Not Drumroll but Drums: Andy Jassy With a Band of New Launches

This Re:Invent keynote was more like a blockbuster movie – a string of new characters, a peek into how both elephants and penguins can dance, potshots at rivals, wise-crack song interruptions and a twist about the DJ. So did we kill any villains here?

A stage dotted with guitarists, DJs and drummers – Does not sound like the setting of a technology conclave? Unless! It is just a set of frills and flounces – we know how big conferences have started getting into gimmicks over gravity.

But this time, every song, every humorous slide and every pregnant pause had a meaning. The big-bang Keynote by AWS Chieftain Andy Jassy did not just have a musical band on the stand-by at the stage, it was crafted as one too. The launches and announcements had something for everybody – the database keyboard, the machine learning guitar, the containers drum – all ticked.

When Andy came on stage after some interesting build-up gig by a mysterious DJ, he hit the main theme right off the bat. He pointed out how big companies have started moving to the cloud too. The disruption caused by ‘born in the cloud’ start-ups is nudging them strongly towards this new status-quo. He had a lot of tips on the right transformation journey here. He emphasized on top-down aggressive goals, ability to fight paralysis, plus, training builders here. This part was introduced by the band’s rendition (oh, yes, he had a full-packed band all along during the keynote) of ‘Right here, right now – it means everything’. Andy made sure that he drilled the importance of the ‘here and now’ for big enterprises.

Talking of elephants dancing as happily and easily as penguins, are we?

But what about the right music that gets these feet tapping all clippety clappety? That’s where the announcements poured in one by one – spread across the full burst of AWS continuum – networking, containers and instances.

Give me that chord

Chief among this year’s launches were these: chip-based innovations, the 2nd version of Graviton (a new generation of ARM-based chips with 4X more compute cores, 5X faster memory and 40 per cent price-performance advantage). He also rolled the curtains on Inf1 instances for EC2 (with 3X higher throughput), Fargate for Amazon EKS (strengthening the serverless part of containers).

Somewhere between these rabbits that were coming out of the hat was a twist. The DJ happened to be no one else but David M. Solomon, CEO, Goldman Sachs, who Andy brought on the stage at the right time. The big banker shared how collaborations with AWS have led the 150-year old company to strike innovations like ‘Bring Your Own Key’ and card-innovations. “Cloud allows us to do our job in the finance space which is to make it all simple, secure, safe and responsible. Finance is the perfect place to use new technology for real-time impact.”

The band set the cue for the next set of announcements next by playing ‘Is that’s all it’s all about, good luck movin up, Cause am movin out’.

Of course, Andy made some room to take a few funny digs at the competitors at the right time. Analogising a modernization project to a movers-and-packers situation, Andy reminded that the most important decision is on what to pick and what to leave. That’s where the question of mainframes, old databases, proprietary solutions and locked-in investments (cough cough, Windows Tax) comes in. He segued into AWS work on open-source engines with Aurora, on Linux and with system integrators who are helping customers do the heavy-lifting of cloud with pilot projects.

Strum it up

In a slew of database updates, Andy unveiled Amazon S3 Access Points that he claimed simplifies managing data access at scale. He then brought in the launch of AQUA for Amazon Redshift and UltraWarm as a warm-tier for Amazon Elasticsearch Engine that he explained, cut costs by 90 per cent to store the same amount of data and scales up massively for large data per cluster. He also talked about relational databases making way for purpose-built databases and announced a Cassandra-compatible service.

Looks like the grandfatherly clause is going to fade away from this slice of old-school IT very soon.

And the drummer jumps in

Machine Learning (ML) HAD to be there in the keynote and on this red carpet of 2019 announcements. Sagemaker’s umbrella got new entries like Studio, Experiments, Monitor, Debugger and Autopilot this time nailing some crucial ML challenges on accuracy, opacity, visibility struggles, control issues etc.

Chorus Time

The event which has galvanized 65,000 people and is abuzz with over 3000 sessions is being held in Las Vegas this week. AWS announcements look like running on the right roadmap when we asked some partners and developers who were attending the event.

Dan Gross from WhiteSource Software feels that even if Microsoft has been developer-savvy with all its industry history, AWS is catching up fast. Joseph Perez, a database enthusiast observed that AWS is big and for their size, they are innovating well so far. Also, their size matters as anything that they bring exerts an influence for external innovations also “Everyone wants to build a feature or connecting piece for what these folks push out as it is going to define the industry.”

A security company’s CEO applauded AWS’s widening up for more players and identity solutions this year. Alex Britnell from softserve, an IT Services company loved the emphasis on simplification and top-down focus in Andy’s keynote. “When we work on a project, we have a core group and satellite groups. So having the ‘readiness’ at the bottom level is extremely important for meeting the time and scope of an initiative. The top level’s goals may not be the same as the laundry-list of people on the ground. So making it work across the organization and with simplicity – is crucial, and Andy is spot-on there.”

The new Series for Data Lakes caught the eyes of Dan Alexander from Giganom while Outposts (a hybrid cloud offering) and Braket (a major quantum computing push announced at Re:Invent) were the favourite ones for Qasim Arham, Principal Architect, Volterra.

So yes, lukewarm or excited, the pats for AWS’s progress on the right roadmaps were palpable. It is hitting the right notes, it seems. But a good band has got to keep everyone surprised, with every next song. It’s a tough concert. Keeping everyone on their toes.

Humming something new

The industry seems to be at the cusp of many big turning points. The shift towards multi-cloud; the new moves by industry heavy-weights like Google Anthos, Azure Arc , Accenture Cloud simulation and Salesforce new chemistry with its competitors; they all make AWS’s bet on innovation leaps all the more well-timed. In more ways than one, these are really the early days of cloud. Jassy did say that even now, 97 per cent of workloads are on-premises. So AWS with a 47.80 per cent grip on the IaaS market, is leaving no strings untouched to get the rhythm right as the industry turns over to new notes.

Let’s see how the end-credits roll. For now, the hair-swirls and head-banging have just begun.