AWS re:Invent 2021: Adam Selipsky’s keynote speech

This year, Managing Consultant Anurag Singh attended AWS re:Invent for its 10th anniversary event. As the world’s largest annual cloud festival, this year’s event saw AWS CEO Adam Selipsky take to the centre stage to deliver his keynote on the latest developments in cloud. Read next: Andy Jassy’s keynote speech at AWS re:Invent 2020: A techie's guide

In his opening remarks, Adam made it clear that despite their current position, AWS are only just getting started on their cloud innovation journey.

Though AWS re:Invent does not provide a central event theme, the message was broadcasted wide from the keynote. Adam referred to various pathfinders from different eras who were willing to traverse the uncharted territories and continually challenge the status quo in pursuit of finding a better way.

Within his keynote speech, Adam addressed several new developments within the Cloud space:

C7g EC2 Instances

In line with the yearly tradition to bring further innovations within the compute space, AWS announced the C7g EC2 Instances running on newly launched Graviton3 processors. These instances deliver up to 25% faster performance with 60% less power utilisation over the sixth generation AWS Graviton2-based C6g instances., and create direct benefits for companies running machine learning, cryptographic, and scientific workloads.

Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) continues to be one of the central topics within the AWS innovation sphere. To deliver on the promise of offering best price performance, AWS announced the launch of Trn1 EC2 instances powered by Trainium chips, which are purposely built by AWS for training deep learning models. Trn1 EC2 instances together with Inf1 Inferentia based EC2 instances provide one power-packed bundle for running machine learning models and inferences.

Further on the quest of democratising machine learning, AWS announced a new machine learning service: AWS SageMaker Canvas. This provides accurate ML predictions from just a visual point to click interface with no coding required. It will empower a new set of non-technical roles within the business to utilise the ML capabilities without having to write a single line of code. Impressive!

AWS Mainframes Modernisation Service

Mainframes have existed as the powerhouses for many of the leading companies around the world for some time as there was no clear replacement available. With the new innovations, Cloud distinguished itself as a worthy alternative but there was a myriad of challenges around migrations of decade-old applications onto the new platforms. AWS announced its game changing service, AWS Mainframes Modernisation Service, to overcome these challenges and reduce the migration time by two thirds. The service opens a whole set of new avenues to modernise legacy mainframe applications and platforms.

AWS Private 5G Service

AWS embarked on a new journey of revolutionising the telecom sector by announcing its AWS Private 5G service this year. Setting up a private cellular network has never been so easy – it cuts down the complexity and turnaround time from months to just days. This is a new space to look out for as the benefits to be realised are far reaching - ranging from factory automations, large campus interconnectivity, secured corporate networks, and more. At the same time, the service auto-configures when deployed without issue and can be scaled out on a very low cost.

AWS Lake Formation Service

Delivering enhancements to the popular AWS Lake Formation service and to manage security and address data consistency challenges, AWS also announced the general availability of row and cell-level security for AWS Lake Formation. They also highlighted the general availability of transactions for governed tables in AWS Lake Formation.

Serverless

Bringing the benefits of low cost serverless technology into the data analytics sphere, AWS announced serverless options for AWS Redshift, AWS EMR, and AWS MSK, and on-demand options for AWS Kinesis. We expect more AWS services to follow this course over time as the benefits of serverless technology are huge.

Financial Cloud for data

With decades of experience in financial data and analytics, Goldman Sachs has joined forces with AWS to launch Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data. This will enable customers to run analytic solutions developed by Goldman Sachs and analyse financial data on a Cloud Platform hosted by AWS with incredible speed and accuracy.

AWS Internet of Things

Finally, it was announced that two new services have been launched within AWS Internet of Things. The AWS IoT TwinMaker service allows customers to create and analyse digital twins of real-world objects. This service has the potential to redefine the industrial sector landscape where inducing even a small change is a challenge and mistakes can be expensive. Using the AWS IOT TwinMaker, a digital twin can be created with ease and analysed for any faults by running different tests before physical changes to the object are made.

The next service announced was the AWS IoT FleetWise service, which is built specifically for the automotive industry and connected cars. FleetWise is an application built for automakers to collect, transform, and transfer data from numerous sensors onto the Cloud in near real-time. This data can further be used to create a variety of applications to enhance safety, comfort, and more.

In a nutshell

Drawing the curtains on his keynote speech, Adam made it clear that AWS will continue to provide more tools and services to businesses and individuals to help them continue on their transformation and innovation journeys with greater speed and agility.

As AWS partners, we look forward to seeing more of these services introduced as we continue to make an extraordinary impact on our clients.