AWS re:Invent 2020 – Week 1 Summary

The end of the year is a very intense time in the AWS cloud. Especially when it comes to new features on the cloud platform itself. This is the time of the largest annual AWS re:Invent conference.

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This time everything is being done a little differently… It’s not in Las Vegas, the city that never sleeps. Which means, there is no chance to do 20,000 steps by 10:00 in the morning in pursuit of sessions between different hotels.

This time it is lazier – we can participate from the couch in our own apartments, following all the new features that are interspersed between meetings with other AWS Heroes in Neon City.

Ah well, with times like these it’s something we all need to get used to.

AWS re:Invent Virtual

This year, AWS re:Invent, like many other conferences, is being held online. The form of the conference has also changed and instead of the usual 4 days, it is now as long as three weeks. Unlike previous events, this time around it is open to everyone, is entirely free, and includes all the usual “full bombardment of content” so what’s not to like?!

Thanks to this, instead of about sixty thousand, people (how many participated in the previous events), this year’s conference will be attended by as many as 500,000 participants (this is the number of registrations).

AWS re:Invent – week 1, summary

The first week is behind us, so it’s time for a brief summary of what happened so far during the conference.

This week, the first keynote of AWS CEO Andy Iaşi took place, followed by a lot of new features. However, that is not all – in the meantime, there were also several other, no less important speeches.

It is hard to summarize everything that we have witnessed during these few days in only a few sentences, but I’ll try my best. The first major tests and the first conclusions are ahead of us, which AWS supporters and enthusiasts will share over the coming weeks.

Let’s take a look at the most popular features that have been announced so far.

The state of the Cloud

To begin there was a short summary from Andy who opens his keynote every year comparing the percentage growth year-on-year, AWS recorded a decline in Q3, going down to 29%. However, this is still a better result than those recorded by competitors. Looking at income, it can be seen that the trend is upward, and the pace of this growth is clearly accelerating.

AWS took 10 years to reach its first $10 billion in revenue, and then only 23 months to reach $20B. It took another 13 months to reach $30B, and another 12 months to get to $40B.

This shows that the cloud business is constantly growing.

Looking at market share and the melting position of AWS (which is quite slow and understandable), it still has a certain leading position.

Dla porównania, rok temu było to 47,8%, a dwa lata temu 51,8%.

For comparison, a year ago it was 47.8%, and two years ago it was 51.8%.

Looking at the OVERALL IT market, these are still the “early days” of the cloud era. The overall share of the cloud market in IT spending is 4%, which is a 1% increase from the previous year.

There is still a lot ahead of us.

AWS re:Invent- announcements

As I have already mentioned, there have been a lot of press releases so far, and this is only the first week.

During his keynote, Andy presented 27 new features plus talked about everything else happening behind the scenes

If you want to read more about each of them, check out these two links:

Summing things up so far, I’ve come to a few conclusions which I would like to share.

More support for hybrid environments

Analyzing what has been announced, AWS is now strongly developing solutions that will allow customers to run applications in different locations:

This is a new option that allows (in the case of ECS) to run tasks in any infrastructure.

Thanks to this, customers can run their containerized applications not only in the AWS cloud but also, for example, in their own data centre.

Two new variants of AWS Outposts were also presented.

Intensive development of ML services

I remember that a year ago there were a lot of additions for machine learning (ML) solutions and the Amazon SageMaker service. We are seeing the same thing this year as well. All this to make it easier to build and manage machine learning models or applications using them.

Plus, of course, other services that are either supposed to help us build ML solutions or are supported by this type of service.

Here are some of them:

Development of services for Business

Although AWS does not have its Own Office365 (in its literal form), it offers other tools for everyday work, such as Amazon Workspaces.

On the AWS platform, there is also a Call Center solution, Amazon Connect, and it has received more attention this year and several new additions, such as:

Perhaps this is the beginning of an even greater focus of AWS on tools for everyday work, we will see.

We look forward to more…

These are just a few examples so far – like the new version of Aurora Serverless v2, Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, and new types of instances and disks. I’m slowly digging through all of these new features and updates and will be waiting for more news in the coming days.

Stay tuned for the summary of week 2! There’s bound to be plenty more interesting stuff.