In its tenth year, the 2021 edition of AWS re:Invent saw a lot of firsts: the first in-person re:Invent during this ongoing pandemic (the event was fully virtual in 2020); first time for the company’s new CEO to be on the global stage (AWS’ former CEO Andy Jassy was appointed to become Amazon’s CEO last July 2021); and a lot of many firsts in the world of cloud computing unveiled throughout the week.
Designed as a learning conference ever since its first edition, AWS recognizes how each of their customers is unique and are considered as “pathfinders” in their own right. In this year’s re:Invent, AWS showed their commitment to empowering even non-developers as they seriously look in inspiring students to learn Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
“It’s hard to believe that when we first started, the concept of cloud computing barely existed. It was slow, it was complicated, it stopped innovation... we knew there had to be a better path forward. We’re going to keep innovating to keep offering the broadest suite of services. In the last 15 years, cloud has become not just another tech revolution, but a shift in how businesses actually function,” according to Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
Selipsky took note that both AI and ML are increasingly being part of the data journey, and emphasized that security is making this an increasingly complex voyage.
Graviton3
The third iteration of the AWS-designed Graviton processor since late 2018 was unveiled in this year’s re:Invent. The upcoming C7g instances will be powered by new Graviton3 processors to be a great match for compute-intensive workloads like HPC, batch processing, electronic design automation (EDA), media encoding, scientific modeling, ad serving, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inferencing.
AWS promises that the Graviton3 will deliver up to 25% more compute performance and up to twice as much floating-point and cryptographic performance compared with its predecessor. From the security side, the new processor includes a new pointer authentication feature.
AWS Mainframe Modernization
One of the many reasons why companies don’t migrate to the cloud is their lack of confidence to move away from their mainframes (those bulky, refrigerator-sized computers we see on books and old video clips). With AWS’ proven methodology, automated tools, and certified partners, businesses can replatform, refactor, or augment mainframe workloads to drive innovation, agility, and cost savings — effectively resolving the mainframe retirement skill gap.
AWS Private 5G
Announced in this year’s re:Invent is the AWS Private 5G, a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an operator’s private cellular network with all required hardware and software provided by AWS.
Philippine AWS Local Zone Announced
Since I started covering AWS in Tech News, for the longest time, my question has always been, “When will the Philippines have its own AWS Local Zone?”
Just as re:Invent is happening in Las Vegas, the company announced that they will be launching more than thirty (30) new AWS Local Zones, with the first twenty-one (21) being made available starting 2022 — and that includes the Philippines!
AWS Local Zones allow users to use select AWS services (compute and storage services) closer to more end-users by providing them very low latency access to the applications running locally.
Please allow me to digest first the brand new learnings I got from AWS re:Invent 2021. More details on the announcements AWS made this year in my succeeding articles.