Re:Invent 2020 keynote recap – our view of all the top announcements

Re:invent has well and truly started and we’ve had plenty of awesome announcements come out of Andy Jassy’s keynote today. The two announcements that resonated with me were:

• Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL – this new feature will enable customers to migrate from SQL Server to PostgreSQL with minimal changes freeing them from costly licensing. It will be made open source in 2021 and is currently in Preview. 
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, which now scales to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second. You’ll be able to save up to 90% vs the current provisioning capacity for peak load. MySQL is available now and PostgreSQL available in early 2021. 

I’ve put together all the announcements from today’s keynote. We’re looking to get plenty more as this year at re:Invent as there’re five keynotes, so keep an eye out for future posts to get across all the announcements.  

COMPUTE

• EC2 macOS instance – this enables iOS / Mac developers to build / test on AWS for the first time. This really fast tracks and simplifies the iOS / Mac development experience.
• D3en instance type provides the largest local storage instances (336TB) available  
• C6gn are will be available soon providing enhanced networking up to 100Gbps, 38GBps EBS  bandwidth and up to 40% better price/performance. 
• Habana Gaudi-based EC2 instances will provide 40% price/performance on current GPU based EC2 and supports TensorFlow and PyTorch 
• AWS Trainium is the second custom ML chip designed by AWS and provides the most cost effective ML training in the cloud. It shares the same Neuron SDK as AWS Inferentia making it easy for developers using Inferentia to get started with Trainium.  

CONTAINERS

• Amazon ECS Anywhere allows the ability for customers to run ECS on-premises. It provides the same seamless ECS experience across AWS and on-premises. It will be coming in 2021. 
• Amazon EKS Anywhere allows the ability for customers to run EKS on-premises. The open source EKS distribution will be released to fast track the work in adopting this service. It will also be coming in 2021. 

SERVERLESS

• Lambda now provides 1 milli second billing to lower costs up to 70% shifting away from the existing 100 ms billing. 
• Lambda Container Support using existing container development workflows. This allows you to package code and dependencies as a Docker or Open Container Initiative and able to deploy Lambda functions as container images. Now you can easily transition container tooling that  you’ve built into your development workflows onto Lambda. 
• AWS Proton which is a management platform for microservices (Lambda and Containers). AWS Proton to connect and coordinate all the different tools needed for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates. 

STORAGE

• GP3 for EBS which is 20% lower price point and provides 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s with a peak of 1,000 MB/s peak throughput. This provides 4x peak throughput over GP2. 
• io2 Block Express which is the first SAN built for the cloud. It provides 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MB/s and storage capacity of 64TB.  

DATABASE

• Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 which allows to scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second. You can save up to 90% vs provisioning capacity for peak load. MySQL is available now and PostgreSQL available in Q1 2021. 

DATABASE MIGRATION

• Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL – this new feature will enable customers to migrate from SQL Server to PostgreSQL with minimal changes freeing them from costly licensing. It will also be made an open source project in 2021 to allow the feature to have community wide contribution. It’s currently in Preview. An announcement that I’m really excited about. 

ANALYTICS

• AWS Glue Elastic Views easily allows you to write materialized views to copy it from a source data stores (Aurora, RDS & DynamoDB) and move it to a target data source (Redshift, ES, S3, DynamoDB, Aurora & RDS). It will automatically copy to the data across to the target source and notify if the source data source structure has changed. 
• Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler recommends transformations based on the data that’s in your dataset. You can preview those transformations in SageMaker Studio and allows you to apply that transformation to the dataset. It fast tracks the data preparation process. 
• Amazon SageMaker Feature Store which allows you to easily name, organise and find and share features. This has been purpose built and accessible from SageMaker Studio. 
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines the first purpose built CI/CD service for data worklows for ML. It covers the entire lifecycle of the workflow and pipelines will manage the dependencies and flow.  

MACHINE LEARNING

• Amazon CodeGuru now supports Python. This allows you to now perform code analysis on Python extending from Java which was announced at last year’s re:invent. 
• Amazon CodeGuru Security Detector helps to improve your code security and help to remediate these code security related issues. 
• Amazon DevOps Guru which uses ML to identify operational issues before they cause an issue to your organisation. Identifying database I/O overutilisation, memory leaks, early warning of approach resource limits and much more to assist with operational excellence. 
• Amazon QuickSight Q which allows you to ask Q any question in natural language and get answers in seconds. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand domain specific business language. It automatically generates data models that understand meanings and relationships of data. 
• Amazon Monitron provides end-to-end equipment monitoring to enable predictive maintenance. It will include models that allows you to fast track the predictive analytics on your equipment. 
• Amazon Lookout for Equipment uses real time data to identify early warning signs that could lead to machine failures. It integrates with S3 and IoT Sitewise to monitor your equipment real time. 

APPLIANCES

• AWS Panorama Appliance is an appliance which connects to your network and starts to identify video streams from existing cameras. It uses pre built computer vision models and provides smart capability in your premises. AWS Panorama SDK will fast track your ability to build smart cameras. 

EDGE COMPUTE

• AWS Outposts in two new sizes now allows you to run Outposts in locations that have limited space. It is now available in a 1/80^th the size of the existing Outposts. 
• AWS Local Zones has now been launched in Boston, Houston and Miami with 12 more locations opening in the United States in 2021. 
• AWS Wavelength will be launching soon with Vodafone in London, KDDI in Tokyo and SK Telecom in Daejeon. 

CONTACT CENTRES

• Amazon Connect Wisdom reduces the time agents spend finding answers for customers. It uses machine learning to detect issues that are happening and alert agents within the console.  
• Amazon Connect Customer Profiles gives agents a unified profile across a call to deliver faster, more personalised customer service.  
• Real Time Contact Lens for Amazon Connect to identifies issues that impact the call with the customer real time. It will use machine learning to detect customer experience issues during the live call. This will have an impact on the call real time and looks for specific terms to provide alerts to the agents. 
• Amazon Connect Tasks which automates, tracks and manages tasks which makes it easier for agents and enables managers to automate some of the tasks entirely. 
• Amazon Connect Voice ID which is a real time caller authentication without disrupting the natural conversation. It is an opt in service and the voice of the caller is used to provide a confidence level of the authenticity of the identity of the caller. 

There’s plenty of announcements to digest that will accelerate your cloud adoption 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 at https://versent.com.au/services/cloud-adoption/.