It was a little over a year ago that I experienced my very first AWS re:Invent. It was 2020, a lost year for many of us as COVID forced us all in our homes, working remote, and attending events virtually. This meant converting a mega-conference that brings close to 70,000 people globally to Las Vegas into a completely online experience.
While I would not want to repeat that experience again, the re:Invent team did a remarkable job in enabling the show to go on. There were plenty of announcements, great music acts, and lots of learning to access. And ultimately, that is why re:Invent exists. It is a conference for builders to learn how to build in the cloud.
However, maybe partaking in my first re:Invent virtually was a blessing in disguise. Since coming back home, I have been in recovery mode resting sore feet, fixing my sleep schedule, and detoxing my body of everything consumed the week before. At least last year, I just chilled on my coach, dug into some keynotes, and absorbed the blizzard of information from the comfort of my home.
It is a relief though to have re:Invent back as an in-person event. Even at a limited capacity of 27,000, the sessions, expo, and evening events were full. The energy and excitement was palpable as most attendees, customers, partners, and AWS staff alike, were attending their first in-person conference in over twenty months!
Coming back together for re:Invent this year was also auspicious. This was the tenth year of re:Invent. It was the 15th anniversary of EC2. The biggest change though was the passing of the guard as Adam Selipsky took the reins as CEO of AWS, replacing Andy Jassy who now heads all of Amazon.
From an announcements perspective, re:Invent did not disappoint. The pace of innovation keeps accelerating along every vector of our stack from compute, storage, database, analytics, to AI/ML. There were exciting forays into robotics and IoT. We continue to push innovation with industry specific solutions like fintech. We even went back in time to lift the mainframe into the world of the cloud.
Yes, I mentioned the big “M” word. It is true that re:Invent often feels it is geared to non-cloud native crowd. Many of the customers brought out during the keynotes such as 3M, ADP, Nasdaq, and United, fall squarely into the “enterprise” space. That being said, they have done incredible work to transform their operations and culture to the cloud. As a user of United’s Travel Ready Center app, I can attest they did an awesome job making travel a lot less stressful and time consuming during COVID.
Does this mean that startups are left out of the party? Based on the startup founders I spoke to during the week, they were excited about attending and got immense value from the conference. Since re:Invent was also available for free to watch sessions virtually, many more startup founders and builders could attend.
What did startups find valuable this year at re:Invent? The most obvious benefit was meeting people in person. To meet founders, connect with enterprise customers, chat with partners, and schmooze with investors for the first time since the beginning of 2020 was itself a huge reward. We hosted many startup talks, and interactive sessions with founders, operators, and AWS experts at the Startup Central booth and breakout rooms. And because the sessions were recorded, you can watch startup sessions on demand by registering on the re:Invent site (search on STP to find the sessions).
Sifting through the flurry of new product announcements however is another matter. What were the things that could help startups right now as they are building and scaling? What could move the needle on markets or open up brand new opportunities?
Last year I highlighted five specific announcements, plus a few others, featuring services that startups could leverage in some practical way. These included new instance types, better developer tooling, and containers & serverless enhancements. This year thought I am going to take a different approach and talk about five overall themes that can help align the most applicable services to the typical challenges most tech startups face. Let’s go!
Cost
Every business is cost sensitive. For startups though, managing burn, whatever the source, is life and death. This is why we launched the Activate program a few years ago, to provide credits to startups to help cover their infrastructure costs at the most critical stages of seeking product-market fit.
When it comes to technology, the biggest costs for startups comes from compute and storage. On the compute side, the new EC2 C7g instances powered by Graviton3 processors provide 25% better compute performance and lower latency, translating into fewer instances needed. For storage, we made a number of enhancements such as reducing S3 costs as well as offering more options for faster retrieval of infrequently accessed data and lower cost storage classes, even furthering reducing costs.
Speed
When I talk about speed, I am focused on what can enable engineering teams to build, ship, and iterate faster. That means enhancing the developer experience and remove unnecessary manual work that interrupts a developer’s flow or stalls a team.
