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'Data Realm' at Center of AWS CEO Selipsky's re:Invent Keynote
The keynotes at re:Invent, the annual mega-conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to showcase new and upcoming changes to its cloud, are typically announcement-heavy. The 2022 iteration, taking place this week in Las Vegas, is no different.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky took the re:Invent stage on Tuesday morning with a keynote that focused largely on the ever-expanding data universe and the role of the cloud in managing that data, as well as interpreting it into useful insights for customers.
A good data environment requires four things, according to Selipsky: the right tools, integration, governance and insights. The bulk of announcements during Selipsky's keynote fell under at least one of these categories. Here are some of the highlights:
- Amazon OpenSearch, AWS's open source data management, analysis and search service, now has a serverless option in preview. "Now we have serverless options for all our analytics," Selipsky said in announcing Amazon OpenSearch Serverless, "and no one else can say that."
- AWS envisions a "zero-ETL future," according to Selipsky. To that end, the company announced zero-ETL integration between the Amazon Aurora database product and the Amazon Redshift data warehouse.
- Amazon Redshift is also now integrated with Apache Spark.
- For governance, the Amazon DataZone data management service is now in preview.
- The Amazon QuickSight Q data querying service now has new forecasting capabilities powered by machine learning.
- Coming soon to the Amazon GuardDuty security service is a container runtime threat detection capability.
- Now in preview is Amazon Security Lake, a data lake designed for petabyte-scale analyses of security data. It's the first data lake in the industry to support the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) standard, according to Selipsky.
- AWS's portfolio of compute options, already numbering over 600 instances, is getting a few more: the C7gn Graviton3 instances, the Inf2 instances and the Hpc6id.
- To run "spatial simulation" workloads, which Selipsky noted entail "millions and millions of real-time interactions," AWS has launched the SimSpace Weaver service.
- There are three new features coming to the Amazon Connect cloud-based contact center: machine learning-based capacity planning, the Contact Lens agent performance management tool, and a step-by-step agent UI.
- A new machine learning-based solution called AWS Supply Chain is now in preview, with the aim of helping organizations manage their supply chain woes.
- Data "clean rooms," which are secure environments where teams can collaborate and analyze different data sets, is now an AWS service in preview.
- A service for health care professionals called Amazon Omics is now generally available to support "large-scale analysis and research" around medical data.
Besides talking up AWS's various data offerings, Selipsky acknowledged several challenges facing customers today, primarily worries about recession and the climate. Sustainability is the problem "of our generation," Selispsky said, noting that AWS is committed to running on 100 percent renewable energy by 2025.
Regarding the possibly impending recession, Selipsky encouraged customers to lean into the cloud for its potential to lower costs. "If you're looking to tighten your belt," he said, "the cloud is the place to do it."