Highlights from Adam Selipsky's AWS re:Invent 2022 Keynote

AWS re:Invent 2022: Perspectives and Product Introductions from AWS CEO Adam Selipsky

As the intersection of data and cloud becomes increasingly central to how we navigate this global economy, I couldn’t have been happier to listen to Adam Selipsky, CEO at AWS, as he shared the latest innovations in AWS cloud. During his keynote presentation to a full house of attendees, he covered AWS’s commitment to environmental responsibility. He illustrated to attendees how AWS brings flexibility and agility to organizations, and how these two attributes are keys to survival in fluctuating markets. Then he introduced his audience to a wide array of new products a services aimed squarely at redefining how we access, utilize and manage the increasing volumes of data that drive innovation in every industry vertical.  

Here’s a high-level summary of his presentation. 

Sustainability

Early in his presentation, Selipsky addressed sustainability, calling it “the issue of our generation.” He shared that Amazon is now the world's largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, with a goal of powering the company with 100% renewable energy by 2025. And he stated that AWS is already at 85% attainment of that goal.

Beyond energy, Selipsky announced his commitment to water conservation through an initiative to become water-positive by 2030, meaning AWS will return more water to its communities than it consumes through its operations.

Global Challenges and Cost Savings Opportunities

Selipsky also touched on the economic uncertainty stemming from inflation, supply chain disruptions, chip shortages and energy prices. We’ve all been impacted by these external factors, and many are still feeling the effects of the pandemic. But while many of these challenges have led companies to reign in or restrict their spend, Selipsky boldly stated that companies should be leaning into the cloud as a way to navigate through these barriers to productive and profitability.

“The cloud is more cost-effective, and many customers are saving 30% or more,” Selipsky said. “If you’re looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it.” Selipsky gave an example of Carrier Global, a Fortune 500 company, that has seen a 40% reduction in the cost of running its mission-critical ERP systems in the cloud.

Flexibility is the Key to Growth and Innovation

Selipsky positioned flexibility and agility as two cloud attributes that lead the way to  serving customers better, faster and more cost effectively. He cited a study that illustrates how customers who migrate to AWS reduced time to market for new features by 43%, with many customers achieving over a 60% reduction in time to market. The flexibility of the cloud gives us the capability to innovate while helping us to be prepared for anything.

Serverless OpenSearch Preview

Selipsky announced a preview of an open search server-less service. Customers can use this platform to perform interactive analytics, real time application monitoring, website search and more without having to worry about provisioning, configuring and scaling infrastructure.

Zero ETL Solutions

As many of us know, building ETL pipelines is painful. It requires writing a bunch of custom code, deploying it and managing the infrastructure to ensure the pipeline scales. So I was happy to see Selipsky  preview of a fully managed new zero ETL integration between Aurora and Redshift.

This integration brings together transactional data with analytics capabilities eliminating all of the work of building and managing custom data pipelines between Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift. Just choose the data in Aurora tables that needs to be stored in Redshift and it appears within seconds after it is persisted into Aurora. One can replicate data from multiple Aurora databases in the same Redshift instance. Data in Redshift is always consistent, and updates are automatically and continuously propagated so you have the most recent information in near real time and of course the entire system is serverless. This newest integration helps solve one of the biggest ETL pain points for our customers now and this is great for running analysis and Redshift.

Amazon Data Zone

To help organizations unlock the full value of data, Selipsky  announced preview of Amazon Data Zone, a data management service that helps catalog, discover, share and govern data across organization. Data Zone allows you to set data free throughout your organization while controlling access and maintaining governance. Data engineers, data scientists, product managers, analysts and other business users will find it easier to discover, use and collaborate around that data to drive insights for the business.

Amazon QuickSight

AWS also announced QuickSight, a data forecasting solution powered by machine learning. Using QuickSight, users looking at a dashboard can simply ask to forecast a metric into the future. For instance, one could ask QuickSight to forecast sales for the next 12 months and get an immediate response that considers seasonality anomalies and other outliers.

Guard Duty EKS

Selipsky spoke to AWS’s recent introduction of Guard Duty. This protection service detects threats inside your managed Kubernetes environments, like malicious actors trying to log into your EKS cluster. Another new Guard Duty capability is container runtime threat detection.

AWS Security Lake

AWS introduced a preview of Amazon Security Lake, which makes it easier for security teams to automatically collect, combine and to analyze the security data at petabyte scale. Amazon Security Lake improves normalizes security log and event data across a wide range of products and services. It also improves your security posture to help reduce the time to resolve security issues and to simplify the lives of your security and operations teams.

New Processors

As we heard earlier in the week, the new AWS Graviton 3 processors used in the new C7GN instances offer 25% better compute performance than Graviton 2 processors while using up to 60% less energy. This contributes to sustainability initiatives for customers. Graviton is also driving better price performance for many of AWS managed services, like Fargate.

AWS-built Trainium chips deliver the best price performance for training deep learning models in the cloud, reducing the cost by up to 50% compared to similar GPU-based instances.

High Performance Computing (HPC)

AWS has a complete set of HPC capabilities from job orchestration and cluster management to a file system that scales to millions of IOPS to tackle some of the world's biggest challenges from drug discovery to energy utilization and electronic design automation.

AWS SimSpace Weaver

Simulations are a type of HPC that's becoming more and more prevalent as real-world scenarios are just too expensive, time consuming, dangerous or flat-out impossible to build and test. Selipsky announced a breakthrough in this area with AWS SimSpace Weaver. This is a new managed service designed for running large-scale spatial simulations without the constraints of a single piece of hardware or having to manage the underlying compute memory or networking infrastructure.

Amazon Connect

AWS wanted to remove constraints of traditional contact centers while making them inexpensive to manage and operate. Amazon Connect is a scalable, cost-effective contact center solution in the cloud that allows agents to begin taking calls in just minutes. You can also onboard agents quickly from any location, scale capacity up or down, and leverage out-of-the-box machine learning features. Users only pay for the time that agents are interacting with customers.

AWS Supply Chain

AWS announced the preview of AWS Supply Chain an application that improves supply chain visibility and delivers actionable insights to help customers mitigate supply chain risks and reduce costs. With AWS Supply Chain, customers get a unified view of their supply chain data, insights and recommendations generated by machine learning, and built-in collaboration capabilities to help them react quickly to unexpected issues.

AWS Clean Rooms

On the topic of data collaboration, Selipsky announced the upcoming AWS Clean Rooms. This is a new service that allows companies and their business partners to securely analyze and collaborate on datasets without sharing or revealing the underlying data. This is made possible by an advanced set of privacy-enhancing controls used for analyzing combined data sets.

Amazon Omics

And finally, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Omics, a purpose-built healthcare and life sciences service used to store, query, analyze and generate insights from genomic data. It comes with built-in capabilities to support compliance with security requirements, privacy laws and regulations, and HIPAA protections.

My Takeaways

It was quite apparent this year that customers across many industries are reimagining their business functions using purpose-built solutions on AWS with the mindset of exploration, transformation and innovation through services. Onica by Rackspace Technology is here to be your partner in optimizing the delivery and management of AWS services. We’re here to help you to create an environment where people and ideas come together to try new things and implement bigger, bolder, better ways of doing business. Learn more about how we can empower your digital transformation.