This year provided some real leaps in innovating on the developer experience! The first was the launch of AWS Amplify Studio, It is a visual development environment for front-end developers to accelerate UI development with minimal coding. The second was a visual, no-code interface for building machine learning models, Amazon SageMaker Canvas. By lowering the complexity and learning curve for teams, startups can build and ship AI enables services and apps faster. As as aside, the Amplify Studio and SageMaker Canvas demos were presented by two of my favorite people at AWS, Ali Spittel and Allie Miller!
Data
Someone once said to me that you can have all the data in the world, but still be just as dumb with the data as without. We need data plus analytics to gain insight, which is why Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP for Machine Learning, spent much of his keynote on data and analytics. For startups, this means investing in capabilities to extract insights from data and determining your database architecture even earlier in your development than you might think necessary.
“Reinvention is driven by data.”
Swami Sivasubramanian
AWS has long had the broadest set of purpose-built database services, so this year was about furthering capabilities. First notable announcement was Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS, a new service which uses machine learning to detect and diagnose database issues in Amazon Aurora automatically, removing the heavy lifting of manually tuning databases for performance. The second notable release was serverless capabilities added to Amazon Redshift, our managed data warehousing service, thus off-lifting the need to provision any compute in advance.
Reach
More and more compute is being delivered at the edge. At re:Invent, I spoke with the Chief Digital Officer of Resilience who presented at our Startup Central stage. They are reinventing how medicine gets made, and have been using AWS Outposts to bring the power of the cloud into their manufacturing facilities.
Compute at the edge was a big overall theme, getting prominent coverage in Adam’s keynote. He talked a about expanding Outposts to more countries such as Vietnam and Nigeria. Then he introduced the new AWS Private 5G, a managed service to deploy a 5G network in days. While both of these appear enterprise focused, there are some novel use cases of startups that could leverage these services. We discussed this during our re:Invent Clubhouse show last week where we also brought up the new Cloud WAN service and expansion of Local Zones to 30 more locations globally, the later which is a boost for startups building apps that require much lower latency.
Talent
Startups are forever resource constrained. The fact is that there are not enough skilled cloud engineers to meet all the needs of all the startups. While low-code and no-code solutions can lower the bar for non-technical founders to get started, to really scale big requires technical expertise and experience. This means trained engineers.
Adam highlighted in his keynote the AWS commitment to train 29 million builders globally by 2025 in core cloud skills. AWS is leading the charge through more access to tools, education, and community:
First, you need access to the tools to experiment, so we launched Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, a no-configuration ML service to allow anyone to experiment and learn machine learning skills for free.
Once you have the tools, you might want a structured path to gain competency, so we announced the AWS AI & ML Scholarship Program. This program provides educational content, career mentorship, and 2,500 scholarships annually to underserved and underrepresented individuals.
Lastly, you might be stuck on some code or configuration and need to ask a question, so we launched AWS re:Post, a community questions-and-answers service available for anyone building on AWS.
That is a lot to absorb! Honestly, re:Invent is a whirlwind of people, conversations, and content. I met a ton of people, I learned a lot, and I also probably gained five pounds while creating holes in the bottoms of my shoes. For startup founders though, there are few events that have as much potential as re:Invent for building momentum for your startup.
If you attended re:Invent, watched virtually, or followed any of the updates, what were the most interesting announcements for you? What service or program do you think you will use for your project or startup? Let me know in the comments!
Mark Birch, Editor & Founder of DEV.BIZ.OPS
There was a lot rolled into this post. Attending re:Invent and drinking from the firehose of new releases will do that to you 🤣
If you want to know more about re:Invent updates and new releases, I am going to host a special AI/ML reCap show on Clubhouse next week Thursday, December 16th at 6 PM ET / 3 PM PT with some of our awesome AI/ML gurus to talk about their observations on the announcements and to answer your questions. It is free to join, and happens to be quite entertaining (as much as shows about AI can be 😉).
Also be on the look out for future re:Invent follow-ups and content being released over the next several weeks as session videos are released and various communities host their own reCap gatherings. I will post what I can here in the newsletter or over my Twitter account.
Lastly, if you like food as much as I like food, check out some of the fine eats I had during re:Invent on my Instagram feed. While I not the biggest fan of Las Vegas, I have no complaints about the food😋
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