Amazon.com Inc.

12/04/2021 | News release | Distributed by Public on 12/03/2021 18:19

AWS re:Invent 2021: what you need to know

What do Angelo-Giuseppi 'Hank' Luisetti, an American college basketball player; Florence Nightingale, a British nurse, social reformer, and pioneer in statistics; and Roscoe Brown, one of the first Black aviators to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, all have in common? Whether it was Luisetti pioneering an early version of the jump shot in the 1930s, to Nightingale driving huge reforms in healthcare in the late 1800s, to Brown breaking racial stereotypes as a distinguished, trailblazing pilot in World War II, they were all considered innovators in their specific field. And according to AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, they were all pathfinders: people who refused to accept the status quo and looked for a better way to do things-transforming their fields and communities in the process.

Pathfinding was the theme of Selipsky's keynote at re:Invent this morning, his first since taking over as CEO earlier this year. Selipsky said AWS had come a long way in 15 years, looking back at how it disrupted the information technology industry when it launched in 2006, when the concept of cloud hardly existed. He described how IT and infrastructure was inflexible and slow, and suffocated innovation. AWS knew there could be a better path forward, then-and now. And according to Selipsky, the company is running as hard and fast now as it was back in 2006.

During his keynote, Selipksy made a suite of new service announcements showcasing AWS's continued commitment to innovation, as well as inviting customers Nasdaq, United Airlines, Dish Wireless, and 3M on stage to share how AWS is helping them forge entirely new paths in their own industries.

New instances powered by AWS-designed chips lower costs and increase energy efficiency

In 2006-when cell phones could flip, but they weren't yet smart-a team of AWS engineers set themselves an ambitious goal of making almost infinite computing power available to anyone in the world. And they did it. The service they created, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), revolutionised the way people build businesses by offering on-demand access to the kind of compute power previously only available to Fortune 500 companies. Fifteen years on, and EC2 shows no sign of slowing down. Today's announcement of three new Amazon EC2 instances (virtual servers that mimic the functionality of physical servers) powered by three new AWS-designed chips-AWS Graviton 3, AWS Trainium, and AWS Nitro SSD-will help customers:

  • Significantly improve the performance, cost, and energy-efficiency of the workloads they run on EC2
  • Speed up the time it takes to train machine learning models at lower cost
  • Ensure optimum storage performance for data intensive workloads

As part of the announcement, Selipsky said: "AWS is working with SAP to power SAP HANA Cloud with AWS Graviton processors." Read the press releaseto find out more.

Making it easier to move off a mainframe

For those of us not so well-versed in the language of information technology, a mainframe, or 'big iron' as they are sometimes referred to, is a high-performance computer typically used by large companies for critical applications-such as storing and processing large amounts of customer data. While mainframes have been used for decades in industries including banking and healthcare, they are complex, expensive, and difficult to scale. That's not to mention the fact that applications written for mainframes are increasingly hard to manage, as fewer and fewer engineers specialise in what's essentially an outdated technology. Many organizations want to modernize their systems and move from mainframes to the cloud, but are held back by the sheer complexity and time-consuming nature of the process. That's why the new managed service AWS Mainframe Modernization, which makes it faster and easier to move mainframe workloads to the cloud, could be prove a big deal for enterprises that want to make the leap-and fast. Read the press releaseto find out more.

Setting up a private 5G network in just a few clicks

More and more companies need to collect, analyse, and transfer huge amounts of data from sensors and devices in their operations, and many want to use cellular technologies like 5G to help them do it. The advantages of 5G are that it allows organizations to connect more devices, and transfer data more cost-effectively and flexibly than current wired and wireless networking technologies. The problem? Building your own private 5G network generally requires considerable investment-in both hardware and software, and in time required to set it up. AWS Private 5G promises to change all that. It will enable companies to set up private 5G networks in their facilities in days instead of months. With a few clicks, customers can specify the geographic area they want to cover, along with the amount of traffic they expect the network to handle, and AWS will do the rest-delivering everything they need to operate the network, so they don't need to buy, integrate, and maintain hardware and software from multiple vendors. Read the press releaseto find out more.

The right capacity for data analysis, right when you need it

Many AWS customers make data-driven decisions using a wide variety of the company's purpose-built analytics services. Things just got easier for them with today's launch of serverless versions of three popular AWS analytics services-Amazon RedShift, Amazon MSK, and Amazon EMR. Essentially what this means is that customers in industries ranging from pharma to gaming to financial services and beyond can analyse data at scale without worrying about having to set up and manage any underlying infrastructure to support it. The serverless options will automatically add or subtract resources instantly to provide just the right amount of analytics capacity, right when customers need it. Read the press releaseto find out more.

The digital twins that could transform industrial operations

Imagine you're in charge of a metals processing plant, with a blast furnace burning up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. If you could detect anomalies in that furnace before it fails, it would transform the way you run your operations, not least from a safety perspective. This kind of predictive maintenance is possible with the use of a 'digital twin'-a 3D virtual representation of the factory (or any other physical system), pulling in data from the plant's equipment sensors and combining it with real-time video of various machines in operation, plus the maintenance history of those machines. Digital twins are virtual representations of physical systems, regularly updated with data to generate immediate insights about the operational state of the environments they are designed to mimic. Many industrial companies have the vast troves of data about their facilities required to build digital twins, but creating and managing them is really hard, even for the most technically advanced organizations, so the majority are unable to use them. AWS IoT TwinMaker will make it faster and easier for companies to create digital twins of buildings, factories, industrial equipment, production lines, and any other physical system, helping them to do things like optimize operations, increase production output, and improve equipment performance, as well as reacting more quickly and accurately when issues occur. Read the press releaseto find out more.

Helping car manufacturers make better, safer vehicles

Car makers got a lift in the form of AWS IoT FleetWise-a new service designed to make it easier and more cost effective to collect and transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near-real time. Why does this matter? Well, manufacturers have been collecting data from standard vehicle sensors for years to improve vehicle quality and safety, but as these sensors get more advanced, they also generate a lot more data. Today's sensors can produce up to two terabytes of data an hour per vehicle (roughly equivalent to 1,000 hours' worth of movies) making the cost of transferring it to the cloud hugely expensive. AWS IoT FleetWise will allow manufacturers to collect and organize data from vehicles, regardless of make or model, and standardize it for analysis in the cloud. Among other things, this will help them to diagnose issues in individual vehicles, analyse vehicle fleet health to help prevent potential recalls or safety issues, and use analytics and machine learning to improve advanced technologies such as autonomous driving. Read the press releaseto find out more.