With another AWS re:Invent in the books, it’s time to take stock about what we learned during the four days in Las Vegas.
As the dominant player in the public cloud sector in terms of both market share and breadth of functionality, AWS is under constant pressure by its users to remain at the forefront of cloud innovation, which it often does by working with other technology providers in its partner ecosystem.
This year’s conference saw several examples of just that, with AWS announcing the launch of several new offerings and enhancements to meet the growing demand for services like generative AI, security, and storage. Let’s take a look at three of the most prominent themes that DoiT took note of throughout the week:
Generative AI solutions abound
GenAI has been a major topic at industry events for the past several years, and re:Invent 2023 was no exception.
The most significant development in this space was the launch of Amazon Q, the new AI-powered chatbot designed to provide fast and efficient customer support while reducing the need for manual, laborious tasks. More than just a generic chatbot, Q is built to provide both developer and business intelligence by personalizing interactions based on the specific user roles, permissions, and data security needs. Customers and partners will be able to leverage Q to answer questions, analyze development processes, accelerate code versioning upgrades, and more.
The launch announcement for Q wasn’t the only GenAI development at the conference. There were also infrastructure improvements through the release of Trainium 2 chips, which are designed to deliver up to 4x faster training performance and 3x more memory capacity for large AI models. And included among the service enhancements were AI integrations into services like AWS CloudWatch, AWS Config, and Amazon Inspector.
Improvements like these will help ensure that AWS and its partner ecosystem will be able to remain at the forefront of AI innovation in the public cloud.
Cost optimization continues to dominate conversations
A walk through the expo show floor and the hundreds of sponsor booths show that in these uncertain economic times, cost optimization is at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Whether a vendor provides commitment management services, DevOps enhancements, storage or security solutions, or just about any other area within cloud management, the value proposition almost always comes back to how they can improve efficiency and save customers money as they leverage various cloud services.
This should really come as no surprise, as the effectiveness of just about any product or application within your cloud environment ultimately has a cost component tied to it. Even when development teams are told to prioritize speed over cost efficiency when working on a project, at some point down the road, optimizing costs and improving efficiency will be a key initiative.
AWS clearly understands this as well, as many of its launch announcements were made with the explicit goal of helping customers save money in the cloud. One of the most significant of these was the launch of Graviton4 chips to power R8g EC2 instances. Graviton chips are among the most effective ways to optimize your AWS costs, and this 4th generation version means that R8g offers the best price performance of any memory-optimized instance available.
Beyond the Graviton4 chip, AWS also announced enhancements to the data quality in AWS Glue and automated pattern analytics in CloudWatch logs, both of which will improve anomaly detection and therefore improve the cost optimization practices of its users.
Continued improvements to partner services
As an AWS premier partner with a brand new $5b Strategic Collaboration Agreement, DoiT was excited to learn about all the new ways that we will be able to better serve our AWS customers.
This includes the ability to leverage Amazon Q to drive deeper insights and uncover opportunities for improvement within our customers’ AWS environments, but also extends to the emphasis that AWS is placing on serverless and managed services. With this shift, DoiT will be able to expand even further beyond purely technical services to drive more business intelligence insights for our customers, and develop more customized solutions to suit their specific needs.
AWS also announced improvements to partner-led customer support, most significantly in the form of new diagnostic tools that allow partners such as DoiT to access metadata and CloudWatch metrics to more quickly and precisely help customers diagnose and remediate any problems that arise in their AWS environment. Even with this new enhancement, though, there is still a strong emphasis placed on customer privacy and data integrity, as partners will still not be able to access any personal identifiable information within the environment, or make changes to customers’ AWS resources.
Given all of the announcements made in the Nevada desert last week, the future is bright for AWS customers to continue to get as much value as possible out of their cloud spend. And with the relationship between DoiT and AWS now stronger than ever, we’re well-positioned to help our customers achieve their cloud and FinOps goals throughout 2024 and beyond.
