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Nov 29, 2018

AWS re:Invent 2018 Keynote Hot Take

Marius Rubin

Marius Rubin

AWS re:Invent 2018 Keynote Hot Take

Credera are at AWS re:Invent 2018, the leading cloud technology event from Amazon Web Services in Las Vegas this week. Here’s our take on all the announcements you may be reading about, distilled by our esteemed technical principal Marius Rubin.

Read next: Credera named AWS Advanced Consulting Partner in the UK

  • AWS's growth continues at the same extraordinary rate as ever – who last year at revenue of $16bn would have thought they could achieve another 46% growth in one year?

     

  • Delivery of new products and services is continuing at a blistering pace – many of these announcements on their own would form the centrepiece of a traditional vendor's keynote.

     

  • The new cost-saving and ease-of-use announcements (S3 Intelligent-TieringDynamoDB R/W Capacity On DemandControl Tower etc.) are taking problems traditionally solved by architects or professional services organisations and making them core features of the platform. Expect this trend to continue.

     

  • Amazon Forecast and Personalize are very interesting – but not for the reasons you might think. They represent a significant commercialisation of Amazon.com's business practices and are overtly targeted at specific industry sectors. Let's see what more sector-specific products they come up with in future.

     

  • AWS Outposts, while compelling for organisations wanting/needing consistent management of a hybrid IT estate, must also be a source of serious worry for traditional hardware vendors (and Azure Stack) – the last thing they need is Amazon rivalling their physical products.

     

  • Similarly, the reasoning behind AWS's purchase of Annapurna Labs is starting to become clear. Chips at a low price point (Graviton) or with a specific use-case (Inferentia) erode the value proposition of the big vendors. How long do we think it will be before they start to produce x86 instruction set chips to rival Intel and AMD's core offerings?

     

  • The same pattern extends to some of the security offerings (e.g. Security Hub). Though one can’t help but wonder whether this will disincentivise small vendors building solutions that provide insight into what’s happening in your AWS deployment – why build a product and grow a customer base with such a high risk of Amazon taking your business?

     

  • All the new database (QLDBTimestream), data lake (Lake Formation) and filesystem offerings (FSx) are going to further reduce organisations’ need to host non-AWS managed services on regular EC2 instances.

     

  • And finally... Most impressive is the number of technology areas AWS innovate in nowadays - whether it's IaaS, AIaaS, processors, databases, architectures. AWS never fail to amaze in quite how broad a scope they now deal with.... satellite data processing as a service, anyone? (Ground Station)

     

Interested in how some of these announcements might impact your organisation or how you can make best use of these features? Wondering what some of the acronyms and technical language really mean in this hot take? Get in touch with us for a discussion or workshop. 



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