AWS's big event had a clear focus on AI to maintain its leadership
AWS re:Invent, started on November 27 and will run until December 1. A rapid flow of announcements of new solutions and services it has been working on is expected, particularly given the growing competition for the cloud and meeting the rise of AI with attractive offers for customers. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky's keynote speech set the tone for the event, making clear that AWS is positioned to defend its leadership and is deploying AI tools and services to remain the leading cloud provider in the market. .
Wednesday November 29
Neptune Analysis
A new tool is Neptune Analytics, which combines the best of both worlds: graphical and vector databases. The new service helps customers analyze Neptune graph data or large volumes of existing data from S3 storage, leveraging vector search to find key insights.
Clean Rooms ML
Privacy-preserving service that allows AWS customers to deploy “lookalike” AI models trained for unique cross-enterprise collaborations called Clean Rooms ML, which is an offshoot of AWS's existing Clean Rooms product and eliminates the need for customers to AWS to share first-party data with its external partners to build, train, and deploy AI models.
HiperPod SageMaker
From Amazon's AWS cloud arm comes SageMaker HyperPod, a new service designed specifically for training and tuning large language models. Ankur Mehrotra, AWS General Manager for SageMaker said: “SageMaker HyperPod gives you the ability to create a distributed cluster with accelerated instances optimized for conflicting capacities. It gives you the tools to efficiently distribute models and data across your cluster, and that speeds up your execution process.”
AWS Titan Image Generator
Amazon is joining the ranks of other big tech companies to finally launch its own image generator. Kyle reports that Titan Image Generator is now available in preview for AWS customers and can create new images when given a text description or customize existing images.
Tuesday 28 noviembre
Amazon Q: an AI-powered chatbot
The big announcement of the day was Amazon Q, an AI-powered chatbot for AWS customers. During his keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky described it as being able to “chat, generate content, and take action easily.” “It’s all about understanding your systems, your data stores, and your operations.” Kyle reports that Q is trained with 17 years of AWS knowledge and will go beyond simply answering questions - he'll also do things like understand the nuances of application workloads and suggest AWS solutions and products for applications that only run for a few seconds.
Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock
The new Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock tool allows companies to define and limit the language types that a model can use. For example, define topics that are outside the boundaries of the model, so that you simply don't answer irrelevant questions.
New AWS Trainium chips for AI models
Amazon presented the latest generation of its chips for model training and inference (i.e. running trained models). Amazon already talked about AWS Trainium2, designed to deliver up to 4x better performance and 2x better power efficiency than the first-generation Trainium. The second chip announced, called Graviton4, is intended for inference. The fourth generation of Amazon's Graviton chip family (as implied by the "4" attached to "Graviton"), is distinct from Amazon's other inference chip, Inferentia.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone
Amazon has a major update to its S3 object storage service called Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new level of high performance and low latency for S3. One Zone will deliver a significant performance boost for data-intensive applications, including AI/ML training, financial modeling, and high-performance computing.
Three new offers
Amazon announced three new off-server offerings to make it easier to manage Aurora, ElastiCache, and Redshift serverless services: “Because each of these options is serverless, it means Amazon manages all the hardware in the background and delivers just the right amount of resources you need, scaling up when necessary without IT having to deal with the entire downstream process.” This creates an end to the management work for clients.
Amazon One palm scanning expands from stores to security
AWS lifted the lid on a new palm scanning identity service that allows companies to authenticate people when they enter physical facilities. Amazon One Enterprise builds on the company's existing Amazon One offering, which debuted in 2020 to enable biometric payments in Amazon's monitored cashier-less stores. Visitors to Amazon Go stores can associate their payment card with their palm print, allowing them to enter the store and complete their transaction by placing their hand over a scanner.
Virtual desktop devices with thin client
Amazon launched new $195 devices that allow business users to access virtual desktop environments, such as Amazon WorkSpaces, over the Internet. The devices are housed in Fire TV Cube hardware, a decision Amazon made to leverage the existing expertise of the retail giant's arm that makes streaming media players. The company explained that its decision to build new hardware was driven by customer feedback about a desire to reduce IT spending by replacing desktop and laptop computers with more affordable hardware.
