Daily Recaps from AWS re:Invent 2023
Key news and takeaways from each day of AWS re:Invent, the annual learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS)
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If you’re anything like us, you might feel like the announcements, events, and insights of the annual AWS re:Invent conference grow seemingly more plentiful — and more complex — every year. It’s a lot to digest, and there are about as many ways to stay informed as there is information.
Here’s an idea: take it one day at a time. Explore our daily recaps below for a balanced rundown of each day’s big news — with a sprinkle of what we’ve been up to at Slalom.
Day one
Keynotes kick off with an engineering deep dive, plus AWS Partner Awards announced
It always takes us a beat to settle into the rhythm of re:Invent. When we’re not looking for the locations of our first sessions or meetings, we’re looking for our lip balm. Or our water bottle. Or the coffee shop with the shortest line.
On a day when most of us are still adjusting to the hustle, bustle, and general unpredictability of re:Invent, we’re grateful for three things that everyone can expect on day one of re:Invent week: Peter DeSantis’s keynote, the product and service launches that come with his keynote, and the announcement of AWS Partner Awards.
The keynote: Peter DeSantis
For the second year in a row (but not the second year ever; see 2018 and 2019), senior vice president of AWS Utility Computing Peter DeSantis delivered the Monday Night Live keynote, diving deep into engineering and performance. DeSantis was joined onstage by customer speaker Brent Rich, head of global infrastructure and operations at Riot Games, who described Riot’s transformation from a single-game company (League of Legends) with colocation — or “colo’”— data centers into a growing gaming company with new offerings (e.g., Valorant) and new infrastructure on the AWS Cloud. For an example of what Riot’s transformation entailed, we highly recommend jumping to the 40:25 mark of the keynote to watch Rich explain how Riot used AWS to mitigate a phenomenon called “peeker’s advantage.”
The launches: Serverless and more
- Amazon Aurora Limitless Database: A capability that allows customers to automatically distribute data and queries across multiple Amazon Aurora Serverless instances while maintaining the transactional consistency of a single database. The implications here are big. In response to the recording of DeSantis’s keynote on YouTube, a commenter writes: “I recall years ago people saying that SQL is dead. Can we now say that NoSQL is dead? We no longer need to trade off consistency and complex query capabilities for performance, so IMO the answer is yes.”
- Amazon ElastiCache Serverless and Amazon Redshift Serverless: While these two offerings are clearly different from each other, their launch represents AWS’s concerted effort to use serverless technologies as a means of making it faster and easier for customers to scale their data infrastructure to support their most demanding use cases. As AWS VP of Data and Artificial Intelligence Swami Sivasubramanian said in an AWS press release about these launches and the Limitless Database launch, “The dynamic nature of data makes it perfectly suited to serverless technologies.”
- Amazon Time Sync Service: A high-accuracy timekeeping service built on dedicated AWS network infrastructure, giving customers a clock that’s accurate to millionths of a second anywhere in the world. Why? So you can more easily order application events, measure one-way network latency, and increase distributed application transaction speed.
The awards: AWS SI Partner of the Year and more
AWS honored Slalom with five awards — including System Integrator (SI) Partner of the Year globally — at its start-of-week Partner Awards Gala, putting us at six total wins in 2023 if you include our recognition in August as SI Partner of the Year in the US. To say we’re honored is an understatement. To see all of the 2023 Geo and Global AWS Partners of the Year, visit the AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog.
Day two
Adam Selipsky talks cloud transformation and Slalom talks zero-ETL data integration
What makes Day Two of re:Invent so highly anticipated is the CEO keynote, which ushers in some of the biggest product and service announcements of the week. But that’s not the whole story — especially if you ask us. While our team was excited about the launches announced during AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s keynote, we also created some excitement of our own in speaking appearances on topics including zero-ETL data integration and how to succeed in your cloud career.
