Re:Invent Final Update

We are rapidly heading to the end of Re:Invent. For many people Friday is travel day. Most of the sessions are repeats and there are on big events. This morning kicked off with, what is for many, the highlight of the week the CTO keynote with Werner Vogels . The day will close out with the Re:Play party at the Las Vegas festival grounds. This afternoon is a final chance for learning, networking and checking out the exhibitor Expo.

I will finish up this last blog with my summary of the keynote and key takeaways from Re:Invent 2023. If anything amazing happens I will update the article later.

CTO Keynote

Werner Vogels keynote is alway much more about AWS than product announcements. It is normally a journey with a couple of key themes. It is not normally announcement heavy. This year was no different.

The event kicked off with a Matrix spoof video where the architect was running the matrix on premise and having problems scaling and keeping costs under control.

After the opening the event was about "The Frugal Architect". The talk focussed on building a sustainable architecture and aligning costs to business.

Werner talked about how AWS charge for services and pass on the real costs, so the cost metrics of their product map to the real world costs. He used some examples like how they developed s3, DynamoDB and Lambda.

There was a lot of talk about observability and ongoing running costs being higher than build costs. Werner also talked abut unable architecture to give the business control and tearing feature depending on criticality.

Another point that was mentioned a few Tims was sustainability and how cost is a very good proxy for sustainability.

After another matrix spoof with the oracle, Verner then went on a bit of an AI journey and talked about solving problems with traditional AI rather than GenAI.

Throughout the talk there were a couple of really good guest speakers. One was from Nu Bank. Nu Bank have grown from a start up to now being used by 50% of all adults in Brazil. The other guest speaker was from Thorn. Thorn are a not for profit who help detect and report child exploitation images. That talked about how the built and distributed a classifier as part of their product to detect images.

The product announcements were:

• Application composer now being available in VS Code
• CloudWatch ApplicationSignals - automatic instrumentation of applications
• myApplications to provide improved application observability in the AWS console
• Container image scanning for CI/CD pipelines

My thoughts and takeaways

Well the number one take away is this has been the year of GenAI. If you want a one word summary, there it is. GenAI has clearly caused an explosion of interest in the tech world. Many business are now asking - what does GenAI mean for me?

All this GenAI hype though hides some of the other things that are going on. AWS is obviously making a massive play in the GenAI world, but they are continuing to innovate their other services. Graviton 4 is another leap forward in CPU efficiency. AWS continues to innovate in many areas. Hearing about some of the work in quantum computing is very impressive (although a few years from a market ready product).

There have been some good container announcements around prometheus and IAM in EKS and container image scanning in CICD. There have been lambda improvements and new controls added to control tower.

One thing that has been a bit disappointing is there has not been nearly enough mention of sustainability. AWS are doing some great work in this area but it has been squeezed out of the limelight this year. I think that is a shame especially as today is the opening of the next COP summit. It is great that Amazon continues to invest in this area but personally I would like to see a similar focus to last year.

Back on to GanAI then - AWS have shown they have all the tools, hardware, chips, partnerships, models ready to use in Bedrock and ready to go services.

Amazon Q looks like a really impressive productivity tool both for businesses and developers. I am looking forward to evaluating it properly.

My advice for anyone who has been bitten by the GenAI bug:

• First you need to be outcome focussed. GenAI is a powerful tool, but it may not be the right tool for the problem
• As has been said in a few of the keynotes, AI is only as good as the data supplied. If you have data problems they will probably need to be sorted out first.

Re:Invent always emphasises why AWS are the world number 1 cloud provider. They have a range of services and continue to invest and innovate. They continue to be the obvious choice for both start ups and enterprise.

I am really looking forward to getting back to PA Consulting and working out how we can use some of teh new announcements to benefit our customers. My head is full of ideas already.