A recap of AWS re:Invent 2021
If you are familiar with cloud computing, you’ve probably heard about one of the most expected events of the year, AWS re:Invent.
AWS re:Invent is the annual conference where Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces its new products and services, while sharing some success stories from customers around the world.
Today I bring you a summary of some of the novelties that have been presented in this 10th anniversary of re:Invent.
Graviton3
One of the new features introduced this year, along with the use of AMD EPYC ROME for EC2 M6a instances, is the release of AWS’s own CPUs based on ARM Graviton3 architecture for EC2 C7g instances.
With this AWS promises a significant performance improvement of up to 25% in workloads, and a x3 in machine learning, compared to EC2 C5g instances based on CPUs with Graviton2 architecture, all with 60% less power consumption.
My opinion is that there are always cycles on the market. Sometimes companies focus on innovation, generating really innovative services and features. Others, the focus is on reducing expenses. I believe that this new feature will allow AWS to improve profitability, by increasing performance while reducing its operational cost. Definitely a good move for reducing OPEX.
AWS Mainframe Modernization
AWS Mainframe Modernization is a new platform for mainframe migration, which aims to help AWS customers get off their old mainframes as fast as they can, in order to take advantage of the cloud.
Customers usually take two different paths for migrating from their old mainframe infrastructures to the cloud: a “lift and shift” approach, trying to bring their application as it is, and a refactor strategy, breaking down the application as microservices in the cloud. Both of them are complex processes and can take months or even years to complete.
With this solution, AWS claims that they can reduce the time it takes to move mainframe workloads to the cloud to two-thirds, using their set of development, test, deployment and mainframe-compatible runtime environment.
AWS Private 5G
AWS Private 5G is a new service that helps enterprises set up and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities.
More and more enterprises need to collect and analyze huge amounts of data within their operations from large number of connected sensors and devices. 5G technology allow customers to connect more devices in a cost-effectively way, with greater flexibility and reliability, and lower latency.
With this new service, enterprises can create, deploy and scale their own 5G network in days or months.
AWS IoT TwinMaker
A service to simplify and speed up the creation and use of digital twins of real-world systems to monitor and optimize operations. This digital twins are virtual representations of physical systems, such as factories, buildings, production lines and equipment that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the structure, state and behavior of the systems they represent.
It allows you to connect data from different data sources like sensors, business applications or processes without having to move all the data into a single repository. You can use built-in data connectors for connecting data sources to different AWS services, such as Kinesis, S3 or SiteWise.
Serverless architecture
They announced a number of their really high profile data services becoming serverless.
Kinesis is one of them. The new feature allows users to remove the need to specify capacity configurations and allow Kinesis capacity to be managed on-demand, depending on usage. This update eliminates the need for provisioning and managing the capacity for streaming data.
The same is applied for EMR, Redshift or MSK. Serverless architecture automatically provisions and adjusts resources as required, so customers does not have to worry when data volumes change over time.
Conclusion
In my opinion, we are witnessing a year of transition. Honestly, we haven’t seen all this sort of wow, crazy innovation things that blow your mind. They didn’t make any big announcement. But there is a sort of change in the tone, a change in the way things are presented.
The way I see it is that they were beginning to set some foundations for a new set of customers they want to go after, much more enterprise center. I think they knew that web skill companies and startups already use AWS in their day-to-day operations, so they need to send a signal to the market to embrace a broad set of customers. And to do that, they need to be sure that they are offering what they need.
For this reason some of the announcements were really focused in enterprises. Things like exposing new services that simplify the migration of mainframe architectures, typically used by huge enterprises of financial, healthcare or assurance services, or simplifying some high-profile services they already have, for example data services. They realize that enterprises don’t want their data teams (database team, AI team, data science team…) to deal with the infrastructure, so they are bringing things they have learned about how to make compute serverless to other high intensity, high scalability data services.
They are trying to reach the next level of adopters. They have already dominated the early adopters, and they are in the fight of trying to convince the early and late majority of the innovation adoption lifecycle.
Also they have realized one of the criticisms that has been made of them for a long time: the large number of services they have. Therefore, there is a strategic change. Rather than publishing a lot of new services, they are trying to change the focus by simplifying the ones they already have and redefining and splitting what they do in vertical markets, so they are able to put the full power of AWS in specific use cases for the different markets, so that customers can have a faster time to results.
In short, we are seeing a change in the cycle. It will be really interesting to see how they make this transition over the next few years.