The keynote: Adam Selipsky
Several inspiring AWS customers came onstage during Adam Selipsky’s keynote, each with a unique story to tell about their cloud transformation journey. Pfizer’s chief digital and technical officer described how the company has been able to speed up the development of new medicines worldwide by migrating to AWS, and then save hundreds of millions of dollars using AWS’s generative AI (GenAI) capabilities. BMW Group’s senior vice president of connected company development and technical operations discussed how the company has used AWS to enhance its in-car entertainment systems and optimize route guidance. Selipsky also welcomed representatives from AWS’s major GenAI collaborators to the stage, including NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, and Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder, Dario Amodei.
The launches: Amazon Q, Graviton4, and more
Selipsky announced more than 20 launches (!) during his keynote. Here are our top three:
- Amazon Q: A powerful new GenAI assistant that’s specifically for work and can be tailored to your business. So far, Q has generated the most mainstream buzz of all re:Invent 2023 launches, with coverage from the New York Times, CNBC, and the Associated Press.
- AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2: Pass the chips! Graviton4, the next generation in the AWS family of processors designed for a broad range of workloads running on Amazon EC2, provides up to 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth than Graviton3 chips. Trainium2, the next generation in the AWS family of chips designed for training foundation models (FMs) and large language models (LLMs), can deliver up to four-times-faster training than first-generation Trainium chips.
- New capabilities for Amazon Bedrock: AWS’s fully managed service that gives users access to FMs now has capabilities like Guardrails and fine-tuning, meaning you can now privately and securely customize FMs with your own data.
The Slalom speakers: Rob Koch and Kesha Williams
Day Two saw a couple Slalom team members take to the stage, starting with our Lightning Talk delivered by Rob Koch, a principal consultant and AWS Data Hero. Rob shared insights and a demo about zero-ETL data integration, which makes data available to engineers at the point of use through direct integration between services and direct querying across a variety of data stores. Rob’s talk couldn’t have been better timed, given the day’s keynote announcements included the launch of four new zero-ETL integrations with Amazon Redshift.
Meanwhile on Day Two, Kesha Williams, a leader of the Slalom Cloud Residency and an AWS Machine Learning Hero, spoke on a panel about how to succeed in your cloud career. Kesha was joined by other big names in the AWS community such as Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS. Check out Kesha’s recap of the panel on LinkedIn.
Day three
Big news in advertising and marketing innovation and looking back on AI’s biggest year yet
With two keynotes and yet more Slalom recognition from AWS, there was a lot to love about Day Three of re:Invent. Let’s get straight to it, shall we?
The keynotes: Ruba Borno and Swami Sivasubramanian
If you’ll permit us a bit of selfishness, let’s start with the keynote where Slalom appeared on the big screen. AWS VP of Worldwide Channels and Alliances Ruba Borno delivered the AWS Partner keynote in the afternoon and sent us over the moon when she highlighted our amazing work with United Airlines. Borno explained how we’re working with United to build and scale the company’s GenAI capabilities to the benefit of its customers.
Earlier in the day, Swami Sivasubramanian delivered his customary keynote focused on data and AI. Seeing as GenAI captured — and held — our collective imagination in 2023, Sivasubramanian focused largely on GenAI, reviewing the developments of the year and announcing a host of new AWS services and capabilities powered by GenAI. Guest speakers included AWS customers Booking.com, Intuit, and Perplexity.
The launches: New capabilities for Titan, Clean Rooms, and more
Sivasubramanian announced 18 launches during his keynote, rivaling Selipsky’s 21. Our top three:
- Amazon Titan Image Generator: This is a fun one. Now available in preview, Titan Image Generator lets you produce high-quality, realistic images or enhance existing images using simple natural language prompts. Another cool part? All Titan-generated images come with an “invisible watermark” designed to help reduce the spread of misinformation. See the new service in action in Sivasubramanian’s demo at the 21:15 mark of his keynote.
