160. Get out there and reinvent - AWS re:Invent 2023 Hightlights #1
In the next few blocks, let's check out the most recent developments and new product and services launch, based on the following 5 main keynote events.
For 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been inspiring the world across industries to reinvent themselves. Enterprises and 80% unicorn startups, universities, community colleges, non-profits, AWS now has 3 times the number of data centers compared to the next largest cloud provider with huge capacity and capabilities.
In the opening keynote, CEO Adam Selipsky has mentioned about the collaboration across industries, started with financial services. (Allianz was the 5th company mentioned by Adam after JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, NASDAQ, Fidelity, interesting sequence)
AMAZON Q
A powerful new generative AI assistant called Amazon Q that’s specifically for work and can be tailored to your business. Employees can use Amazon Q to hold conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insights, and act on them by seamlessly tapping into corporate information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems.
Enable a digital twin for Earth
AWS and Nvidia are also partnering to bring the Nvidia DGX Cloud to AWS.
DGX Cloud will be the largest AI factory Nvidia has ever built - including running Project Seba, 16,384 GPUs connected into one AI supercomputer - "it's utterly incredible," CEO of NVIDIA Huang notes - a stunning 65 exaflops of power.
"DGX Cloud is Nvidia's AI factory," Huang says. "This is how our researchers advance AI. We use our AI factories to advance our large language models, to simulate Earth 2 - a digital twin of the earth."
Amazon S3 Express One Zone
Amazon has a major update to its S3 object storage service called Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new high-performance and low latency tier for S3. Up to ten times faster than S3 standard storage, Selipsky said. This faster compute power will enable users to cut costs by up to 50% compared to S3 standard.
Graviton 4
Selipsky says Graviton 4 is the most powerful and energy efficient chip aws has ever built. 40% faster for database applications compared to Graviton3 and 30% faster than Graviton3. Also 45% faster for large Java applications.
Generative AI Stack
"We think about generative AI as having three macro layers," Selipsky says.
"The bottom layer is used to train foundation models and run them in production. The middle layer provides the tools you need to build and scale generative AI applications.
"Then at the top we've got the applications that you use in everyday operations"
AWS Trainium 2
The launch of the new AWS Trainium 2 chip for generative AI and ML training.
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This is optimized for training FMs with hundreds of billions - to trillions - of parameters. It's also four-times faster than AWS Trainium.
Amazon Bedrock
The innovation around generative AI is explosive, Costs are a major consideration for organizations training AI models at present. The costs incurred by firms during training have been rising rapidly over the last year or so. The other one is security and responsibility are still quite important, Selipsky announces the launch of Guardrails for Bedrock.
Adam highlighted Delta Air Lines Inc.’s customer service tool, which is built on Amazon Bedrock and will be able to answer customer questions in a more conversational style by accessing Delta’s travel policies, real-time flight schedules, customer rebooking options, and airport conditions.
For instance, it can respond to questions ranging anywhere from a simple one like,“How many bags can I check on a Delta flight?”
to something more complex like,
“Can I carry a pet with me in the cabin to Jamaica?”
On the topic of AI security, Pfizer chief technical officer Lidia Fonseca showed the pharma company's relationship with AWS and how the company is harnessing generative AI across its research operations. Bedrock allows Pfizer to explore different models and generative AI tools based on specific business needs spanning a range of areas. This isn't just limited to medical research, but across IT operations and more.
She saw the company move 12,000 applications and 8,000 servers to the cloud in just 42 weeks. One of the fastest, and largest, cloud migrations in history.
There's a major skills gap looming amid the ongoing focus on generative AI among enterprises globally. Simply put, businesses just don't have the relevant skills. The company recently announced plans to provide AI training for two million people by 2025.
ZERO-ETL
Zero-ETL is a set of integrations that eliminates or minimizes the need to build ETL data pipelines. Extract, transform, and load (ETL) is the process of combining, cleaning, and normalizing data from different sources to get it ready for analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads. Traditional ETL processes are time-consuming and complex to develop, maintain, and scale. Instead, zero-ETL integrations facilitate point-to-point data movement without the need to create ETL data pipelines. Zero-ETL can also enable querying across data silos without the need for data movement.
the company announced Redshift Serverless now uses AI to automatically optimize and scale Amazon Redshift data warehouses based on query patterns and data volumes, greatly reducing the amount of work IT needs to do behind the scenes. Because each of these options is serverless, it means that Amazon manages all of the hardware in the background, and delivers just the right amount of resources you need, scaling up when needed without IT having to deal with all of the back-end management work.
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon RDS for MySQL zero-ETL integrations with Amazon Redshift enable customers to analyze data from multiple sources without building and maintaining custom data pipelines Amazon DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon OpenSearch Service enables full-text and vector search on operational data in near real time.
"The most important reinvention of all is yours," Selipsky notes, emphasizing how AWS is looking to give businesses everywhere the tools they need to experiment and grow.
Project kuiper
He notes how Amazon has a history of making big bets, and how its long-term focus is part of its DNA.
Next up is Project Kuiper, the LEO satellite project that looks to deliver fast and reliable internet access for those in need. We're then treated to a little promo video about Kuiper's recent advances, complete with real-life smoke machines!
It's not just consumers who can benefit from Kuiper though, as Selipsky outlines how first-responders, environmental scientists and more can see advances.
Kuiper is also going to provide enterprise-ready data transfer services via Kuper Network Core, coming next year.
Stay tuned for the next summary coming up.