AWS re:Invent: 2020 Keynote Top Highlights and More

We’ve gotten through the first five days of the special all-virtual 2020 edition of AWS re:Invent. It’s always a really exciting time for practitioners in the field to see what features and services AWS has cooked up for the year ahead.

This year’s conference is a marathon and not a sprint — it’s three weeks, from Nov. 30 – Dec 18, plus Jan. 12-14. Because of that, let’s focus on the big news: all the good stuff from AWS CEO Andy Jassy’s keynote.

We’ve gone straight to our AWS Content & Security Lead, Stuart Scott, to give a concise overview of what’s important. Stuart knows what he’s talking about with AWS: he’s an AWS Community Builder, has authored 100 courses for Cloud Academy, and has had over 100,000 students take his courses. So let’s get to it — here are Stuart’s highlights in tweet form from the Andy Jassy keynote.

AWS re:Invent keynote new services and features

Habana Gaudi-based Amazon EC2 instances – Built specifically for ML training and powered by Habana Gaudi processors
AWS Trainium – ML training chip custom-designed by AWS to deliver the most cost-effective training in the cloud
ECS Anywhere – Run ECS in your own data center
EKS Anywhere – Run EKS in your own data center
Lambda Container Support – Build Lambda-based applications using existing container development workflows
AWS Proton – The first fully managed deployment service for container and serverless applications
gp3 volumes for EBS – Provision the IOPS or throughput you need without having to add storage capacity
io2 Block Express – The highest IOPS throughput in the cloud
Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 – Scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second
Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL – Run SQL Server applications on Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes
Babelfish for PostgreSQL – Open-source project
AWS Glue Elastic Views – Easily build materialized views that automatically combine and replicate data across multiple data stores
Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler – The fastest way to prepare data for ML
Amazon SageMaker Feature Store – A new repository that makes it easy to store, update and share ML features
Amazon SageMaker Pipelines – The first purpose-built, easy-to-use CI/CD service for ML
Amazon DevOps Guru – A new service that uses ML to identify operational issues long before they impact customers
Amazon QuickSight Q – Ask Q any question in natural language and get answers in seconds
Amazon Connect Wisdom – A new capability that uses ML to deliver agents the product and service information they need to solve issues in real time
Amazon Connect Customer Profiles – Gives agents a unified profile of each customer to provide more personalized service during a call
Real-Time Contact Lens for Amazon Connect – Identifies issues in real time to impact customer interactions during the call itself
Amazon Connect Tasks – Automates, tracks, and manages tasks for contact center agents
Amazon Connect Voice ID – Real-time caller authentication using ML-powered voice analysis
Amazon Monitron – End-to-end solution for equipment monitoring
Amazon Lookout for Equipment – Anomaly detection service for industrial machinery
AWS Panorama Appliance – A new hardware appliance that allows organizations to add computer vision to existing on-premises cameras
AWS Panorama SDK – Enables hardware vendors to build new cameras that run more meaningful computer vision models at the edge
AWS Outposts in two new sizes – Smaller Outposts to run AWS infrastructure in locations with less space
New AWS Local Zones coming across different geographic areas

New at re:Invent – AWS Glue Elastic Views – A video explainer

Stuart dives deeper into the new AWS Glue Elastic Views feature, which can easily combine and replicate source data across multiple different target data stores, while at the same time manifesting a virtual table of combined data which can then be accessed by your applications.