AWS re:Invent 2023: Adam Selipsky’s Keynote Announcement Recap

Re:invent has well and truly started and it’s back to full swing which allows over 50,000 people in Las Vagas and 300,000 virtually to consume all the great content that’s produced during the week. I’m still super excited about all the awesome announcements that will be coming over the next days. The announcement that resonated with me the most in Adam Selipsky, CEO AWS keynote the most was;

• Amazon Q its bringing GenAI to everyone and it’s integration across CodeWhisper and QuickSight is just the start of big things to come for this service. It’s exciting how easy it is so easily accessible in the AWS Console. It’s great to see all the GenAI advancements this year at re:invent.

I’ve put together all the announcements from the keynote and we’re looking to get plenty more over the course of re:invent so keep an eye out for future posts to get across all the announcements.

EC2

• AWS Graviton4 is the most energy efficient chip that Amazon has built. It’s 40% faster for database applications and 45% faster for large Java applications. R8g instances for EC2 has been launched which is powered by AWS Graviton4.
• AWS Trainium2 is 4x faster than AWS Trainium and is optimised for training foundation models with hundred’s of billions to trillions of parameters. It has 65 exaflops of on demand supercomputing performance.

Storage

• Amazon S3 Express One Zone is purpose built for accelerating data process and you can choose your AZ for the first time. It has single digit millisecond latency and saves up to 60% on compute cost and 50% lower costs vs S3 Standard.

GenAI

• Amazon Bedrock has seen multiple announcements at re:invent. Fine tuning you can now point to models in S3 with context and can learn from your data to get tailored responses which is available Amazon Titan Text Lite, Cohere Command Line & Meta Llama 2. Retrieval Augment Generation (RAG) with Knowledge Bases allows you to customise your model’s responses when you want it to consider new information for the model’s response. Continued Pre-training for Amazon Titan Text Lite & Express this is a technique that uses unlabelled data to improve the model’s knowledge of your data. Agents for Amazon Bedrock allows for you to now configure agents to allow Foundation Models to take actions on your behalf. It can take multi step tasks across a workflow that you define.
• Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock which allows you to easily safeguard your applications by preventing harmful content through filtering and inline with your AI policies
• Amazon Q a new GenAI assistant to work for you at work. It lets you answer questions quickly and generate content using your data and your operations. Its built securely and with enterprise requirements at the forefront. It’s trained with over 17 years of Amazon knowledge. It can architect solutions and an expert the Well Architected Framework. It’s built and integrated into the AWS Console and CodeWhisper.
• Amazon Q – Code Transformation handles the complete upgrade of Java version in your applications. Amazon has migrated 1,000 applications in 2 days which is a phenomenal outcome. It will be supporting .NET in the future.
• Amazon Q is enabled in Amazon Quicksight (Preview) allows you to integrate Amazon Q with your Quicksight report building.

Data & Analytics

• Zero ETL Integration with Amazon Redshift now supports Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon OpenSearch Service this will remove the pain to build and integrate data pipelines to transfer the data into Amazon Redshift. It will allow you to do more with data.          
• Amazon DataZone AI recommendations uses GenAI to create business descriptions for your data. It provides recommendations on how to use data for faster insights. It makes data immediately easier to understand and discover.

Call Centre Enablement

• Amazon Q in Amazon Connect gives agents a GenAI boost that will allow them to generate recommendations in real time on call. It will send suggestions in real time without any typing required.

There’s plenty of announcements to digest that will accelerate your modernisation journey. If you need to speak to a consultant on how you can utilise these services to transform your business, please do get in contact with us.