 100TB data transfer device with on-board storage and compute, clustering capabilities, data sync to s3 storage and includes Greengrass.
- AWS Snowmobile – 100PB capacity, 45-ft long container transferred by semi-truck with high-speed data transfer to support exabyte-scale data transfer.
It’s pretty amazing what capabilities the cloud offers. Whether its on AWS or Azure, the services are growing by the day. Let’s not forget Google either, although they have a ways to go they are actively deploying datacenters with more services coming online. It’s pretty compelling when you hear the stories of companies like NASA/JPL and McDonalds and how they have embraced the cloud.
Summary
For those companies who wish to stay relevant and to be able to compete in the market, you have to learn to to evolve your business. For those companies who refuse to participate in the cloud revolution, its only a matter of time before you lose to your competition. The cloud brings us reduced cost, scalability, agility, automation, and allows us to innovate at a much faster pace. The transformation from traditional to digital is upon us. With the amount of services being offered in the cloud, its’s no longer If something is possible, but more like when and how it can be done. I hope this has been as enlightening for you as it has me.