The AWS re:Invent event started on November 27 and lasted until December 1, and as always there were a large number of announcements: 21 announcements at press time.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI (ChatGPT officially celebrates its one-year anniversary today), much of the focus in AWS’ announcements was on AI, including a major partnership with NVIDIA on infrastructure, software and services Partnerships.
However, beyond that, there was much more announced at the Las Vegas Carnival. Here, CloudTech rounds up the rest of the best content:
next generation chips
Here’s another big AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models and other customer workloads. Graviton4 offers 30% more computing power, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth than its predecessor, while Trainium2 trains four times faster than before and can be deployed on up to 100,000 chips in EC2 UltraCluster.
As AWS said, EC2 UltraCluster aims to “provide the most efficient and energy-saving AI model training infrastructure in the cloud.” With it, customers will be able to train large language models in “a fraction of the time” and with twice the energy efficiency.
As always, AWS provides services to customers who are already using these tools. Companies such as Databricks, Epic and SAP have all been accused of using new chips designed by AWS.
Zero ETL integration
AWS announced the launch of new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for the integration of MySQL with Amazon Redshift, the AWS cloud data warehouse. Zero-ETL integration (no need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines) makes it easier to connect and analyze transactional data across a variety of relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.
A simple example of zero-ETL functionality is in a hypothetical company that stores transaction data (time of transaction, what was purchased, where the transaction occurred) in a relational database, but uses another analytical tool to analyze the transaction in a non- Structured data analysis data. – Relational database. To connect it all, companies previously had to build ETL data pipelines, which was a time and money drain.
The latest integration “is built on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.
Amazon S3 Express Zone 1
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class built specifically for the data customers access most. Compared with standard S3, the data access speed is increased by 10 times, and the request cost is reduced by 50%. The company also has the option of collocating its Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same Availability Zone as its compute resources.
Companies and partners using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.
Amazon Q
A new product, an interesting pivot, also with generative artificial intelligence at its core. Amazon Q has been announced as a “new generative artificial intelligence assistant” that can be customized to fit a customer’s business. AWS added: “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content and take action – all informed by the customer’s information repositories, code and enterprise systems.” The service can also help on AWS Built companies and companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact center, and supply chain management.
Customers considered early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.
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