Christmas came early this year for attendees at Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) ReInvent conference in Las Vegas. As 30,000 developers and business professionals descended upon The Venetian Hotel, the AWS team was busy unveiling new innovations to help further the cause and impact of cloud computing technologies.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy took the stage on the first day to share with the audience the numerous new available features. We’ll cover them here in the blog post.
Takeaway #1: Amazon AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been an impactful influence on technology direction over the past few years. Though many have suspected AWS’ involvement, ReInvent truly brought their intentions to light with the launch of three new tools, including:
- Rekognition – Image recognition
- Lex – Software that will reside inside Alexa to assist in the building of chatbots, applications, and other technologies that support lifelike interactions
- Polly – Text to speech service that can recognize different accents and present speech in an accurate, natural, and lifelike way
Takeaway #2: Revolutionizing Storage
We all know that adopting the cloud also requires the addition of storage capacity given the amount of data generated. The developer teams at AWS understand this challenge as well and have developed Amazon Snowmobile, an application that is geared towards moving on-premises data into the cloud. Integrated with the already-existing AWS services in S3 and Glacier, Snowmobile can move petabytes to exabytes of data in a matter of days to weeks.
Takeaway #3: Contextualizing Data
Staying along the lines of data, AWS developers also created Athena, a serverless query service that makes it easier to analyze large amounts of data stored in S3 using standard SQL. All end-users will need to do is identify their fields and run their queries to get the results they need in mere seconds, saving time, energy, and processing power.
Takeaway #4: Advancements in DevOps
AWS did not leave DevOps out of the festivities with the development philosophy gaining steam this year. The release of AWS Greengrass builds on top of existing services like AWS IoT and Lambda, built for offline code operation, testing in the cloud, and quick deployment. Other services that will also increase focus on DevOps include Amazon Lightsail (renting out virtual machines by the hour), AWS Step Functions (distributed applications), and Snowball Edge (more connectivity, scaling, and storage endpoints).
Takeaway #5: Customer-Centric
Amazon has always been a customer-centric organization, so it’s no surprise that the final takeaway from the conference would be an application that focuses on just that. The launch of AppStream 2.0 further enables the live streaming of desktop applications from AWS with a simple user interface, a fully managed service, and consistent scalable performance. Now more than ever, customers can run applications on multiple platforms to increase collaboration without having to worry about version control, security, or scalability.
Were you at ReInvent? Let us know which innovations you found the most compelling.
Learn more about our Amazon practice here.
