Explore Scalable Digital Solutions #5 - Get the BASICS right
AWS Opening Keynote

Explore Scalable Digital Solutions #5 - Get the BASICS right

2024 AWS Summit in Berlin is one of the most influential, original and thought-provoking annual tech event in Germany, across many industries from financial services to manufacturing and engineering.


Here you can discover how the latest advancements in generative AI, learn from organizations how they developer tooling, how to build foundational infrastructure allow you to build quickly with confidence, differentiate your business through your data, and deploy applications with availability, elasticity, cost, sustainability, and performance in mind, you can talk with an architect, play and learn, meet the AWS community in creative problem solving, at the historical, 150 years old Station Berlin, which used to be a train station from Berlin to Dresden, established in 1875.

Location of AWS Summit (source: AWS)

My key takeaway is to get the BASICs right

  • Baseline your data foundation
  • Algorithm at scale
  • Strength with high resilience
  • Internal Developer Platform (IDP)
  • Capability building as priority
  • Sustainability

Baseline your data foundation

Marketing buzzwords such as "Platform", "GenAI", can strengthen repetition Bias by simplifying evaluations of a concept by focusing on information that has repeated words, that might be quite distant from reality.

Good data, good AI
To truth unleash the power of AI, we need good data.
DataOps

During the keynote, Mindy Ferguson, AWS Streaming & Messaging AWS, has emphasized the importance of comprehensive generative AI stack, with solid data governance, enabled with infrastructure that enables training and inference, apply tools to build application with FMs (functional models) and LLMs (Large Language Models).

Generative AI Stack
Generative AI Stack

High-quality data is the foundation of any successful AI endeavor, it's well worth investing time and resources to get it right. From a Data science perspective, there're different types of needs.

The Data Science Hierarchy of Needs? Scaled Agile, Inc.

Algorithm at scale

An algorithm is a set of rules or a step-by-step procedure designed to perform a specific task or solve a particular problem. In AI, algorithms are the core mechanisms that drive the functionality of models and systems. Today, with the emergent of ChatGPT, we are seeking a paradigm shift in terms of the amount of parameters in foundation models and large language models.

For example, the first AI model was created back in 1957 with 3 parameters, Google's PaLM (Pathways Language Model) is one of the most advanced models and has 540 billion parameters, to generate original output for tasks like answering questions, translating languages, and completing sentences.

No one model to rule them all

Today, Foundation models represent a high-level, generalized approach in AI, providing a broad platform for diverse applications. Developing a Foundation model involves training on vast datasets to create a versatile base. But there is not one that will rule all, often it requires a contextual linkage, e.g. applying Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

RAG

It is the process of optimizing the output of a large language model, so it references an authoritative knowledge base outside of its training data sources before generating a response. RAG extends the already powerful capabilities of LLMs to specific domains or an organization's internal knowledge base, all without the need to retrain the model. It is a cost-effective approach to improving LLM output so it remains relevant, accurate, and useful in various contexts.

Strength with high resilience

The European Commission is determined to boost Europe’s competitiveness and innovation in financial services, and to be a global standard-setter. One aspect of the Commission’s drive for digital innovation in financial services is The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA):

DORA Impact

It is a proposal for a pan-European framework on operational and cyber-resilience. The Act outlines improvements in information and communications technology (ICT) and security risk-management requirements, a harmonization regime for ICT incident reporting, development of a digital operational resilience testing framework, and an oversight framework for critical ICT third-party providers, in areas of:

  • Incident response
  • Governance and monitoring
  • Operational resilience

Internal Developer Platform (IDP)

In recent years, BMW has been setting up a common internal development platform (IDP), CodeCraft, which is part of its overall “Software Factory.” During BMW’s development cycles, this software development platform executes at peak more than 140,000 continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) builds daily, using over 74,000 virtual CPUs. These builds can be very complex, relying on up to thousands of direct and transitive dependencies. Frequently, it takes several hours to generate artifacts up to several hundred GBs, causing two major challenges:

Code Craft of BMW

  • For any missing or outdated dependency, the required version must be downloaded on-demand from the central artifact repository during pipeline execution. This results in a longer build execution, making the system wait instead of doing useful work.

Relative Complexity increases

  • As BMW aims to deliver higher-level autonomous driving functions, the demand for the software development platform (SDP) is expected to grow substantially. All these new initiatives are managed and tracked with a strict timeline. To meet these milestones, the development team has a limited window each night to update CI/CD build images with the latest dependencies and prepare pipelines for the next day’s new commits.

BMW Software Development Platform
How SW changes are developed and integrated - developer view
How SW changes are developed and integrated - project view
How SW changes are developed and integrated - software factory view

During another talk of IDP, AWS expert has shown best practices of how to build IDP, there is no one size fit all, however the underlying principles are universally applicable, by balancing autonomy and standards.

One size does not fit all

Capability building as priority

AWS has announced to invest 7.8 billion EUR in Brandenburg infrastructure, to create the capability of the future with European Sovereign Cloud.

AWS Keynote
Skills to Job Tech Alliance

How to serve the future if the organization doesn't have the right competence and capabilities? In fact more than half of the organizations are struggling with capability gaps in cloud talent, AWS is investing more than ever the training and certification program.

Trend in Germany

  • Sustainability

AI in Germany increased by 30%

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made significant commitments and efforts towards sustainability.

  • 100% Renewable Energy: AWS aims to power its global infrastructure with 100% renewable energy by 2025. They have already made substantial progress towards this goal, with numerous renewable energy projects across the globe.
  • The Climate Pledge: Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge, committing to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement. AWS plays a crucial role in this initiative by reducing its own carbon footprint.
  • Water Recycling: AWS data centers use sustainable water management practices, including water recycling and the use of non-potable water for cooling purposes., committed to be be water positive by 2030, meaning they will return more water to communities and the environment than they use in their direct operations.
  • Green Building Practices: AWS follows green building practices, ensuring that their facilities meet high environmental standards. They often seek certifications like LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for their buildings, uses innovative cooling solutions, such as evaporative cooling and direct-to-chip cooling, to reduce the energy needed to cool data centers.
  • Sustainable Services: AWS provides tools and services that help customers monitor and reduce their own carbon footprints. For example, the AWS Well-Architected Tool includes a Sustainability Pillar to help customers design and operate their workloads sustainably, e.g. Carbon Footprint Tool.

To summarize, by getting the following right,

  • Baseline your big data foundation
  • Algorithm at scale
  • Strength with high resilience
  • Internal Developer Platform (IDP)
  • Capability building as priority
  • Sustainability

the future is bright for builders, in fact, it's never been a better time to be a builder. The combination of advanced technologies, accessible resources, global connectivity, and supportive ecosystems creates a fertile ground for builders to innovate and thrive. the opportunities are vast and the tools at your disposal are more powerful than ever, with the dazzling speed of innovation opening doors to endless possibilities.

Source: AWS, Scaled Agile Inc.

Joel Reimer-Eiglmeier

Helping companies to adopt DevSecOps best practices!

6 个月

Heard only good things from my colleagues that attended the summit as well. I guess, I need to put it on my agenda for next year. Thank you for sharing these insights!

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