AWS re:Invent 2016 — Wednesday’s Keynote

A Summary of the Wednesday Keynote by Andy Jassy

After two big days of sessions and events at AWS re:Invent, Wednesday started with the first of two general keynotes. There was an air of excitement for the first round of announcements by AWS CEO, Andy Jassy. We saw a wide range of announcements for infrastructure and platform services.

Compute

AWS continued to improve their compute offerings this year with updates to their Infrastructure as a Service offerings. The new instance types and services provides tools for those who have found existing offerings do not quite fit their needs.

EC2 Instance types— More options for compute

• General Purpose — t2.xlarge, t2.2xlarge more CPU and compute
• Memory Optimised — r4
• Storage Optimised — I3
• Compute Optimised — C5

Available: Now

Elastic GPUs For EC2 — Attach GPU to EC2 Instances

• Similar to EBS you can attach GPU to instances
• Options for 1,2,4,8 GiB of GPU

Availability: Preview

Amazon Lightsail —Virtual Private Servers (VPS) made easy

• Run virtual private servers without configuring a VPC
• Choose image, Select size, Pick name and go
• Simple price per month
• Move Lightsail to AWS when requirements change
• Get started — https://amazonlightsail.com/

Availability: Now

Hardware acceleration — Programmable hardware

• A new instance family — F1 instances
• Develop Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) in AWS
• Released a Hardware dev kit on GitHub (link doesn’t work yet?)

Availability: Preview

Data storage and services

We saw a couple of interesting new features for data storage in AWS. You cannot your run an access database on s3. But now you can query your S3 data with SQL.

Amazon Athena — SQL queries for Data in S3

• Ad-hoc query against s3 without clusters
• Fully managed by AWS
• Doesn’t replace Redshift or EMR — another option

Availability: Now

Aurora for Postgres — New database engine for Aurora

• High performance
• Low cost

Availability: Preview

Amazon AI

The suite of Amazon AI services is an great addition to AWS. Image recognition and Natural Language Processing will allow more developers to create intelligent user experiences.

Amazon Rekognition — Image recognition service

• Pass image to Rekognition in Batch or Realtime
• Identifies Objects & Scenes — car, outside ect
• Identifies Faces — gender, smiling, glaces, matching
• Improve models over time

Availability: Now

Amazon Polly — Text to speech service

• Convert text to an MP3
• Fully managed, cached responses
• 47 voices, 27 languages

Availability: Now

Amazon Lex — What’s inside Amazon Alexa

• Automatic Speech recognition (ASR) — speech to text
• Natural Language understanding (NLU)
• Processes text or audio — suitable for voice or chat bots
• Triggers lambda to act upon requests
• Can be used for multi-step conversations
• Conversation models will improve over time

Available: Preview

Internet of Things (IoT)

I am personally very excited for updates to the IoT offerings on AWS. Project Greengrass is exactly what I need to finish my Serverless Garden project. Deploying software to devices and operating devices in an offline world are hard problems to solve. Project Greengrass will help solve this issue.

Greengrass — Lambda compute on Devices

• Embed lambda functions in devices
• Runs locally and offline
• Cache data locally
• Manufacturers can build Greengrass into devices
• Install Greengrass runtime
• Deploy Lambda functions to devices
• Facilitates device communication

Availability: Preview

Snowball

Snowball Edge — Hybrid Device with Storage and Compute

• 100 TB Storage
• S3 endpoint
• Greengrass (Lambda) inside — equivalent of m4.4xl inside
• Cluster Snowballs

Available: Now

Snowmobile — Clustered Snowballs in a truck

• 100 Petabyte container
• Connect to your datacenter via fiber
• Quickly move large amounts of data

Available: Now

What’s Next

We saw some great announcements today and we’re looking forward to more tomorrow. Andy hinted that tomorrow will be the day for Serverless announcements. I hope Werner Vogels might tick off some more items on my wish list tomorrow.

Myself and the team at A Cloud Guru are building a Serverless training system. If you need to get AWS certified or learn AWS Lambda sign up and start learning today.

Thanks to my colleague Daniel Parker for the photos.

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