Amazon’s re:Invent conference was impressive this year again with a whole slew of future-oriented talks and over 40,000 expected attendees. Here’s a re:cap of the most notable re:Invent 2018 announcements:
Don’t ever delete anything - Thanks to AWS Glacier Deep Archive, you can now store everything in a durable format at the ridiculously cheap cost of $1 per terabyte per month. Granted, it may take time to retrieve the data, but it wouldn’t be gone. Amazon is obviously aiming as replacing tape archives.
Simplify File Drop Operations - The new AWS Transfer for SFTP now makes it easy to integrate legacy or existing applications that rely on using SFTP for dropping files into your workflow.
AWS vs Oracle and SQL server - Amazon had lots of news around databases. Especially the fact that it is making Aurora speedier. It sounds like AWS is positioning themselves as the new enterprise database of choice against Oracle and SQL server. Check out the new Aurora Global Databases and access a single database across multiple regions.
New time series database product - Amazon announced an enhanced version of a time series database called Amazon Timestream for handling internet of things operations. This new product caters specifically for time series databases, which have very different needs from relational databases.
Blockchain fans will rejoice — Amazon announced its take on this exciting technology with the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database. This is a managed version of either the Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum blockchain systems.
New Transit Gateway — On-premise hybrid cloud users should be excited about the new Transit Gateway where you can connect all of your VPCs with your networks in a single gateway.
More Deep Learning tools - Amazon’s new SageMaker Ground Truth and SageMaker RL is another deep learning tool to aid with machine learning and forecasting activities. Predictions can be facilitated by out of the box models or tools put together by Amazon based on their experience in the space. Basically you feed in all the events from your end-users as well as a catalog of products, and you get a list of recommended products for the customer. Or you can load up all your datasets to get back some forecasting.
Deep Racer League announced — Join up to a local league! You can now simulate driving 18th scale autonomous car that you can simulate in online simulator. Load your models down into the cars and race them on the track.
Lightning fast new instance types — Amazon has announed a new C5n instance instance type that will transfer 100 gigabits/sec. This means you can load your databases into your datawarehouse at record speed. Instead of waiting hours for a datawarehouse to load up, you now only need minutes.
Inexpensive Compute Resources — Amazon also announced a more afforable compute option based on their own custom designed Graviton ARM processor. This is ideal for workloads that can scale horizontally and are highly elastic.
Firecracker Virtualization Platform Open Sourced — This is a pretty darn cool piece of technology and Amazon has put it into the Open Source realm. You can deploy these on top of your own infrastructure and also leverage the power of a minimal full virtual machine for the ultimate in security. The big deal here is running Lambda serverless functions in a full VM vs a container for extra security.
AI Summit 2018
