AWS re:Invent 2023 - the key highlights and takeaways

re:Invent is AWS’s annual tech learning conference for the global cloud-computing community, which took place this year in Las Vegas from Monday 27 November, to Thursday 1 December.

Each year, AWS uses re:Invent to announce innovative new services, primarily through the daily keynote speeches. re:Invent focuses on technology, innovation, and learning, making it the perfect opportunity for technologists to come together and review the latest technology announcements from AWS. It’s also an opportunity to learn about real life examples where AWS technology has impacted organisations around the world.

As the dust settles on another fantastic re:Invent, it’s given us some time at Softcat to digest our thoughts on some of the big announcements, and what we think it means for you as our customers. There was some big news; Amazon Q, additions to AWS Serverless, a bigger and better partnership with Nvidia and Cloud operational improvements.

Amazon Q

Amazon Q took the headlines, and rightly so. It’s a significant move from AWS into the world of Generative AI, and a number of use cases stood out to us:

Amazon Q integration with AWS Connect is an area that we expect to bring real value to organisations. Some of the key integration features are:

- Real-time AI recommendations for agents that will automatically detect customer issues and recommend actions to remediate the problem.

- Data ingestion in Connect, powered by Q is a particular area of strength. This comes with built in connectors for Salesforce, Zendesk, SharePoint Online, ServiceNow and AWS S3.

- Ease of access. Like any technology aimed at improving productive, the simplicity and ease that users can access it is paramount – Q is available to access within the Agent Workspace.

AI assistance to tech teams and developers will empower teams and organisations to deploy and develop workloads quicker:

- Q provides a conversational Q&A capability that will allow technical teams to find quick answers to technical questions and problems. We will be able to ask Q, “what are the AWS serverless services used to build serverless APIs?” A question like this would have previously required a level of research, compared to the ease that Q provides answers with, instantly.

- We can also ask Q to do things like, optimise EC2 instance selection. Q will offer clear guidance on the right instance families to select for upcoming projects or workloads.

AWS Serverless

Serverless is always a topic that has the potential to steal some headlines, and it did. Serverless computing is providing organisations the ability to build and run application code without provisioning or managing servers or backend infrastructure – and AWS has taken the flexibility, and potential this provides to the next level.

Amazon Aurora Limitless Database will scale to millions of write transactions every second, whilst managing petabytes of data and retaining the simplicity of operation as a single Database.

Amazon ElastiCache Serverless will simplify cache management and instantly scale to support applications.

Amazon Redshift Serverless will allow organisations to easily run analytics on workloads without the overheads of managing data warehouse infrastructure.

AWS and Nvidia collaboration

Continuing on the theme of AI, AWS and Nvidia announced a deeper partnership which will make AWS the first provider to offer NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, powering organisations’ generative AI innovations. These new chips will be available within a host of new Amazon EC2 instances.

Cloud operations

Whilst not the most exciting topic, cloud operations are vitally important, and AWS launched several improvements to their cloud operations services. Interestingly, AWS has chosen to integrate Amazon Q AI into many of the services shown below, making many aspects of cloud operation easier and faster for customers and technology teams.

• 65 new controls in the Control Tower, including region, deny supporting data sovereignty
• CloudWatch multi-source (monitor multiple accounts)
• AWS System Manager low code Visual Designer
• CloudWatchLogs infrequent access – 50% cheaper
• AWS Config period recording – collects changes once per day for reduced costs
• AWS System Manager add tags automatically
• CloudWatch – Natural Language query
• Logs insights
• Metric insights
• Query generation
• CloudWatch – log Anomaly detection (proactive learning)
• AWS Config – Natural Language Query
• AWS Control Tower – Natural Language Query

If you’d like to know more about these announcements, please reach out to your Softcat Account Manager or contact us here. Additionally, Softcat will be hosting an in-person event; re:Invent Replay on the 27^th of February 2024 at the OXO2 – If you’re interested in joining us on the day, please register here.