In AWS re:Invent 2022 conducted recently, the cloud-computing arm of the e-commerce giant has made several announcements targeted at their cloud services, smart automation, data management, etc. Here we list 8 key announcements.
1. Managed compute for spatial simulations with SimSpace Weaver
Until now, enterprises that wanted to scale their spatial simulations were bound by their hardware capacity to get accurate simulations. Managing simulation infrastructure has inherently been a complex job. AWS has announced an elegant fix to this problem in the form of a new managed compute service that lets customers build and run mammoth spatial simulations.
With AWS SimSpace Weaver, you can deploy spatial simulations to model complex dynamic systems with multiple data points such as crowd flow patterns in a location or traffic patterns in a city. You can even use these simulations to visualize physical spaces and perform immersive training to get scenario-specific insights.
2. Updated Amazon Quicksight for streamlined BI
To help its customers streamline their business intelligence (BI), the tech giant also went on to announce Amazon QuickSight, its serverless BI cloud service. AWS has expanded off of QuickSight Q, a natural language querying capability, to deliver forecasts and answer “why” questions while automating data preparation. With native-ML integrations and usage-based pricing, users can now create and share interactive dashboards and paginated reports and analyze billion-row datasets — all directly from QuickSight. The application will help you programmatically create and manage your BI assets which will in turn accelerate your migration from legacy systems.
3. Addressing Supply Chain problems
AWS has come up with an elegant solution for supply chain disruptions in the post-pandemic era. AWS Supply Chain is a new app designed especially to mitigate supply chain risks, increase visibility and thereby help users make more informed decisions.
Adam Selipsky confirmed that the new solution gives users a unified view of their supply chain data (imagine a web UI with all your offices, warehouses, stock inventory levels, etc) along with ML-powered insights and recommended actions. It also offers built-in collaboration capabilities which will shorten your reaction time for all unexpected issues.
4. Newer capabilities for SageMaker
Swami Sivasubramanian in his keynote during re:Invent announced that Amazon SageMaker is getting 8 new capabilities.
SageMaker will now support a new level of geospatial data which will make it easier for you to build, train, and deploy models for a number of scenarios including precision agriculture, urban planning, disaster response, climate science, etc.
Other updates include the ability to perform shadow tests to compare inference performance, new-gen Notebooks with real-time collaboration capabilities, newer governance tools to simplify access control to your ML projects, etc.
5. Amazon Security Lake for quickly responding to security risks
Security risks are a menace for all businesses and they need to be addressed quickly. The problem is that the data required for analyzing fixes are spread across multiple sources in different formats.
AWS has fixed this problem through Amazon Security Lake, a service that automatically centralizes security data from all on-premises and cloud sources into a data lake built with deliberation for the user. Engineers and security analysts can then aggregate, manage, and optimize massive volumes of heterogeneous log and event data to accelerate the process of threat detection, investigation, and incident response.
6. New EC2 instance types in the works — C7gn, R7iz, Hpc7g
AWS has three new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances in the works viz. C7gn, R7iz, and Hpc7g. C7gn instances feature the new AWS Nitro Cards delivering the highest network bandwidth and the best packet-processing performance for Graviton3E-based Amazon EC2 instances.
Hpc7g instances are powered by AWS Graviton3E processors as well, giving you 200Gbps of dedicated network bandwidth at the best price-to-performance ratio. R7iz instances run on 4th gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids) and high-performance DDR5 memory, perfect for Electronic Design Automation, financial, and simulation workloads.
7. Application Composer
The new Application Composer from AWS is a great tool for speeding up the development process of serverless applications. By maintaining deployment-ready infrastructure as code definitions, it allows you to focus on building the app and achieving the bottom line.
It offers a browser-based visual canvas through which you can simply drag and drop and connect AWS services to your application’s architecture. This means you can either start a new architecture from scratch or import an existing AWS Serverless Application Model or CloudFormation template to get going.
8. Vendor Insights
AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights, a new capability of AWS Marketplace is now generally available. This will help in simplifying third-party software risk assessments when users procure solutions from the marketplace.
This service compiles all security and compliance information like data and application security, access control, etc to ensure that the third-party software you use continuously meets your industry benchmarks. As a security engineer, this brings your third-party risk assessment timeline from a few months down to a few days. With Vendor Insights, you can:
- Track your application’s security posture after procurement and get notifications for compliance and security events.
- Quickly identify products in the AWS Marketplace that meet your security standards.
- Directly download all the gathered and validated information from vendors’ audit reports and assessment tools.
Final thoughts
There were several other announcements made in this year’s AWS re:Invent in the field of global infrastructure, gaming, management tools, migration services, etc which can be accessed from the company’s official blog. All these developments show that AWS is innovating at great pace for 2023. Do consider which of these you can leverage for your organization.
If you have questions related to this topic, feel free to book a meeting with one of our solutions experts, mail to sales@amazic.com.
