3 Key Takeaways from this Year’s AWS re:Invent
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently wrapped up its 10th annual re:Invent conference, and the Navisite team had a great time at the event. And as expected, AWS unveiled a number of innovative solutions and strategies that are helping AWS customers successfully migrate and manage their businesses on the cloud and drive innovation.
This year, re:Invent was defined by three main themes: transformation, sustainability and continued automation and ease of use. Here’s a look at how AWS is paving the way to help businesses achieve all three.
From Cloud Platform to Digital Transformation Partner
While AWS continues to roll out new solutions and technologies to advance its capabilities, the company is clearly moving beyond its role as a cloud service provider (CSP) and positioning itself to be a true digital transformation partner for customers.
This sentiment came through in AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s keynote, which focused on a retrospective of AWS over the past decade, and how the company has become increasingly strategic for customers who are running core parts of their businesses on AWS.
Nasdaq was highlighted as a prime example of this: The two companies started working together over 10 years ago, and recently, Nasdaq said it will move its trading platforms to AWS. This move demonstrates AWS’ role as a mission-critical, trusted partner in the cloud and is setting a standard of what’s to come. Following Nasdaq, we’ll likely see a domino effect of banks and other companies who will move their trading and performance-intensive systems off-premises to AWS.
AWS’ place at the center of the enterprise driving core business processes is only going to grow. As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, we’re excited about the future and combining our strengths with AWS to help customers transform and drive business outcomes on the cloud.
Upping the Ante on Sustainability
Over the past year, we’ve seen businesses stepping up to make sustainability, climate change and the environment a large part of their platform, and AWS is likewise leading the charge.
Peter DeSantis, SVP of Utility Computing at AWS, reaffirmed the company’s pledge to become carbon neutral by 2030—and, in fact, expects to hit their goal ahead of schedule. They’re achieving this by investing in renewable energy, particularly in wind and solar, which will enable the company to leverage natural energy sources without having to resort to fossil fuels.
Three of AWS’ climate initiatives/innovations that stood out include:
- Customer Carbon Footprint tool – Available early next year, this tool will provide AWS customers with the carbon footprint of their use of AWS services to support their efforts to meet their carbon reduction goals.
- Graviton3 chip – AWS announced the next generation of its Gravitron processor family: Gravitron3, which provides up to 25% better compute performance, up to 2x higher floating-point performance, and up to 2x faster cryptographic workload performance compared to AWS Graviton2 processors.
- Well-Architected Sustainability pillar – Lastly, Amazon CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels, discussed the new sustainability pillar for its Well-Architected Framework, which will help customers make informed decisions in balancing security, cost, performance, reliability and operational excellence with sustainability outcomes for their cloud workloads
Focusing on Automation and Ease of Use
AWS continues to focus on taking the burden of tooling off customers, making it less manual and more automated, and by removing the need for cloud and data expertise. They announced several new tools at this year’s conference, including:
- Amazon SageMaker Canvas – Amazon added a new feature to its SageMaker service that expands access to machine learning (ML) by making it easier to generate accurate ML predictions—all without requiring machine learning experience or having to write a single line of code.
- Amazon Redshift Serverless – With Amazon Redshift, customers can run analytics at scale in the cloud without having to manage the data warehouse infrastructure behind it. There is no need to set up and manage clusters. Customers simply pay for the duration in seconds when their data warehouse is in use.
- AWS Amplify Studio – Amazon introduced Amplify Studio, a visual development environment that lets developers easily build and ship complete web and mobile apps in hours instead of weeks. Amplify Studio makes it easy for customers to build apps with minimal coding.
- AWS Mainframe Modernization – The new Mainframe Modernization platform allows customers to migrate and modernize their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS. A key benefit of the platform: enabling customers to take legacy mainframe code and rewrite it for modern code frameworks.
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