- AWS Clean Rooms ML: We were stoked about AWS Clean Rooms when AWS rolled it out at last year’s re:Invent. Since then, we’ve helped customers like Television New Zealand use it to transform the way they manage advertising. Now we’re looking forward to trying out its new machine learning (ML) capability, which opens the door to using Clean Rooms to create lookalike segments for marketing use cases.
- Model Evaluation on Amazon Bedrock: The more foundation models you have to choose from, the better — obviously — but the harder it is to choose. That just got easier with Model Evaluation, which is now available in preview and allows you to evaluate, compare, and select the best FMs for your use case.
The Slalom scoop: New AWS Advertising and Marketing Technology Competency
At a time when recent changes to privacy laws and platform modifications have resulted in signal loss and made it much harder to track and target prospects across digital channels, it’s never been more important to figure out how to use technology to safely and securely create a complete view of audiences and consumers, and then use that view to create more meaningful interactions with end customers. That’s why there’s a new AWS Competency in town and we’re proud to say that we earned it, specifically in the categories of Audience and Customer Data Management and Digital Customer Experience.
Day four
A keynote — and conference — to remember
Many re:Invent attendees go home the fourth day of re:Invent. One of the best reasons to stay is the keynote of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.
The keynote: Werner Vogels
As usual, Vogels began his keynote with a cinematic fever dream of an introduction. Instead of an elaborate, Matrix-inspired metaphor for asynchrony (see last year’s keynote), Vogels kicked things off this year with a short film of an exchange between himself and someone who calls themself “The Architect.” The Architect proudly shows Vogels their “system,” gesturing around a rack-filled room, and then mentions that they have a problem: every time the Architect adds a new service, they need to build a new rack, “ergo,” says the Architect, “it’s becoming very expensive.”
“Also,” the Architect says as they switch on a handheld fan, “it’s very hot in here.”
Vogels’ response: “Have you considered cloud migration?” The Architect looks puzzled at this. Cue montage — Vogels literally cues a montage — of the pair of them frenziedly writing code and whiteboarding until the Architect arrives at a series of epiphanies about the cloud and its benefits. A cloud convert is born, but not without some parting wisdom from Vogels to the Architect that, “You need to build with cost in mind from the outset; you need to be a frugal architect.”
The first half of the keynote felt like part of a promotional tour for The Frugal Architect, a new online book containing a set of seven “laws” spearheaded by Vogels for designing and building cost-aware and sustainable systems. Vogels spent an hour introducing the laws and elaborating upon each with an overview of the AWS services that support it. The second half of the keynote was a story in itself, with its own cinematic intro and far-reaching topic of, you guessed it: AI. It’s worth the watch, especially for Vogels’ powerful examples of organizations leveraging AI for good, including the International Rice Research Institute, cergenex, Precision AI, Digital Earth Africa, and Thorn.
The launches: Building gets (even) better
There were few-enough launches to list all of them here, and all of them represent exciting news for builders — click on each to learn more:
- AWS Management Console myApplications
- Amazon Cloudwatch Application Signals
- Amazon SageMaker Studio Code Editor
- AWS Application Composer in VS Code
- Amazon Inspector CI/CD Container Scanning
The end.
Most re:Invent attendees don’t live in Las Vegas, so for most of you who attended: we hope you had a safe trip home and have caught up on sleep. If you’re still working on that last part, might we recommend the Cleveland Clinic’s research-backed tips?
Because this writer caught up on sleep before writing Day Four’s recap, yet more recaps dropped since the conference ended. If you’re feeling refreshed and ready to review more of the week, we encourage you to explore more re:Invent recaps:
- AWS’s 11 key announcements from re:Invent 2023
- CRN’s AWS re:Invent Wrap-up: 15 Huge Products and Partner Launches
- SiliconANGLE’s breaking analysis: “re:Invent 2023 underscores a new simplicity mandate for AWS”
Wishing you health, happiness, and cost-aware architecture in the new year. See you for AWS re:Invent 2024!
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
