AWS re:Invent 2020 Week 1: The Cloud Giant Unveils DevOps Guru

AWS has clearly prioritized building a reinvention culture. The first week of AWS re:Invent 2020 focused on advancements in containers, serverless, machine learning, and developer tools. Let’s look at the major announcements from the first week of the event.

On the opening day of AWS re:Invent 2020 on November 30, 2020, AWS CEO Andy Jassy delivered a three-hour keynote where he spoke about the company’s focus on constant reinvention to build a sustainable business. While live streaming from Seattle, Jassy shared the company’s financial success and announced a slew of products ranging from compute, analytics, containers to storage, machine learning (ML), and developer tools. 

Week 1 of AWS re:Invent 2020 week one was definitely power-packed with product launches to support enterprise customers and partners across various verticals. Let’s look at this week’s product launches.

Fun to be with many of you today for the #AWSOpens a new window live keynote. Love being able to share the hard work and innovation from the team. 27 launches in my keynote, 43 overall today. Action-packed first day of #reInventOpens a new window .

— Andy Jassy (@ajassy) December 2, 2020Opens a new window

1. AWS Unveiled DevOps Guru

AWS announced Amazon DevOps Guru, a fully managed operations service for developers and operators to improve application performance. The new tool leverages machine learning to anticipate operational issues automatically before it impacts users. 

With the power of AI and automation, the new service collects and analyzes data from application metrics, logs, and events to identify behavior that vary from standard operational patterns. Upon determining the abnormal application behavior, the tool sends an alert to the developers through Amazon’s Simple Notification Service (SNS) and partner integrations like Atlassian Opsgenie and PagerDuty. 

After that, it provides prescriptive recommendations to fix the operational issue. Additionally, no manual setup or machine learning expertise is required to work with Amazon DevOps Guru. Existing DevOps Guru customers include Atlassian, PagerDuty, and SmugMug, and customers have to pay only for the data analyzed by the Amazon DevOps Guru.

Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, Amazon machine learning, Amazon Web Services, saidOpens a new window , “With Amazon DevOps Guru, we have taken our experience and built specialized machine learning models that help customers detect, troubleshoot, and prevent operational issues while providing intelligent recommendations when issues do arise. This enables teams to immediately benefit from operational best practices.”

Amazon DevOps Guru is in preview mode in the U.S., Europe, and the Asia Pacific regions.

2. AWS Announced New Compute Innovations 

After the launch of Amazon EC2 Mac instances, the company announced five new EC2 instances, two new AWS Outposts, and three new AWS local zones to meet the growing demands of its cloud compute offerings.

• AWS Graviton2-powered C6gn instances

The company has expanded its Arm-based Garviton2 portfolio with C6gn instances to meet the demands of network-intensive workloads. The new instances deliver up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth, up to 38 Gbps Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth, up to 40% higher packet processing performance, and up to 40% better price/performance versus comparable current-generation x86-based network optimized instances. 

C6gn instances will be available later this month in eight sizes.

• Graphics-optimized G4ad instances 

AWS announced G4ad instances to meet the demand for higher performance graphic workloads at low cost. Featuring the latest AMD’s Radeon Pro v520 GPUs, 2nd generation EPYC processors, the new instances are ideal for running graphics applications for virtual workstations.

The new G4ad instances will be in this month in three sizes in the U.S. and Europe.

• General-purpose M5zn instances 

AWS launched the new M5zn instances to solve performance per-core challenges in industries such as finance, automotive, aerospace, telecom, and energy. Powered by Intel Xeon scalable processors and built on AWS Nitro System, it features high-frequency processing, low latency 100 Gbps networking to improve communications and HPC applications performance.

M5zn instances are available in the U.S., Europe, and the Asia Pacific regions.

• D3 and D3en storage-optimized instances

AWS launched new D3 and D3en instances to power on-instance HDD storage at low cost. Customers who need computing power for their dense storage workloads, including data warehouses, data lakes, network file systems, and Hadoop clusters, can rely on the new instances powered by Intel Xeon processors. The next-generation D3 instances deliver up to 30% better processing performance and up to 2.5x higher network performance than previous generation D2 instances. 

D3 and D3en instances are available in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia Pacific, and China. 

• R5b memory-optimized instances

Designed for memory-intensive applications such as high-performance databases, big data analytics engines, and distributed web scale in-memory caches, the new R5 instances for AWS EC2 are powered by AWS Nitro System, offers up to 60Gbps of EBS bandwidth and 260,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS).

R5b is available in the U.S., Europe, and the Asia Pacific regions.

Apart from the instances, the company launched two smaller AWS Outposts form factors to enable customers to bring AWS infrastructure services on-premises to space-constrained areas such as branch offices, hospitals, and retail stores. The smaller AWS Outposts form factors will be available in 2021. 

The company also announced three new AWS local zones locations in Boston, Houston, and Miami. Customers can now run AWS services and deliver latency-sensitive applications to end-users nearby. AWS also plans to launch 12 additional local zones across the U.S. in 2021.

Dave Brown, VP, EC2, AWS, saidOpens a new window , “As customers bring more and more workloads to the cloud, AWS continues to expand the industry’s leading compute portfolio to meet their increasingly diverse needs. With the new EC2 instance types, AWS Outposts, and AWS Local Zones options that we’re introducing today, we’re providing customers with an unmatched breadth and depth of capabilities to help them innovate more cost-effectively, with the right compute for the right job.”

