AWS re:Invent 2021: All the news, announcements and more from this year's event
Our wrap-up of all the latest news and announcements from the three AWS re:Invent 2021 keynotes
It wouldn't really be a tech keynote without some deafening 8am rock and roll, would it?
Music time over - now for some keynote!
First up we've got a run-through of AWS' growth and successes over the past few years - it's fair to say it's come a long way since launching in 2006
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky is on stage, to the tune of "Sweet Child O'Mine" - it's the 10th anniversary of AWS re:Invent, and the 15th anniversary of AWS.
"It's hard to believe that when we first started, the concept of cloud computing barely existed," he notes. "It was slow, it was complicated, it stopped innovation...we knew there had to be a better path forward."
S3 stores more than 3 trillion objects, AWS offers over 200 ully-featured services, with millions of customers around the world, the CEO says.
"We're going to keep innovating to keep offeering the broadest suite of services, Selipsky notes"
Such customers are "pathfinders", Selipsky notes - "they're doing something unique"
"In the last 15 years, cloud has become not just another tech revolution, but a shift in how businesses actually function," Selipsky notes. "There's no business that can't be radically disrupted."
"And we're just getting started," he adds, noting that only 5-15% of spending has moved to the cloud, so there's a big opportunity to come, with 5G and IoT becoming super important too.
NASDAQ CEO Adena Freidman is the first customer use case on stage today, explaining how the organization is using AWS to help offer a huge range of services for its users across the world to help "redefine the global capital markets".
Selipsky is now looking at another gamechanger - 1930's basketball revolutionary Hank Lucetti - "the most disruptive basketball player of all time" who came up with the running shoot technique.
"When you get pathfinding right - it's transformative," Selipsky notes.
There's now more than 475 different instance types available, he notes, for virtually every workload.
And here's the first big announcement of today - Graviton3 - "the next generation". Offering 25% faster speeds, boosted performance for science, cryptographic and ML workloads, the G3 also uses up to 60% less energy.
There's also a new C7g Instance for EC2 - the first available for Graviton3.
For ML workloads, there's also new Trn 1 and Inf1 instances "for every workload", Selipsky notes, as machine learning plays a bigger role for many organizations.
"We know we'll never be done innovating in compute," he says.
Another new launch - AWS Mainframe Modernization - which Selipsky says will help companies migrate, modernize and run mainframe workloads on AWS at a much lower costs than ever before.
AWS has been building bridges to your data centres, and wants to keep this trend going - "we'll continue to build those bridges", he notes.
"It's shockingly easy", notes Selipsky - AWS sends everything you need, from hardware to software to SIM cards. Automatic configuration makes it ideal for factories and workplaces, and you can ask for as many devices to be connected as you need.
"There's nothing like AWS Private 5G network out there," notes Selipsky.
Dish Chief Network Officer Mark Rouanne is up next, to talk about the company's work in offering cutting-edge mobile networks with the help of AWS.
Our next superstar "pathfinder" is Florence Nightingale. The famous "lady with the lamp" was actually a pioneering big data geek, Selipsky says, having noted the link between hygiene and diseases, spotting patterns by collecting data into infections and deaths.
"If we can revolutionise how we spot patterns....data will change all of our lives," he says, "working with data is tricky, it's not static, and every organization has different needs."
"A modern data strategy knows data is dynamic...handling only a few stops on the data journey just isn't enough."
"AWS knows how important this is to every customer...and that's why we're focused on building out all the critical needs for each step"
Our next launch and update is for AWS Lake Foundation. Selipsky announces the general availability of row and cell-level security for Lake Foundation - giving the chance to restrict access to specific rows and columns, and automatically filter and reveal data only to authorized users - a hugely important security boost.
There's also the general availability of transactions for governed tables in Lake Formation, which automatically manages conflicts and erros, ensuring a consistent view for users, and eliminating need for custom error handling code or batching updates.
Next we have AWS' raft of analytics tools - digging through all your data to help you spot trends and more.
"This is big," he says.
Our next customer talk is from United Airlines chief digital officer Linda Jojo, who outlines how the company has had to make the most of recovering from the pandemic.
Selipsky is back now to talk more about machine learning.
"We want more customers to unlock the power of ML," he says, noting that AWS provides the broadest and most complete set of ML capabilities around.
"We know your data is on a journey - and all the stops on this journey matter," he notes.
Data governance is the next stop for us, as Selipsky runs through AWS' range of tools and services that allow you to control where your data resides.
But how does AWS help people in your company access all the data they need?
This is all part of the company's push to democratize machine learning, he notes - something AWS is hoping to solve with SageMaker - but there is still more to be done.
