HITS

Amazon Web Services Highlights Growing Trends, New Services at re:Invent

Growing demand for containers and data lakes are among the major trends being seen by Amazon Web Services, according to its CEO, Andy Jassy.

“Everybody wants a data lake,” he said Nov. 27 during a keynote at the company’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. “In some ways, it’s this year’s version of machine learning and big data and the cloud,” he said, adding: “We have over 10,000 data lakes…. We have a lot of experience with it. But it’s hard work to set up a data lake right.”

Meanwhile, “more and more companies are looking to use containers,” he said, noting AWS has “an incredible number of customers now using containers on top of AWS and we have a lot more offerings there than you will find anywhere else.”

Jassy and Terry Wise, VP of AWS Global Alliances and Channels, also cited strong demand for Amazon SageMaker. “Thousands and thousands of customers are already using SageMaker” since it was launched at re:Invent last year, Jassy said. In introducing the service last year, he called it “an easy way to build, train and deploy machine learning models for everyday developers.”

Among other trends, Jassy this time said: “The days of using relational databases for all your workloads has come and gone. That ship has sailed. People are using purpose-built databases for … particular use cases and workloads.”

He also told attendees: “I think we’re just at the early stages of the meat of enterprise and public sector adoption in the U.S. Outside the U.S., I’d say we’re 12 to 36 months behind, depending on the country and the industry. So, there are a lot of mainstream enterprises that are just now starting to plan their approach to the cloud in any kind of meaningful way.”

AWS also announced several new services and features at re:Invent once again. For example, it said AWS Ground Station is a new service that “makes it easy and cost-effective for customers to download data from satellites into AWS Global Infrastructure Regions using a fully managed network of 12 ground station antennas located around the world.”

After customers receive satellite data at a ground station, they can “immediately process it in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, store it in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), apply AWS analytics and machine learning services to gain insights, and use Amazon’s network to move the data to other regions and processing facilities,” it said in a news release.

AWS also announced four significant services and capabilities that it said “make it easier to ingest data from edge devices and build rich” Internet of Things (IoT) applications.”

AWS IoT SiteWise is a new managed service that collects, structures, and searches IoT data from industrial facility devices and uses it to analyze equipment and process performance data, the company said.

AWS IoT Events, meanwhile, is a managed IoT service that it said “makes it easy to detect and respond to changes indicated by IoT sensors and applications, such as malfunctioning equipment or a stuck conveyor belt, and automatically trigger actions or alerts.”

AWS IoT Things Graph is a new service that it said “makes it easy to build IoT applications with little or no code by connecting different devices and cloud services, such as linking humidity sensors to sprinklers to weather data services to create an agricultural application, through a visual drag-and-drop interface.”

And AWS IoT Greengrass Connectors provides developers with the ability to connect third-party applications including ServiceNow for service management, on-premises software like Splunk for log analytics, and AWS services including Amazon Kinesis for data ingest via common cloud Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). “With this ability, developers can easily add more features like location-based services, replenishment, industrial data processing, alarm and messaging, repair and maintenance, logistics, and more, without writing code,” AWS said.

For more information about Ground Station, click here.