Also Read: AWS re:Invent 2020: 3 Major Announcements From Day 1

3. AWS Launched Three New Analytics Capabilities 

AWS announced three new analyticsOpens a new window capabilities to help enterprise customers get more value from their business data. Let’s explore these. 

• AQUA for Amazon Redshift 

The new AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift delivers up to 10x better query performance than any other cloud data warehouse and will be available in January 2021.

• AWS Glue Elastic Views

Designed for developers, the AWS glue elastic views help developers build materialized views that automatically combine and replicate data across multiple data stores. 

• Amazon QuickSight Q 

AWS announced the preview of Amazon QuickSight Q, a machine learning feature for Amazon QuickSight to address business data queries accurately.

Customers using new analytics capabilities are Capital One, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, NTT DOCOMO, Audible, and Panasonic Avionics.

4. AWS Announced Industrial Machine Learning Capabilities

With reinvention in mind, AWS announcedOpens a new window a host of machine learning capabilities to address technical challenges faced by the industrial sector. 

• Amazon Monitron

The Amazon Monitron is a monitoring service powered by machine learning and IoT to detect anomalies and predict when industrial equipment will require maintenance. The service is generally available. 

• Amazon Lookout for Equipment

AWS launched Amazon Lookout for Equipment, an API-based machine learning service that detects abnormal equipment behavior. With this feature, customers can perform predictive maintenance, make timely decisions, and improve the industrial process.

• AWS Panorama

The company announced two capabilities under AWS Panorama – AWS Panorama appliance and AWS Panorama software development kit (SDK). The Panorama appliance enables enterprises to bring computer vision to their on-premises cameras and make automated predictions with high accuracy. Whereas with the Panorama SDK (launching in the future), manufacturers can build Panorama-enabled devices.

• Amazon Lookout for Vision

AWS launched a new ML service to help industrial customers detect visual defects on production units in a cost-effective manner.

Doug Henschen, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research, shared his thoughts on the industrial ML launches. He saidOpens a new window , “Predictive maintenance and quality control are the most in-demand, starting-point applications in IoT and machine vision deployments, respectively. AWS has formidable competition on these fronts from Microsoft Azure, so getting more industrial customers in at the top of the funnel by lowering time-to-value for high-demand applications is an important objective.”

Existing partners and customers using AWS industrial ML services include Axis, ADLINK Technology, B.P., Deloitte, Fender, GE Healthcare, and Siemens Mobility.

5. AWS Launched Four Storage Innovations

AWS announced four storage solutionsOpens a new window to deliver customers better storage performance and resiliency. These include:

• Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes

This is a new storage server architecture to deliver the first storage area network (SAN) built for the cloud. Currently, in preview mode, it is designed for I/O intensive business-critical applications, where customers can achieve consistent sub-millisecond latency for their latency-sensitive applications.

• Amazon EBS Gp3 volumes

The new Gp3 volumes will enable customers to leverage higher performance for their applications without worrying about paying more for storage capacity. Gp3 volumes will separate input/output operations per second (IOPS) from storage capacity and deliver more performance at a 20% lower cost than the predecessors.

• Amazon S3 intelligent-tiering 

Amazon added two new archive tiers (Archive Access and Depp Archive Access) to S3 intelligent tiering, ensuring 95% storage cost savings. The new archive tiers are available in all AWS regions.

• Amazon S3 replication

The new S3 replication allows customers to replicate data to multiple destinations within and across multiple AWS regions. The multi-destination data replication will enable customers to meet data sovereignty requirements and support collaboration between distributed teams.

Also Read: Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining: Why Investment in Infrastructure Is Integral

6. AWS Introduced New Container Solutions

AWS announced four new container solutionsOpens a new window to help customers profitably run their workloads.

• Amazon ECS Anywhere and Amazon EKS Anywhere 

With the new Amazon ECS Anywhere (available in 2021) and Amazon EKS Anywhere (available in 2021), customers can run Amazon Elastic Container Services and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services in their own data centers, respectively. Amazon ECS will enable customers to migrate containers to cloud and manage their hybrid environment easily. With Amazon EKS Anywhere, customers can create clusters and eliminate the fragmented collection of vendor support agreements and tools.

• AWS Proton

AWS announced AWS Proton, a new application management service to automate container and serverless application development and deployment. Proton will ensure that infrastructure teams manage the application’s development process without hampering developers’ productivity. It will be available in preview today.

• Amazon Elastic Container (ECR) adds public registry

Amazon ECR now offers a fully managed public container registry for customers to easily store, manage, and share container images. With Amazon ECR public, customers can host container images and eliminate the need for public websites and registries.

7. AWS Announced Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 and Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL

AWS announced Aurora Serverless v2, which scales database workloads to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, which will save 90% of consumer database costs. Additionally, the company also launched Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL to help customers easily migrate workloads from SQL server to Amazon Aurora. The company also plans to open-source Babelfish for PostgreSQL in 2021.

Shawn Bice, VP of Databases, AWS, saidOpens a new window , “With today’s announcement of the next generation of Amazon Aurora Serverless and Babelfish, we are making it even easier for customers to leave the constraints of old-guard databases behind, enjoy the immense cost advantages of open source database engines, and choose the right database for the right job.”

AWS has become an indisputable juggernaut in cloud computing services. With a myriad of launches, the cloud giant continues to strengthen its foothold in the infrastructure market and build a reinvention culture to help customers and partners thrive in the ever-changing IT landscape.

Did you attend AWS re:Invent 2020 event? What did you think of the latest product launches? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!