What To Expect From AWS re:Invent

It’s that time of the year when cloud enthusiasts and professionals gather on Las Vegas to attend the AWS re:Invent conference, the mega event that Amazon hosts for its cloud platform.

With each passing year, the conference only becomes bigger and better.

And this time around is no different.

The last week of November will witness tens of thousands of cloud technologists attending multiple technology sessions, tracks, and networking events. AWS hosts smaller events through the year in all corners of the globe, but re:Invent is where it announces significant updates to its cloud platform.

Engineering teams work towards this milestone to ensure that their product is included in the announcements, while AWS partners make sure that they showcase their products and highlight their services at the gathering.

So, what to expect from AWS re:Invent this year?

For starters, there is no doubt that AI will take the center stage at the event, in a big way. In fact, this is going to be the key theme of the event. And that’s because as compared to its rivals, Amazon Web Services is lagging behind in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Expect intelligent vision, translation, text analysis, video pattern recognition and recommendation services to join existing AI services available on AWS like Lex, Polly, and Rekognition.

We also heard about Ironman, AI powered data warehousing that Amazon Web Services has developed.

AIOps is another area that may steal the show.

AI applied to operations is not exactly new, but has the potential to redefine the way infrastructure is managed. We already got a glimpse of it with Amazon Macie, which is just one example of what AWS can do with the combination of artificial intelligence and humongous amounts of data.

No reason for services like AWS Inspector, Trusted Advisor, and Cost Explorer not to become intelligent and smart, this is the perfect time.

The bottom line is that Amazon will infuse AI into every possible service.

Another key focus, as it always has been for Amazon Web Services, is compute services. There are voices that the cloud giant is all set to announce managed Kubernetes running on top of EC2. Amazon, as you may recall, recently joined CNCF, and the company is hiring container experts.

Clear signs that a hosted Kubernetes offering is in the works.

Word is that an extension to the existing EC2 Container Service, ECS, maybe branded as EC2 Container Service for Kubernetes, and called EKS. A new container service based on Kubernetes is only a matter of time, and though this may still be speculation, a launch is very likely.

Another expected highlight is a bare metal cloud offering.

Amazon EC2 already offers dedicated instances, which are beefy servers meant to run one VM per physical machine. AWS has already tested the waters with the VMware infrastructure running on its physical servers, and it’s only a matter of time before the bare metals servers are exposed to customers.

This will enable them to run their own hypervisor and operating system on EC2.

And finally, Lambda is one service that is due for a facelift. It has been around for four years now, but the tooling for this serverless platform still leaves a lot to be desired. Amazon has been putting its weight behind this technology, even acquiring Cloud9 IDE, but is yet to integrate it with Lambda.

It is only reasonable that the cloud giant may have something to show here, at its marquee event.

You can follow and find more details on AWS re:Invent on its official website.

The mega event itself is set to be held November 27 to December 1.