The new Amazon SageMaker Canvas will let users create ML predictions even if they don't have any ML experience, and with no need to write any code. This should let more users than ever before get the most out of ML, no matter what level of experience they have.
Our next pathfinder is Roscoe Brown, one of the Tuskegee Airmen and a pioneering African-American pilot, who overcame racial discrimination to found landmark organizations and community.
AWS is doing its bit for training, Selipsky notes, looking to train 29 million workers in cloud skills by 2025 to deal with the explosion in cloud work.
Next up is a new partnership between Goldman Sachs and AWS, looking to offer GS customers quicker access to financial data to analyze and manage.
Our next customer story comes from sticky-note and scotch-tape giants 3M, with Shaun Braun, SVP of digital transformation, explaining how the company is using AWS to make the most of innovation and become a digital-first organization.
One final launch - AWS IoT TwinMaker, to make it easier for companies to create and use digital twins of real-world systems. It includes nifty tools such as pre-built conenctors to data sources, automatically-built knowledge graphs, and 3D visualizations and real-time updates.
There's also quick mention of connected cars, with a new AWS IoT FleetWise platform allowing manufacturers to colelct data from millions of vehicles and make it easy to analyze in the cloud.
"Ultimately what the cloud and AWS offer is the ability to transform," he says, echoing the theme of transformation that's run throughout the keynote.
"The cloud is an opportuntiy to reimagine everything - it provides a pathway to real transformation."
And that's a wrap! Selipsky leaves the stage to more Guns N Roses, and we're all done for the morning here.
Désiré Athow here, Managing Editor at TechRadar Pro, stepping in until Mike Moore comes back online later today. Our sister publication, ITPro, also looked at the new RoboRunner IoT platform launched at AWS Re:Invent, one that allows you to, err, manage a fleet of robots.
In other AWS announcements yesterday
- 8 new Compute instances were announced including the fastest Intel Xeon scalable processor in the cloud
- 5 new storage products including the lowest cost storage with millisecond retrieval, Glacier Instant.
- 4 IoT-elated services with Twinmaker, where you can create digital twins of real world systems, the one that was caught our eyes
- Plus 10 other new products like AWS Mainframe Modernization (because
Fortran, Cobol will need to die out sooner rather than later, right?) capping a very busy first day.
Hello AWS fans, we're back and reporting from the Day 2 keynote at AWS re:Invent 2021.
After a heavy news day yesterday, today it's the turn of Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of AI/ML, AWS to tell us all about how the company is using the technology.
"Data is the underlying force that fuels the insights that help you do better business," Sivasubramanian notes, showing some examples of using big data as diverse as Swimming Australia and NASDAQ.
"AWS provides the most comprehensive set of services for the entire end-to-end data, analytics, and ML jpurney for all workloads and all types of data", he notes, giving an overview of AWS' existing tools and services available today.
There are three elements to forming a modern end-to-end data strategy, Sivasubramanian notes:
- Modernize data structure - AWS has "unmatched maturity and experience"
Sivasubramanian turns now to databases - often the unheralded workhorses of many businesses.
It's clear that moving to a managed database system can provide incredible savings in time, money and effort, he notes.
"This is going to make it a lot easier for you to modernize your data," he adds.
Now we're on to unifying your data.
Building a data lake on Amazon S3 offers unmatched durability, availability and scalability, as well as great security and analytics tools.
Sivasubramanian is now taking a thorough look at Amazon Redshift, and the various innovations it has brought to customers over the years.
There's a cool example of how the NFL is using Amazon QuickSight Q to share stats with broadcasters, writers and everyday fans in an engaging and interesting way.
Sivasubramanian is back, and talking about technology and culture, and how the two can interact. Having a data-driven organization means treating data like an organizational asset, but also encouraging data literacy and championing data-driven decision-making, he says.
"Machine Learning is one of the most innovation technologies we will encounter in our generation...having the right data strategy is vital to this transformation," he notes.
AWS' new instances can provide the bedrock for all your ML needs, Sivasubramanian says.
But in order for ML to truly scale, it needs to get a lot easier to adopt. It's only in the last few years that accessibility have improved enough for ML technology to become more mainstream.
"Data is the fuel for machine learning," he says, but adds that even with the right strategy in place, preparing data can be the most infuriating part of building ML technology.
Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth goes a long way to help with this, offering pre-built workflows, templates and multiple workforce options for customers such as the NFL.
But that's not enough, and the company is now launching Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus, which lets users deliver high-quality training databases fast, without writing a single line of code.
There's also a new SageMaker Studio Notebook, allowing users to access a wide range of data sources, and perform data engineering, analytics and ML workflows in one notebook.
