Despite heavy afternoon rains that caused downtime for portions of the Javits Center, an estimated 10,000 cloud computing practitioners descended upon New York City this week for AWS Summit. With access to a vendor exposition and breakout sessions focused on technical and non-technical topics around the world of Amazon Web Services (AWS), attendees got a glimpse into where cloud is heading next.
As always, the most poignant of messages came from AWS CTO Werner Vogels in his Tuesday morning keynote. With the mantra of “build on,” Vogels reflected how the adoption of AWS from various industries has reduced the barriers to innovation, helping industries move from vendor-guided innovation and monolithic architecture models to a new paradigm where applications are interconnected and composed of individualized, elegant building blocks.
Vogels also reaffirmed how far multiple industries have come with the cloud. Whether it’s gaming company Fortnite and their full commitment to AWS that supported a hundredfold increase in users, or the Depository Trust and Credit Corporation (DTCC) adopting scalable cloud storage to manage stock trade and other transaction records, the message was clear: cloud has reached ubiquity.
Nonetheless, AWS continues to push on, focusing on solutions that drive further innovation across all industries. Here’s a brief summary of the new AWS features and services announced in Vogels’ keynote:
- Advances in Computing: The need for computing power is increasing and AWS has every intention to support that vision. Vogels pre-announced the availability of new Amazon EC2 R5, R5D, and bare metal instances, which offer scalable processing power to support everything from new media-rich applications to data-rich scientific research projects.
- Machine Learning Scales Higher: Machine learning has gained significant traction in 2018 with the help of AWS. At the New York Summit, Vogels announced features that provide greater scalability and speed in machine learning jobs. These include data processing improvements and faster job completion in Amazon SageMaker, text analysis in Amazon Comprehend, increased language support in Amazon Translate, and channel splitting on Amazon Transcribe. In all, these advances will help put machine learning in the hands of every developer and help organizations automate more of their operations.
- Simplified Network Delivery: Vogels announced a preview of Bring Your Own IP in Amazon VPC, where organizations will now be able to use their own publicly routable IP addresses to access resources such as EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, and NAT Gateways. This will further accelerate migration between on-premises workloads and AWS applications without compromising the IP addresses of legacy cloud applications.
- Improvements in Storage: Finally, AWS made several announcements concerning storage capabilities. Its S3 customers can now expect faster data retrieval rates for faster processing, all at no extra charge. AWS added support on its Snowball Edge for SBE1, a new EC2 instance type that features a 1.8 GHz Xeon D processor. Organizations can now move their large-scale workloads through serverless environments by developing on EC2 instances in disconnected or remote locations to collect, store, and process data before returning it back to AWS.
You can read more about all of the announcements on the AWS Announcement Website.
At this pace of releasing new services, even the most sophisticated of teams need ways to stay ahead. If you’re interested in applying the fundamentals of these technologies to your business, choose the next AWS learning path for your team in the Cloud Academy training library.
With re:Invent 2018 coming up, Amazon Web Services will continue to enhance its portfolio with new and updated solutions. If you’re wondering how to make the most of the new features and prepare for what’s ahead, meet us at AWS Summit Chicago next month or follow our blog for continuing updates.
