AWS announces new innovations

AWS re:Invent 2022 was back from November 28 to December 2 in Las Vegas with over 50,000 attendees for the 11th edition, and over 30,000 attendees registered virtually around the world after a virtual-only event in 2020 and a reduced-size 2021 edition.

“By far the majority of the innovation is driven by listening to and responding to customers. And today customers span every industry, every geography and every use case. And as you keep proving, there is no challenge too big,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in his keynote address.

The CEO highlighted innovations in data, security, infrastructure, and specialised solutions that are helping customers achieve their goals faster, take advantage of untapped potential and create a better future with AWS.

Several powerful groups globally are making success with AWS Cloud. BMW Group is revolutionising the driving experience with its connected car platform. Riot Games is now processing roughly half a million events per second to improve its games continually.

And PrivatBank, the largest bank in Ukraine serving 40 per cent of the population, under the spectre of war, has managed to move all of its operations to the cloud, including 330 IT systems and four petabytes of customer data to AWS in just 45 days, safeguarding customers' ability to keep banking

According to the CEO, things that people said never would be done, like bringing capital markets to the cloud, are now happening

On this stage last year, NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman announced that they would move their matching engine to AWS. This is technology that makes the markets tick by changing an order into a trade, and it's the foundation of the infrastructure for the world's capital markets.

These workloads are incredibly latency-sensitive. Edina said they'd start by bringing their first market to the cloud in 2022. And they're almost done moving the first of the North American options markets. They moved several symbols already, with the rest on track to move before the end of this year. And customers already see enhanced performance.

AWS knows that they should be leaning in precisely because of economic uncertainty, as the cloud is more cost-effective, and many customers are saving 30 per cent or more. For example, Carrier Global is a Fortune 500 company, and they've seen a 40 per cent reduction in the cost of running its mission-critical ERP systems.

Gilead estimates that it will save more than $60 million within five years through many strategic cloud adoption initiatives. And AGCO is an agricultural manufacturer and another Fortune 500 company. They've reduced their cost by 78 per cent while at the same time increasing data retrieval speed.

There are more than 1,000 Unicorn startups in the world, and 83 per cent run on AWS. And more than 90 per cent of the startups on the cloud 100 also run their businesses on AWS. These include successful unicorn startups like 6Sense, Win and DataRobot. These leaders could choose any cloud provider, and they choose AWS.

“Because we have the largest community of customers and partners, we have the opportunity to see more business challenges, new ways of looking at problems and the global impact of regulation and emerging trends,” Selipsky noted.

Sustainability was one of the main topics of the event. AWS plans to power operations with 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025 and be water positive by 2030.

“We're also taking a leading stance and sustainability. It's the issue of our generation. And Amazon is now the world's largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy. We're committed to powering operations with 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025. And we're already on target and over 85 per cent of the way there,” he noted.

During multiple sessions at AWS conference, the cloud provider announced new services and features, with the focus on business solutions and data options impacting computing, database, storage, networking, machine learning, and development.

For example, it announced new solutions to drive industry transformation - AWS Supply Chain, a new application that helps businesses increase supply chain visibility to make faster, more informed decisions that mitigate risks, lower costs, and improve customer experiences.

Another is AWS Clean Rooms- a new analytics service that helps companies across industries easily and securely analyse and collaborate on their combined datasets—without sharing or revealing underlying data. AWS Clean Rooms will be available in early 2023 in Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions.

Elsewhere, AWS SimSpace Weaver is a fully managed compute service that helps customers build, operate, and run large-scale spatial simulations. AWS SimSpace Weaver is generally available today in Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions, with additional AWS Regions available soon.

Unlocking the value of data, AWS announced Amazon DataZone, Amazon Omics, and Amazon Security Lake. For delivering innovation in the public sector, AWS announced the launch of the new Continuity of Government IT, an AWS solution guide. AWS successfully runs AWS compute and machine learning services on an orbiting satellite in a first-of-its-kind space experiment

At re:Invent, Werner Vogels, vice president and chief technology officer of Amazon, talked about the benefits of building asynchronous, loosely coupled systems and how event-driven architecture enables global scale. He explained how the cloud enables customers to build more immersive experiences using 3D and how simulation is empowering customers to experiment and innovate in new ways. He introduced AWS Step Functions Distributed Map, Amazon EventBridge Pipes, Amazon EventBridge Pipes, AWS Application Composer, AWS Ambit Scenario Designer and others.

Illustrating the point of better distribution of operations, Vogels announced AWS Step Functions Distributed Map. Step Functions are a clear and simple way to iterate objects through steps in an easy-to-use visual workflow. With the addition of Step Functions distributed mode for the Map state, customers can run thousands of parallel workflows to be spawned based on object updates in S3. 

Vogels believes the world is event-driven. His theme on event-driven architecture as an asynchronous principle tends toward a loosely coupled design, as that is the driver behind the function of such an environment. He announced the addition of Amazon EventBridge Pipes, enabling a simple and reliable way to create point-to-point integrations among many sources.

Vogels brought up several design patterns and showed how they could get very complex. With AWS Application Composer, AWS has created a visual-based canvas for creating serverless application stacks.

Building on the theme of event-driven architecture, Vogels said, "Event-driven architectures enable global scale. Diving into the background architecture behind Amazon DynamoDB, we see a complex web of services designed for global availability.” That complexity is well-documented in the Amazon Builders’ Library.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expected to increase investment in infrastructure and digital skills, and bring best practices to Vietnam as a way to increase its footprint in the market. Phil Davis, the US tech firm’s managing director for Asia-Pacific and Japan, discussed with VIR’s Bich Thuy the changes in its future business strategy here.

The AWS Public Sector Summit opened in Singapore on October 6, discussing cloud transformation and the upscaling of cloud technology in ASEAN.

Vietnam and regional countries are making big steps in cloud transformation as part of their digital transformation journey, with the trend to further intensify. Eric Conrad, regional managing director for Worldwide Public Sector ASEAN at Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, talked with VIR’s Bich Thuy about the cloud journey in Vietnam and the region, as well as future opportunities at the AWS Public Sector Summit 2022 in Singapore.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been cooperating with countries across ASEAN in upskilling to meet their digital transformation needs.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 24 announced plans to open an infrastructure Region in Thailand as a move to boost its footprint in the Asia-Pacific region.