Amazon Web Services revealed some banner achievements and announcements in Las Vegas last week, revealing numerous infrastructure, cloud, and development tools that will further innovation in 2018. Over two days, CEO Andy Jassy and CTO Werner Vogels dazzled the crowd with customer case studies, new products, and innovative concepts. Vogels’ keynote is embedded below.
With the conference concluded and the holiday season upon us, let’s look at the top takeaways that every innovation and technology professional should note in the coming months ahead.
- Machine Learning is Top of Mind: One of the most impressive elements of the conference was watching Amazon roll out its Rekognition platform, offering deep learning based video recognition. This new innovation, combined with all the available cloud infrastructure (SageMaker and DeepLens, among many others) and automatic transcription technologies provides content-oriented organizations the effectiveness to communicate and share with customers and employees. Moreover, the foray into machine learning in a consumer-focused avenue brings the concept into the mainstream and will impact everyone.
- Application Development Support Continues: AWS continued its commitment to developers by announcing new solutions on both keynote days. Included among these announcements were solutions like AppSync (develop data-driven apps online and off), updated EC2 Instances, as well as well as solutions including Amazon Glacier and support for Kubernetes and Containers. It will be interesting to see how developers leverage these updated solutions to build the next generation of IoT, augmented/artificial reality, business, and consumer applications.
- IoT Gains Steam: As expected, the Internet of Things also got top billing during both Vogels’ and Jassy’s sessions. Between the business features of Alexa (Amazon’s smart device), IoT Analytics, and IoT defense devices, enterprises now have the capability to deploy, defend, and measure the effectiveness of their IoT strategy. We imagine that this will also have eventual ramifications for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which is key to growth and scalability in manufacturing.
In all, these announcements were the tip of the iceberg. However, they do represent a solidifying of the enterprise ecosystem that Amazon continues to hold onto and dominate.
Were you at Re:Invent? Let us know what you thought of the event in the comments below.
