Innovation, Disruption, And Sustainability In The Cloud: Highlights From AWS re:Invent 2022

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Recently I made the trip to Las Vegas to attend AWS re:Invent 2022 – the leading cloud service provider’s annual conference where new products are announced and the roadmap for the next year is laid out to an audience of over 50,000 in-person attendees and 300,000 virtual registrants.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s keynote marked a major highlight of the event and centered, understandably, on the theme of sustainability. There has been growing concern in recent years around the environmental impact of the cloud industry – something that clearly needs to be addressed by corporations at the highest level.

For me, one of the most exciting announcements was AWS' ambition to become "water positive" by 2030. Quite simply, this means that it is aiming to return more water than is consumed by its operations. Why is this important? Well, water scarcity is increasingly becoming a threat to humans, wildlife, and all manner of ecosystems across the globe. In fact, the WWF forecast that by 2025 water shortages may affect two-thirds of the world's population. This is why, along with reducing carbon emissions, decreasing water consumption is seen as one of the most critical steps that industries need to take in order to improve sustainability.

Selipsky pledged that AWS would annually report its water use metrics and take steps to implement measures, including the use of recycled and harvested rainwater and collection of water used for processes such as cooling data centers, so it can be reused whenever it is safe to do so.

It also announced a number of partnerships with charities and non-profit groups dedicated to water preservation and sustainability, including a project to create two new areas of wetlands close to the River Thames in the UK. Other projects are planned for Brazil, South Africa, India, and Indonesia. He also restated the organization’s commitment to powering 100 percent of its operations with renewable energy by 2025 – as of now, it manages over 85 percent, he said.

Disruption

As well as sustainability, another theme running through Selipsky’s keynote – and AWS re:Invent as a whole – was the flexibility and agility offered by cloud in the face of volatile and turbulent market conditions.

With global enterprise weathering the “perfect storm” of supply chain disruption, inflation, spiraling energy prices, skills shortages, and hangovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, pressure is undoubtedly on to tighten belts, trim fat, and reduce inefficiency wherever it can be found. "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it," Selipsky announced, pointing to typical savings of 30 to 40 percent achieved when companies move core business systems to the cloud.

Other statistics that he highlighted included a typical reduction in time-to-market for new features by 43 percent – with many achieving closer to 60 percent.

New pathways available to help achieve this that were announced at AWS re:Invent 2022 include new integrations between the AWS relational database service Aurora and the data warehouse service Amazon Redshift. The promise here is the elimination of the troublesome “extract, transform, load” (ETL) process that often causes headaches for professionals working on enterprise-scale data analytics tasks. Put simply, the “zero-ETL” approach promises to make it easier to move data between tools, projects, and functions, making it simpler to adapt to different tasks and functions.

“We’ve been working for a few years now … to make it easier to do analytics and machine learning without having to deal with ETL,” Selipsky said, “but what if we could do more? What if we could eliminate ETL entirely? That would be a world we would all love." In simple terms, it's yet another bold step towards a vision of "data democracy," where barriers to using technology such as AI and machine learning are pulled down, meaning all organizations can benefit from their potential.

One more innovation announced on the day is a new “serverless” iteration of AWS’ OpenSearch service, which enables search operations across Big Data-scale datasets necessary for today’s enterprise analytics workloads. In effect, this means a more “pay-as-you-go” approach to provisioning requirements for these tasks, as it isn’t necessary to pay for servers and instances in order to run the cloud processes – merely for the compute power itself.

Security

Another interesting and long-awaited announcement was the launch of AWS’ centralized security solution for its cloud platform – Amazon Security Lake. This takes security data from the cloud as well as on-premises systems and brings them together in a data lake environment within AWS. The aim is to reduce the time it takes for AWS customers to detect security threats when they occur and react to them in order to keep their and their customers' data secure. This can often prove to be tricky when attacks can come from multiple directions, and the data that needs to be analyzed in order to respond to an attack may be spread across multiple systems, platforms, and formats. The process of building the data lake is fully automated and initiated in a self-service manner by the customer with just a few clicks. It was launched at the event, having previously undergone trials and pilots with organizations including Salesforce and Tinder.

Symbiotic Relationships

During the keynote, Selipsky was joined on stage by Biljana Kaitovic, Group CIO for global energy company ENGIE, who explained how her company had created a symbiotic relationship centered on decarbonization and the creation and use of clean energy. As well as ENGIE and AWS, this strategy reaches out to customers of both companies and could play a major role in enabling energy transition across industries.

How this works in practice is that by partnering with AWS, ENGIE leverages state-of-the-art cloud resources as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platforms in order to streamline their own production of clean and renewable energy. A great example of what this might involve is predicting the supply of intermittent energy sources like wind and solar power in order to maximize the use of capture and storage infrastructure. It also allows them to employ predictive maintenance across their fleets and machinery, meaning that the equipment is used more efficiently and spends less time out of action as a wasted resource.

In return, ENGIE provides AWS, as well as their customers and other technology providers, with clean energy, helping them work towards targets such as the one mentioned by Selipsky during his keynote.

I caught up with Kaitovic after the keynote, and she told me, "It's the flywheel effect – it's a really nice symbiotic relationship; thanks to the technology we get from AWS, we can create these customized digital solutions for specific use cases to decarbonize ourselves and our clients, and that helps us to provide clean energy.”

The evidence is all around us that the world is facing huge challenges due to climate change. Its impact is already being felt – recent flooding in Italy and forest fires across the globe just being the most recent examples, as well as ongoing desertification and loss of access to clean drinking water. In the face of this, global organizations like Amazon and AWS obviously have huge responsibilities to live up to. Not only must they decarbonize themselves and decrease their own water use, but they must lead the way for others, too, while also helping their own customers set and achieve sustainability targets. It is encouraging to see these vital themes placed at the forefront of AWS’ messaging during its most important event of the year. Let’s hope they are promises that can be lived up to, for all of our sakes.

You can watch my conversation with Biljana Kaitovic here:

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About Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr is a world-renowned futurist, influencer and thought leader in the field of business and technology. He is the author of?21 best-selling books ?(and winner of the?2022 Business Book of the Year ?award), writes a regular column for Forbes and advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations. He has over 2 million social media followers, over 1.2 million newsletter subscribers and was ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world and the No 1 influencer in the UK.