AWS re:Invent 2021 keynote announcements recap

It’s an exciting time of year for the cloud computing community and anyone who’s interested in disruptive technology. AWS re:Invent has well and truly started! Even though it’s a hybrid/remote conference, and most of us can’t make the trip over to Las Vegas this year, I’m still super excited about all the awesome tech announcements that will be coming over the next few days.   

Big news coming out of re:Invent  

There are two announcements so far that have resonated with me the most.  

Serverless analytics for Redshift, EMR and MSK   
This one’s exciting because of the significant savings and efficiencies it introduces. Following this service announcement, Redshift, EMR, and MSK will now be truly serverless.  

SageMaker Canvas   
AWS is bringing machine learning (ML) to a wider set of users with SageMaker Canvas. AWS’s announcement heralds an easier entry point for people who aren’t familiar with ML, putting the power of training models at their fingertips.  

Day one Keynote wrap-up  

For this post, I’ve put together all the major announcements from the first day of AWS re:Invent.  BTW, there’ll be plenty more big news this year, as there are still more keynotes to come. So, stay tuned for my next posts to get across all the announcements.   

Compute (EC2) announcements  

Graviton3: the third generation of AWS designed processes that provide 2x faster floating-point performance for scientific workloads (2x faster for cryptographic performance) and use 60% less power than regular instance types. A huge leap forward in computing power and efficiency.  

C7g instance will be the first of many instances powered by Graviton3.  

Trn1 instances can now be used for training ML models for a wide range of applications. It has 800Gbps networking bandwidth and can train complex models with trillions of parameters. The best value performance for training and inference.  

Mainframe announcement  

AWS Mainframe Modernization will make it faster to migrate and modernise mainframe workloads to the cloud. It can cut down the migration by as much as 66% and will assist with assessing, analysing and deploying mainframes to AWS.  

Edge Compute announcements  

AWS Private 5G allows you to set up and scale a private 5G network in mere days. AWS will provide the hardware, software and SIMs to automatically create the private 5G network with pay-as-you-go pricing.  

AWS IoT TwinMaker makes it easier to create digital twins of real-world physical systems such as factories, jet engines and production lines. It comes with a plugin for Amazon Managed Grafana and is currently in preview.  

AWS IoT Fleetwise will make it easier to transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near-real-time. It eliminates the need for automakers to build custom data collection systems by standardising the data sent by vehicles.   

Analytics announcements  

Row and cell-level security for Lake Formation allows you to enforce security for specific rows and columns in data sets. It also provides the ability to automatically filter and reveal data to authorised users only. It will put the right data into the right people’s hands.  

Governed tables transformations for Lake Formation: automatically manage conflicts and errors. This announcement means you can ensure consistent views for all users. It will eliminate the need for error handling code during querying.  

Serverless analytics for Redshift, EMR and MSK. This is a fantastic announcement that will bring huge cost savings to these services.   

On-demand analytics for Kinesis Data Streams. There’s now an on-demand option for running Kinesis data streams, so you don’t have to provision capacity for this service.  

Amazon SageMaker Canvas now allows the ability to run an entire ML workflow with a simple point and click user interface. As I mentioned above, this innovation provides the ability to generate ML predictions without any ML experience. It makes it easier to train models and expands the ML capability to a broader user base. Exciting stuff!  

More from re:Invent soon  

That’s a lot of big AWS announcements to digest already, isn’t it? These innovations are certainly going to accelerate cloud adoption journeys. And there’s sure to be more exciting news over the rest of AWS re:Invent, too.  

Want to learn more about how these AWS innovations could help transform your business? Get in touch with a Versent advisor, and we’ll be happy to answer all your questions.