Top Takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2019

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently held its 8th annual re:Invent conference in sunny Las Vegas. With over 65,000 attendees, it was instantly deemed the largest AWS event to date. During this year’s conference, AWS not only announced 77 new product launches, feature releases, and services, but also held over 2,500 educational sessions for customers, builders, CIOs, channel and ecosystem partners, and industry analysts. Among those attendees, SoftwareONE showed its presence with a dedicated team of AWS practice experts who setup and conducted over 50 customer meetings and also attended over 100 different sessions.

Throughout the week, attendees were given the opportunity to get a head-start and hands-on experience with all of the latest offers from AWS. The most notable among those offers included new hybrid offerings, advancements in Machine Learning, as well as Amazon’s first fully Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Amazon Sagemaker Studio.

This year at re:Invent, AWS took the idea of hybrid and then doubled down. One of re:Invent’s largest announcements of the week was centered around the now generally available AWS Outposts. This new managed service extends the AWS infrastructure, APIs, AWS services, and tools to virtually any customer datacenter, on-premises facility, or co-location space for a truly hybrid experience. Outposts is most ideal for workloads that need low latency access to on-premises applications, local data storage needs, as well as local data processing.

To piggy-back on this announcement, AWS also announced Local Zones and Wavelength. In combination with Outposts, Local Zones and Wavelength create a powerhouse trio offering. As described by AWS on their product web pages, “AWS Local Zones are a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists today. AWS Wavelength enables developers to build applications that deliver single-digit millisecond latencies to mobile devices and end-users. AWS developers can deploy their applications to Wavelength Zones, AWS infrastructure deployments that embed AWS compute and storage services within the telecommunications providers’ datacenters at the edge of the 5G networks, and seamlessly access the breadth of AWS services in the region. This enables developers to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latencies such as game and live video streaming, machine learning inference at the edge, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).” Essentially, if you’re a customer looking for a low latency experience on-premises and lowest-latency in the public cloud or in the core carrier network, AWS has all of your bases covered.

With so much of our future focused on Machine Learning (ML), it only makes sense that AWS spent a large portion of re:Invent 2019 spotlighting its own ML developments. One of the main focuses was on Artificial Intelligence (AI) services that require no prior ML experience. Two unique ML services that became key focal points at the event were Amazon Kendra and Amazon CodeGuru. Both services focus on ease of usability and aim to produce faster, more accurate results for end users.

Amazon Kendra

With the vast amount of digital content spread across your company, it’s no surprise that employees can become frustrated when trying to search for the information they need. More complications arise when you consider the number of native languages of said employees for multi-national organizations. Thanks to its powerful natural language search capabilities, Amazon Kendra helps end users find their information more easily while using natural language questions, as opposed to simple key words. Gone are the days of sorting and sifting through long lists of links and hoping that one will provide the information you need. With Kendra, users can quickly and easily find whatever they need, be that a precise answer, FAQ, or even an entire document.

Amazon CodeGuru

Finding and fixing issues with expensive lines of code has been a long-standing pain point for developers. With Amazon CodeGuru, an ML service that automatically reviews code and provides performance recommendations, developers now have an intelligent ML service sidekick to help stop and prevent errors. CodeGuru does a seamless job of pulling and reviewing code in order to provide a detailed assessment that detects incorrect inputs, anomalies, and concurrency issues. Powered by ML, best practices, and lessons learned across millions of code reviews, CodeGuru gives developers the ability to catch problems faster and easier, and then write and commit future code with minimal errors. And with better code comes better, more reliable software.

As Amazon’s first fully integrated development environment for ML. Amazon SageMaker Studio aims to confront and improve the extremely iterative and difficult ML development workflow that many developers struggle with on a daily basis. SageMaker makes it possible to aggregate ML development tools, which will allow developers to write code, track experiments, visualize data, and monitor all within one visual interface. In addition, because each step of the ML workflow is tracked in the environment, developers are able to quickly move back and forth between steps, as well as make changes, iterate faster, make changes, and reduce time to market for high quality ML solutions. Not only will SageMaker significantly boost developer productivity, it is bringing us closer than ever before to ML services.

To sweeten the news, made many related sub-announcements regarding SageMaker, including:

• Amazon SageMaker Notebooks
• Amazon SageMaker Experiments
• Amazon SageMaker Debugger
• Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot

Looking back, it is clear to see that one of the main themes from this year’s conference was “transformation,” a word that found its way into every product workshop, learning lab, and keynote. Specifically, in Andy Jassy’s keynote, the CEO of AWS discussed the importance of making major technical transformations in your business through developing leadership and preparation, a very different message than the more traditional idea that digital growth must be technical. In a nutshell, he expressed that if you want to successfully transform, then you need to create a plan in order to do so. We believe that just because you need to create a plan, doesn’t mean it has to be hard. With our Simple Services offerings, customers can work with us to discover and design exactly what they need to successfully create their workplace transformation journey. Once your ideal roadmap is determined, our team will be there every step of the way to design, deliver, and manage your environment. By working with SoftwareONE, your AWS investment is maximized for long term value.