That's not all for Amazon SageMaker though, as the platform is getting three new innvations:
"All of these new innovations are going to make it a lot easier for you to scale machine learning in your organization," Sivasubramanian notes.
Now it's time for a deeper look at SageMaker Canvas, which was announced yesterday by AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, and offers analysts a better way to get more out of mountains of data.
Swami is back once again, noting how end-to-end solutions are critical to solving business problems, hence AWS' major investment in a range of such tools.
Search experiences can be a big part of this, he notes, and to enable this, there's a new Amazon Kendra Experience Builder tool to deploy intelligent search applications in just a few clicks.
"This will make it a whole lot easier for IT department to build in-site search", Sivasubramanian says.
Amazon wants to help train 29 million new people, including AI and ML developers by 2025, and hopes its new tools can help do just that, Sivasubramanian says.
There's also a new AWS AI & ML Scholarship Program, offering $10m a year for students looking to undertake courses in these fields.
And that's a wrap for today. Sivasubramanian leaves us with the tought that beign a data-driven organization is "imperative for the future...it's the difference between those that thrive, and those that will survive."
Good morning, AWS crowd. Thousands of you have been following us over the past 72 hours and we thank you for that. Although many of the big announcements have already been made, we've still got another keynote, this morning from Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels.
We're in and seated for Dr. Vogels keynote, set to begin in about 15 minutes.
After Tuesday's rock band and yesterday's techno DJ, today's pre-keynote entertainment is a string quarter (with an added drummer) playing versions of all your favorite Hot 100 hits - Pharrell Williams anyone?
"It may have been 15 years, but I'm still wearing a t-shirt", Vogels quips, stripping off his F&L outfit to reveal a t-shirt of iconic UK indie icons The Stranglers.
We're set for a trip down memory lane, but first a look at some new releases....
After an overview of just how global AWS' reach is, and announcing the launch of 30 new AWS local zones in 2022 (including one in his home city of Amsterdam), Vogels takes a look at some customer stories.
Now it's on to how the cloud can connect up what Vogels calls "The Internet of Billions of Things". AWS IoT Core and Greengrass do a strong job of keeping customers online, but many connected devices are pretty dated, he notes - with manufacturing devices having an average age of 27 years.
Compliant, rugged and remote devices are becoming more important than ever as the edge expands, Vogels says. AWS is already in Antarctica - but can it go even further?
Vogels is back, and we're still looking at the heavens, with the AWS Space Accelator, which looks to boost companies using AWS cloud to get to space.
Vogels says this all builds into what he calls "The Everywhere Cloud" where AWS tools create a massively distributed, but not decentralized network.
Tools such as IAM play a vital role, as millions of businesses around the world use AWS' services to stay secure, but also keep the ability to scale when needed.
AWS values innovation over co-ordination, Vogels notes, as the company always looks at how it can move as fast as possible to deal with customer needs, working backwards to work these out before they're even identified.
Vogels says it's time for a new way of working to get around this, with the AWS CloudControl giving you a better way of solving API around calls.
Swift, Kotlin and Rust are all getting AWS SDKs, Vogels adds, giving developers more options in their programming language choices.
There's also a new AWS Cloud Development Kit V2, which Vogels says fixes a lot of the issues seen in V1. It'll offer one package for all stable AWS CDK libraries, and changes to how you handle experimental classes, methods and properties.
That's not all - there's also a new Construct Hub that let devs find and use open-source CDK libraries.
After a colorful customer mention from Liberty Mutual (and a spontaneous award for the company's Matt Coulter), Vogels returns for the last half hour of his keynote.
Now it's time to focus on how AWS is helping build a sustainable future. Vogels says AWS wants everyone to be aware of how much energy they are using, pushing efficiency and lowering carbon footprints.
"Every resource you are not using is the greenest resource you can think of," he notes - even small steps such as using lower-res images on your websites can make a difference.
There's a new AWS re:Post resource launching, a new community-driven site where users can ask messages about any AWS builds they are thinking about, or are actively using.
"The cloud continues to change development," Vogels notes, "we want to work with you to build the tools you need...to build the applications of the future."
"You change the way the cloud works."
That "something new" is Amazon's hit MMORPG New World, which Vogels says he sess as not just a game, but also as a massively distributed system.
There's been a generational shift in gaming, he notes, outlining some of the incredibly complex and powerful systems that are powering New World for millions of online players, including the ability to update a player's movement 30 times a second.
AWS lets you build systems the way you want to, Vogels notes - what he calls "21st century architecture."
And with a cry of "now go build!", Dr Vogels brings his keynote to a close! It's been a packed morning, and a packed three days of AWS re:Invent, and thanks for sharing it with us here on TechRadar Pro. Stay tuned for more news, interviews and features from the event!