Three Key Themes That Defined AWS re:Invent 2022

The Navisite team had the opportunity to attend AWS re:Invent 2022—and, as always, the year’s most transformative event in tech gave us an exciting look into the future of cloud technology.

From keynotes and leadership sessions to boot camps and breakout content, AWS unveiled a number of innovative solutions and strategies to help customers seamlessly navigate their digital transformations—and prepare their businesses for whatever lies ahead in 2023.

While there were many product releases, enhancements and topics covered throughout the course of the conference’s 2,300 sessions, we found three key areas of particular interest: low code services, supply chain visibility and the democratization of data. Here’s a closer look at each.

1. Simplifying Application Development to Help Companies Overcome the Skills Gap, Staffing Shortages

As with most areas of IT, there is a significant skills gap when it comes to finding qualified candidates who possess the unique knowledge (like expertise in programming languages, cloud infrastructure and UI/UX, to name a few) required to develop and manage complex applications. This means that while organizations battle to find the talent they need, critical application development processes remain at a standstill. And, that’s assuming companies even have the green light to hire—today’s current economic environment has forced many to enact hiring freezes and staff reductions, leaving them lacking the developers they need.

Understanding these pain points, AWS announced several new low-code solutions designed to help companies build applications, push releases and drive innovation without the need for extensive application development expertise and specialized skill sets. Here are two in particular that stood out:

Amazon CodeCatalyst: This is a new service that offers the tools software development teams need to quickly and easily develop, build and deliver applications on AWS. Teams can bring their own code or choose from blueprints (e.g., web application or data pipeline) to get new projects going in minutes. TechCrunch wrote a great piece describing the benefits of Amazon CodeCatalyst and summarizing Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ thoughts on the purpose of the product, which he delivered during his re:Invent keynote:

“Amazon CodeCatalyst takes away all the heavy lifting [of app dev]—it has all the tools you need to go from idea to production much fastes,” Vogels said.

AWS Application Composer: This is a low-code tool helping developers simplify and expedite the designing, architecting and building of serverless applications. Vogels noted in his re:Invent keynote that this tool is all about simplicity for developers:

“Sometimes developers choose a synchronous system because it’s convenient. They look so much simpler,” Vogels said. “In a synchronous system, you have all these components. In the event-driven [architecture], how they work together can sometimes look a little daunting. So we’ve been thinking about how can we simplify this. How can you make it easier, for example, for developers that never used serverless before? How do you know where to start? Which services do they need? How do they work together? We really wanted to make this easier.”

Both CodeCatalyst and Application Composer will simplify and expedite the creation of cloud applications on AWS, enabling companies to jumpstart their development programs with the skills they already have on staff—and this goes a long way to relieve pressure on those organizations that are struggling to find talent or make processes work amid hiring freezes or staffing shortages. 

2. Meeting Industry Demand for Visibility in the Supply Chain

Let’s face it: the past few years have seen their fair share of supply chain attacks, resource shortages and tumultuous disruptions—and visibility (or lack thereof) is a significant contributor to each. Without a comprehensive view across your supply chain, it can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to accurately take inventory, successfully forecast supply and demand, enhance processes, detect problems and predict issues, and ensure third-party partners across the supply chain are upholding security and compliance protocols. This means that if there’s an issue across a single aspect in your supply chain, the whole operation can fall off the tracks—causing major problems for the business, including excess inventory, not enough inventory, long delivery times, security issues and a subpar customer experience.

Following the events of the past few years (the SolarWinds attack, pandemic-prompted part shortages, and a lack of workers at ports to load/unload containers, to name a few high-profile examples), the industry has demanded increased visibility across the supply chain. And, AWS answered that call at re:Invent by announcing AWS Supply Chain—a new cloud application that underscores the reality that shoring up the supply chain remains a global priority.

In the product press release, AWS says its new cloud application will “help businesses increase supply chain visibility to make faster, more informed decisions that mitigate risks, lower costs, and improve customer experiences.” AWS also notes that the application will help users observe operations in real-time, identify trends quickly and generate more accurate demand forecasts that align inventory with customer expectations.

Supply chain visibility is a topic Navisite has talked about for some time (see our blog, “Supply Chain Transformation: Optimize and Reduce the Impact of Ongoing Disruptions”), and we truly believe achieving comprehensive visibility will translate to optimized supply chain processes for organizations of all sizes.

3. Streamlining Data Processing to Make Data Analytics More Accessible.

The massive push toward digital transformation and cloud adoption over the past few years, among other factors, has caused an explosion of data. Companies now have more data than ever across more environments than ever—and they’re left trying to figure out how to safely store, integrate, analyze and obtain actionable insights from it.

Given the volume and variety of data, these tasks have traditionally fallen to a data scientist—a niche role that typically only large enterprises can afford. But, here again, AWS is working hard to make it the domain of everyday IT and business professionals, so organizations of all sizes can benefit from data analytics and its transformative insights.

At re:Invent, the company announced Amazon DataZone, a data management solution allowing companies to search, share, collaborate on and govern data across the organization through a unified data analytics portal. In his re:Invent keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky noted DataZone enables users to “set data free throughout the organization safely by making it easy for data engineers, data scientists, product managers, analysts and other business users to discover, use and collaborate around that data to drive insights for your businesses.”

AWS also announced five new features to help companies optimize business intelligence (BI) operations using Amazon QuickSight, including:

• The ability to forecast and ask “why” questions via Amazon QuickSight Q
• Automated data preparation
• Paginated reporting
• Faster and easier analysis and visualization of large datasets
• The ability to programmatically create, manage and edit dashboards and reports

Democratizing data and simplifying data management through new and enhanced solutions such as those announced at re:Invent enable more organizations to take advantage of data analytics and turn insights into actions that will drive more informed decision-making and better business outcomes. Tools such as these are more necessary now than ever as data volumes are expected to grow continuously, and companies need to be able to make use of all their data to better their business. Check out Navisite’s 2023 trends blog for more on the benefits of bringing data analytics to the masses.

Making the move to AWS or looking to optimize your AWS environment? Navisite will make sure you’re set up for success. Contact us today.