Big Announcements at AWS re:Invent 2021

This year’s AWS re:Invent conference is taking place from Nov. 29 through Dec. 3, 2021 at the Venetian Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. The re:Invent conference is the biggest AWS event of the year. Unlike last year’s conference which was only online, this year’s re:Invent is a hybrid event that is both in-person and online. AWS re:Invent in-person attendees needed to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and wear masks.

Adam Selipsky, AWS CEO provided this year’s keynote where he looked back at the impact of cloud computing. Selipsky explained, “In the 15 years since we launched AWS, the cloud has become not just another tech revolution, but an enabler of a fundamental shift in the way that businesses actually function. There’s no industry that hasn’t been touched, and no business that can’t be radically disrupted.”

He went on to point out that Amazon is still innovating for the future as he announced a bevy of new services that are available now or coming soon. Additional keynotes were presented by: Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning, Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President, AWS Utility Computing and Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com.

Announcements at Amazon Web Services re:Invent

Like you would expect, AWS made quite a number of announcements at this year’s re:Invent conference. There are more announcements than I can cover but here are some of the biggest:

• Amazon SageMaker Canvas— Enables business analysts to build machine learning (ML) models and generate business predictions without writing code. It provides a visual, point-and-click interface and can connect to multiple disparate sources.
• AWS Mainframe Modernization — Allows customers to migrate and modernize their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS. It supports two main migration patterns: replatforming and automated refactoring.
• AWS Private 5G — Announced as a preview, this new managed service helps enterprises set up private 5G mobile networks. Customers specify where they want to build a mobile network and the network capacity needed for their devices. AWS delivers and maintains the small cell radio units, servers, 5G core and radio access network (RAN) software, and subscriber identity modules (SIM cards) required to set up a private 5G network and connect devices.
• AWS IoT TwinMaker — This new service makes it faster and easier for developers to create and use digital twins of real-world systems to monitor and optimize operations. Digital twins are virtual representations of physical systems like buildings, factories, production lines, and equipment that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the structure, state, and behavior of the systems they represent.
• New Amazon EC2 Instances Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors – The new Im4gn and Is4gen instances offer up to 30 TB of NVMe storage using AWS Nitro SSD devices that are custom-built by AWS. They are designed to maximize the storage performance of I/O intensive workloads like SQL and NoSQL databases.
• AWS Outposts Servers in Two Form Factors — Outpost servers provide local compute capabilities to edge locations. 1U and 2U rack-mountable servers are now generally available. The 1U server uses Graviton2 processors with up to 64 vCPUs, 128 GiB memory, and 4 TB of local NVMe storage. The 2U system uses Intel Xeon Scalable processors with up to 128 vCPUs, 256 GiB memory, and 8 TB of local NVMe storage.
• Amazon Inspector – This new services service automates security assessment and management. The new Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service that automatically scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.
• New AWS Backup support for VMware and VMware Cloud on AWS — This new service lets you centralize and automate the backups for virtual machines running VMware on-premises and in VMware Cloud on AWS.

This year’s AWS re:Invent is happening now through December 3rd and all of the sessions are available to stream online for free.

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