Unable to attend the AWS Global Summit event in New York earlier this week? Don’t worry, Onica has you covered with a full recap of everything you missed…
Earlier this week, the Onica team had the pleasure of attending the most recent AWS Global Summit, held at Jarvis Center in New York City. AWS Summits are free events held in major cities around the world, where the industry comes together to connect, collaborate, and learn more about new AWS products and features. Summits are two-days long, offering boot camps, hands-on-labs, workshops, chalk talks, and a vendor expo floor.
The NYC event was the third of eight AWS Global Summit events scheduled for 2018 in North America, and one of 35 scheduled around the globe. Over 10,000 people attended, with 80+ technical sessions scheduled, and 138 sponsor partners. You can see the complete schedule of upcoming AWS Global Summit events for your region here. Also, in case you were unable to catch Werner Vogels’ keynote LiveStream from the NYC Summit this week, a video recording is available here.
Sporting a Fortnite t-shirt, Werner enthusiastically delivered his keynote and had no shortage of new product and feature announcements. Here is a quick at-a-glance recap of all product announcements from this week’s event. Note that some of these were not specifically included in the keynote but were announced elsewhere during the event.
Machine Learning
Starting with the launch of Amazon SageMaker at re:Invent 2017, AWS very much seems to have doubled down in the space of Machine Learning and AI. Announcements at re:Invent, and 2018 Summits thus far, have emphasized new AI/ML products and features. This week’s summit was no different, with five announcements around AI/ML:
- Amazon SageMaker Now Supports High-Throughput Batch Jobs: Amazon SageMaker now supports high-throughput batch jobs for non-real-time requirements. Until now, processing batches of data for non-real-time inferencing needed to be done outside Amazon SageMaker using alternate methods. With the new Batch Transform capability, customers can process batch jobs within Amazon SageMaker, through a simple API call making the platform more flexible to use. More »
- Amazon SageMaker Now Supports Pipe Mode for TensorFlow: Amazon SageMaker now supports pipe mode for its in-built TensorFlow containers. This results in training jobs to start and finish faster, needing less disk space and reducing your overall cost to train machine learning models on Amazon SageMaker. More »
- Amazon Transcribe Channel Splitting (Pre-Announcement): Amazon Transcribe will support a feature called channel synthesis to better handle audio where each speaker records on a different channel. Contact centers stand to benefit significantly by submitting the single audio file to Amazon Transcribe, which will identify the two channels, split them out, make transcriptions of each speaker per channel, and then produce a coherent merged transcript with channel labels. More »
- Amazon Translate Language Expansion: Amazon Translate has added the following six new languages that are highly requested by customers: Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Turkish. These languages expand upon the existing six languages already available in Amazon Translate: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. More »
- Amazon Comprehend Syntax: Amazon Comprehend now support Syntax analysis enabling customers to analyze text using tokenization and Parts of Speech (PoS). The Amazon Comprehend Syntax API allows customers to obtain word boundaries and labels defining each words Part of Speech like nouns and adjectives. More »
Storage, Compute, Network & Content Delivery
Additionally, AWS had four announcements around Storage, Compute, Network & Content Delivery:
- Amazon S3 Request Rate Increase: Amazon S3 is increasing request rate performance to 3,500 requests per second to add data and 5,500 requests per second to retrieve data, which can save hours of data processing time for no additional charge. Customers can expect these request rates for each Amazon S3 object prefix, making it easy to increase performance exponentially by adding parallel processes for different prefixes. More »
- Amazon EC2 Compute Instance on AWS Snowball Edge: AWS Snowball Edge is a petabyte-scale data transport device with onboard storage and compute capabilities. Local pre-processing tasks can be performed using AWS Lambda Serverless functions and now with Amazon EC2 instances. Customers may now build Amazon EC2 applications that can run on AWS Snowball Edge devices in disconnected or remote locations to collect, store, and process data before returning it to AWS. More »
- Amazon EC2 R5, R5D and Z1 Bare Metal Instances (Pre-Announcement): Three new Amazon EC2 instance types are coming soon to meet the specific use cases of AWS customers. Amazon EC2 Z1d instances deliver the highest sustained Turbo CPU clock speed in the public cloud, featuring a custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor with a sustained Turbo CPU clock speed of up to 4.0 GHz. In addition, coming soon are Amazon EC2 R5 instances, the next generation of memory optimized instances. R5 instances offer 3.1 GHz Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8000 series processors, with up to 50% more vCPUs and 60% more memory over R4 instances. R5 instances deliver 5% additional memory per vCPU and a 10% price per GiB improvement over R4 instances. Additionally, R5d instances have optional local storage, offering up to 3.6TB of NVMe-based SSDs. More »
- Amazon VPC: Bring Your Own IP (Preview): With Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), you can use your own publicly-routable IP addresses to access AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Elastic Load Balancers and NAT Gateways. You can easily move to the cloud legacy applications that use IP addresses and retain the IP reputation of your web services. BYOIP simplifies the migration of your workloads to the AWS public cloud. More »
Did you attend the AWS NYC Summit, or any other AWS Summits in 2018? Do you have any stories or anecdotes to share? Did you hear any announcements that we missed above? We’d love to hear from you, share your thoughts in the comments here.
Onica is a full-service AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Service Provider, with 9 competencies including: Big Data, DevOps, Education, Healthcare, IoT, Microsoft: Workloads and Application Modernization, Migration, and Storage.
