AWS re:Invent 2019 — NEW FEATURES and Takeaways

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Authors: Ye Xu and Douglas Paton

In this post, we, Adobe Experience Platform, round up the key takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2019. We look at the big things coming up for Computing, AI and Machine Learning, Database and Analytics, Security, IoT.

AWS re:Invent is Amazon Web Services (AWS) annual conference for all things cloud computing. The 8th year of the event, held in November of 2019, was the biggest yet, attracting 60,000 people, and featured the launch of 75 new services for AWS.

The new services were launched in over 13 different categories, ranging from Analytics to developer tools, and has some exciting implications for Adobe Experience Platform. Looking at everything from the show would be impossible, but we’ve got a roundup of some of the more applicable new services that were launched. Let’s dive in and take a look.

Computing

Amazon has made enhancements to Amazon EMR, their big data processing and analysis platform that allows you to run and scale Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Hbase, among others.

AWS has brought in support for Spark 2.4, which makes EMR 5x faster than before and allows for 2x query speed. They’ve also added support for Apache Hudi that decreases data latency during high-frequency injection and allows you to perform high-level upstart and delete on S3.

They’ve also added the ability to run steps in parallel, which eliminates the queue and makes it possible to get more done faster. Everything can now happen at once.

Users now have access to an off-cluster Spark history service, which provides a cached history that lasts up to seven days. If something gets terminated, rather than disappear immediately, you can check back to the logs during that time.

Braket is a new forward-thinking quantum computing tool from AWS that helps developers get started with quantum computing. It’s an environment that lets you design, test, and run quantum algorithms. It offers people a way to get started quickly with quantum computing and experiment with new technologies.

AI and Machine Learning

In machine learning, AWS announced AWS Fraud detector, which lets you upload and train data models automatically to predict fraud in areas like account creation, web traffic, payment, and free trial usage. It’s designed to help combat the billions that are lost globally every year to this kind of activity.

Amazon Kendra is a new enterprise-level search tool that makes it easier to find and access all the information that exists within a company. It gives you the power to easily search through things internal wikis, Dropbox, Sharepoint, and S3.

We got a preview of Contact Lens, a new service that uses machine learning to empower CRM. it makes it possible to capture conversations in customer service, determine the sentiment, and make recommendations based on what is captured. It aims to reduce the amount of time spent on support by providing recommended answers.

Augmented AI is an exciting new system that brings a human review process to the developer. Designed to eliminate AI uncertainty, Augmented AI manages the human review at scale in a standard way, by providing workflows for common machine learning cases, like content moderation and text extraction. What’s nice about this is that it allows developers to focus more on their work, rather than having to manage the review process.

In a similar but different kind of way, CodeGuru is a new automated code review tool that checks code for best practices, looking for things like junk code or sensitive data. It’s an inexpensive way to ensure that there aren’t any issues with the code that affect performance.

Database and Analytics

AWS has made some enhancements to Redshift, their cloud data warehouse that helps provide a smoother service. Their new Advanced Query Accelerator is a new distributed and hardware-accelerated cache that is 10x faster than any other data warehouse.

Federated Query gives users the power to query data from multiple platforms (such as data warehouses and data lakes, for example) at once. This lets you spend significantly less time on queries.

Security

On the security front, AWS has added application-specific access to shared datasets, to help manage security at scale on S3. It allows users to create 100+ access points per bucket, with unique names for each application.

AWS Cloudtrail Insights is a new service that is going to make it possible to detect unusual activity on your AWS account. It looks for things like unexpected provisioning and sends events to Cloudwatch that triggers alerts.

Identity and Access Manager helps control access and permissions for AWS across teams. Thes service monitors AWS and automatically checks for policy changes, like whether someone is no longer an employee. It’s designed to help manage large teams with lots of access restrictions on AWS.

IoT

Figure 1: Managing IoT devices on AWS

The last category we’re going to look at is the Internet of Things (IoT). AWS Wavelength empowers compute and storage inside the 5G network. The pay-on-demand service gives developers the ability to build applications, like game and video live streaming, with millisecond latencies to mobile devices and end-users.

AWS Outposts brings the power of the cloud home by allowing users to run AWS locally. Users can manage resources across on-premise and cloud infrastructure. Outposts are ideal for low latency or local data processing.

Key takeaways

Along with all the new services (and the possibilities that come with them), we walked away from AWS re:Invent with some important thoughts about what’s in store for the future.

The first is that quantum computing is poised to be the next big thing in computing, after machine learning. The announcements made by AWS is going to make it easier to get involved in quantum computing.

Hybrid cloud, like Outposts, is bringing the best of both the cloud and on-premise hosting to people. And scaling is going to be increasingly easy to manage. Security is also becoming easier to scale and will become increasingly important as we move into the big data century.

Finally, machine learning will become easier for businesses to use. And AI automation is going to grow in the IT world, with things like CodeGuru, fraud detection, and Augmented AI reducing barriers to access for technology like this.

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Resources

1. AWS Sagemaker: https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/
2. AWS Braket: https://aws.amazon.com/braket/
3. Announcement Page: https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/
4. Keynotes: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/learn/keynotes/
5. AWS re:Invent 2019 Sessions: http://aws-reinvent-audio.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/2019/2019.html
6. AWS 2019 recap: https://www.slideshare.net/cfregly/aws-reinvent-2019-recap

Originally published: Mar 19, 2020