AWS re:Invent 2016 keynote

The first AWS re:Invent 2016 keynote here at was an endless series of exciting announcements. Andy Jassy kept astonishing the crowd for more than two hours straight. In addition to the nearly 32,000 attendees this year, re:Invent is hosting more than 50,000 live streams spread across more than 400 technical sessions.
During his AWS re:Invent 2016 keynote, Jassy also invited special guests to showcase new projects and partnerships, including the CTO of McDonald’s, the CEO of VMWare, and the CEO of Workday.
Here is a quick recap of the services announced today (most of these are already available for you to experiment with):
the party is on at #awsreinvent in Vegas! pic.twitter.com/gbbMKKT3FS
— Alex Casalboni (@alex_casalboni) November 30, 2016
In 2014, AWS announced the Cloud as “the new normal.” Last year, the focus was on “taking control over your own destiny“. In 2016 and 2017, using AWS will make you feel like you have been given Super Powers. But which super powers?
Andy announced six new EC2 instance types:
And brand new compute services:
I think Athena is probably the most interesting service among the ones mentioned above; we will find out more tomorrow here at re:Invent.
Amazon has been working on Machine Learning and AI for years, under the hood. Today, AWS has finally released a bit of that technology as a triplet of services powered by Deep Learning:
Of course, these new services are well integrated with one other, and you can build powerful user interfaces by combining face recognition, language understanding, and speech rendering.
After the amazing success of Amazon Aurora that was announced last year, AWS made it compatible with PostgreSQL as well.
Aurora is now fully compatible with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, and it provides much better performance with respect to the corresponding traditional version. Furthermore, it’s pretty easy to migrate your PostgreSQL databases from RDS to Aurora.
Andy asked a very interesting question:
What constitutes on-premises infrastructure? And what will it be in the future?
Today, we consider on-premises to be only physical servers in data centers. However, we’re already looking forward to a future where sensors and IoT devices will be everywhere. And, they will be the new on-premises, as you will be limited to what’s on the device unless you rewrite or reprogram it.
Unfortunately, programming and updating embedded software requires very specialized skills and here is where a whole new service comes in AWS Greengrass.
AWS Greengrass will let you embed Lambda Compute in connected devices, plus secure messaging and data caching as well. You will be able to define Lambda Functions directly in the AWS Console with the same programming model and deploy them into your IoT devices.
Last but not least, Andy highlighted the huge success of AWS Snowball.
Given the high demand and the even higher demand for exabyte-scale transfers, AWS announced two new devices:
We can’t even imagine what Werner Vogels will announce tomorrow at the second AWS re:Invent 2016 keynote !
Stay tuned. In the meantime, we’d love to know which of the new services is your favourite? Which one will you try first? And, had you guessed any of the news above?
Also, don’t forget to come and say hi to our team in Vegas, we have some swag for everyone.