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AWS Doesn't Let Up on Data Push at re:Invent
At the Day 2 keynote of the 2015 AWS re:Invent conference, the spotlight was on the Internet of Things (IoT).
Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels presided over Thursday's keynote address, treating attendees with another avalanche of new product announcements on the heels of Wednesday's barrage. However, the centerpiece of his presentation was arguably the new AWS IoT platform, which is now available in beta.
Vogels announced AWS IoT after a lengthy slideshow of real-world examples of IoT, spanning Internet-connected consumer devices, to industrial and municipal implementations, to biometrics and genomics. Developing apps for IoT requires "a lot of heavy lifting," Vogels said, but AWS IoT aims to reduce that burden by giving developers an easy way to connect their devices to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
AWS IoT is designed to help developers build, deploy and manage IoT apps. It gives developers a mechanism to connect devices to their apps in the AWS cloud, a rules-based engine to collect and process data, a registry to store data from those devices, and security capabilities to keep that data secure. It also includes a feature called "Device Shadows," which Vogels explained enables IoT devices to be restored to a desired state after being offline.
In another Big Data announcement, Vogels unveiled Amazon Kinesis Analytics, which will be available sometime next year. Vogels described Kinesis Analytics as a "SQL-based time series analytics for streaming data." It works with Kinesis Firehose, which AWS unveiled earlier at the Day 1 keynote presentation.
Other Announcements
Vogels' keynote presentation was packed with other new product announcements, including:
- Two new EC2 instance types: The X1, which will be available in the first half of 2016, is based on the Intel Xeon E7 V3 processor and supports 2TB of memory. At the other end of the spectrum is the T2.nano, which will be available later this year to support very small loads.
- The Amazon EC2 Container Registry: Vogels described this as a "fully managed service" where developers can store and launch container images. The registry will be available later this year.
- Lambda improvements: AWS Lambda now supports Python. Other new features include VPC support, long-running functions, scheduled functions and custom retry logic.
- The AWS Mobile Hub: Now in beta, the Mobile Hub lets developers build mobile apps on AWS by going through a simple three-step process.