Recap of Selipsky's keynote at AWS re:Invent

Last week, AWS re:Invent 2022 took place in Las Vegas. As we're still hustling in start-up mode, we couldn't afford to be there in person. That being said, AWS does give the general public a chance to catch-up through recorded sessions. As is custom during these events, the CEO (Adam Selipsky in this case) elaborated on the company's portfolio and its latest accomplishments. The emphasis throughout his entire keynote was on "sustainability." AWS wants to be carbon neutral by 2025 and water positive (returning more clean water than it uses) by 2030. According to Selipsky, they're well on track getting there.

After a good 20 minutes, Selipsky gave the mic to Biljana Kaitovic, Executive Vice-President IT and Digital at Engie, well-known in Belgium as energy provider (but featured in the keynote as one of France's largest companies). Her message was clear:

"To accelerate to a carbon-neutral economy, data and digital play a key role in the energy transition."

Getting there won't be easy but cloud providers such as AWS will definitely help in this effort. One of the concrete ways they are helping to achieve this is to be able to (1) store, (2) manage, and (3) analyze petabytes of data. The more technical among our readers will probably recognize services like Amazon Aurora (common AWS database) and Amazon Redshift (the native AWS data warehouse solution) but AWS is thinking ahead, a future in which it will be made easier for a larger group of people (citizen developers?) to handle data through services that allow to easily train AI models (such as AWS Sagemaker) and do away with some of the peskiest tasks in data handling, building ETL (Extraction / Transform / Load) pipelines.

Are we welcoming a zero ETL future soon?