All The Power in My AWS

In 2007/8, we had a lunch meetup of DC area techies and social marketers in Jimmy's Old Tavern in Herndon. Jeff Barr - the first Amazon Web Services Evangelist was in town. At that time, AWS was every startup's dream of fame. Have a credit card will scale. That is all it took, no buying physical machines, waiting for data centers to be set up and scale your business. Jeff was the bridge between developers and the development and added features from Amazon Web Services. My friends who were developers in the Washington DC area loved this idea as this was insurance in case any of their creations became an overnight sensation and they need not worry about servers going down.

I am not a developer but I very passionate about tech. I signed up for my own Amazon Web Services account way back when they first started. My use case was :

1. Get all the photos from every computer in the house to the cloud
2. How to store all the music that I have on CDs
3. When we upgraded computers, backing up all the files

That was almost 10 years ago. AWS has come a long way and now has over 165 features ( That is before this week's Amazon Web Services ReInvent conference)

I have access to all the 165 features from my AWS account, even though I pay only about $9 a month. This is because AWS is not a SaaS subscription model. It is a PPU model, i.e. pay per use model. You pay only if you use the feature.

I immediately started using the AWS Chime. It's a conferencing tool that will call you when your meeting is ready and ping your attendees as well. The screens in this post are from, my control panel. If you want to go beyond the free version, you pay $3 per day up a maximum of $15 a month. Compare that to any other conferencing service.

I added an AWS WorkDocs drive to my laptop that I can access on my phone. The difference between this feature and Google Docs is that I can use any word processor to edit my files without having to upload/download to another drive or editing tool.

While this is not something I do every day, yet the idea that I had the power of setting up a Satellite Ground Station - as they say, I had the power to "Command and control satellites, and downlink data using the cloud." - Someday I will have enough data to use this.

The tools that I am testing are:

Amazon Polly - Text to Voice. Copy and paste your text and choose a voice you want to use to transcribe. Your blog post is now a podcast.

Amazon Textract - In a use case where you have to scan documents or have images of the documents. You can use this service to detect and extract text and data from scanned documents. Textract can identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables, which is cool

Amazon Transcribe - Use this service to transcribe any voice or speech to text in real-time. Educators can capture lectures, use training classes transcribed to notes

Amazon Rekognition - Imagine, you were getting a lot of user-generated images. You were worried about people posting out of topic images. This deep learning-based visual analysis service can Search, verify, and organize millions of images and videos to give you the results.

Amazon Lex - This is a service that can let you create an integrated chatbot and an Alexa voice app to give your audience a better experience. Universities are using this for international students to ask questions in their language of choice. Libraries are connecting this service to answer questions about availability and also books on hold or hours of operation.

So far the services I mentioned are things that I can do myself with some minimum help from my more advanced techie colleagues.

At work, we created an AI/ML model to continuously feed our customer data and predict the personas and their buying behavior. AWS has a new service called the Amazon SageMaker Studio where if I understood the feature right, you take all your data in a .csv file, you can create your own AI/ML model.

Did you know you can use AWS both for your email marketings - SES i.e Simple Email Service and SNS i.e Simple Notification Service for text.

In this entire article, I wrote about 6 features of the AWS cloud features. In my opinion, these are features a professional or business of any size can use these features, One important feature which is where my AWS journey started is the S3 - Simple Storage Service. Do not store any of your data, financials on a physical drive on a computer. Store then on an S3 server and access them anywhere from any device.

Did you know that you could stand up a call center if you needed one? Amazon Connect is being used by large corporations as their cloud contact center. And, wait for it, they announced recently a new feature called Amazon Contact Lens. Contact Lens can better understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance risks of customer conversations to effectively train agents, replicate successful interactions, and identify the crucial company and product feedback.

IT professionals will be very thrilled with moving the IT infrastructure to the cloud and geeks like me will be thrilled with the thought of so much power in our hands. We do not have to worry about years of development and costs.