Amazon Web Services is live in Las Vegas for the AWS re:Invent event. Expect a quick influx of announcements and reveals of recent things you’re working on.
We know you may not have time to watch The whole thing, so we’ll be dealing with that over the next few days and providing quick hits of the most important stories as they’re announced, all in an easy-to-understand and navigate list. here we are!
Stay tuned for more developments throughout the day.
Wednesday 29 November
Image generator
You read that right, as Amazon has joined the ranks of other major tech companies in finally launching its own image generator. Kyle reports that the Titan Image Generator is now available in preview for AWS customers and can generate new images when provided with a text description or customize existing images. Read more.
Tuesday 28 November
Amazon S
The big announcement of the day was Amazon Q, an AI-powered chatbot for AWS customers. During his keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipski described the service as being able to “easily chat, create content, and take action. It’s all based on understanding your systems, data warehouses, and processes.” Kyle reported that Q has been trained in the equivalent of 17 years of Knowledge of AWS He’ll go beyond just answering questions — he’ll also do things like understand the nuances of application workloads and suggest AWS solutions and products for applications that run for just a few seconds. Read More.
Railings for Amazon Bedrock
The new Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock tool allows businesses to define and limit the types of language a form can use. For example, identify topics that fall outside the boundaries of the model, so that it doesn’t simply answer irrelevant questions, Ron writes. Read more.
New chips
Amazon has unveiled the latest generation of its chips for model training and inference (i.e., running trained models). Kyle wrote that Amazon has already discussed AWS Trainium2, which is designed to deliver up to 4x better performance and 2x better energy efficiency than first-generation Trainium. The second chip announced this morning, called Graviton4, is dedicated to inference. The fourth generation in Amazon’s Graviton chipset family (shown by the “4” appended to “Graviton”), it differs from Amazon’s other inference chip, the Inferentia. Read more.
Amazon S3 Express One Region
Amazon has a major update to its S3 object storage service called Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new high-performance, low-latency layer for S3. Frederick reported that One Zone will provide a significant performance improvement for data-intensive applications, including AI/ML training, financial modeling and high-performance computing. Read more.
Go serverless
Amazon has announced three new serverless offerings to make it easier to manage serverless services Aurora, ElastiCache, and Redshift. “Since each of these options is serverless, it means Amazon manages all the machines in the background, provisioning just the right amount of resources they need, and scaling them out when needed without IT having to handle all the hardware,” Ron wrote. Background: “Termination of administrative work.” Read more.
Now this is using the palm of your hand
AWS has lifted the lid on a new palm-scanning identity service that allows businesses to verify people’s identity when entering physical buildings. Amazon One Enterprise builds on the company’s existing Amazon One offering, which was first rolled out in 2020 to enable biometric payments at Amazon’s non-ATM and monitored stores, Paul reported. Visitors to Amazon Go stores can link their payment card to a palm print, allowing them to enter the store and complete their transactions by passing their hand over the scanner. Read more.
Virtual desktop environment
Amazon has launched new $195 devices that allow enterprise users to access virtual desktop environments, such as Amazon WorkSpaces, over the Internet. The hardware is in the Fire TV Cube, Sarah wrote, a decision Amazon made to leverage existing expertise from the arm of the retail giant that makes streaming media players. The company explained that its decision to build new devices came as a result of customer comments about their desire to reduce spending on information technology by replacing desktop and laptop computers with less expensive devices. Read more.