Six insights you might have missed in 2021. AWS Re:Invent

The year 2021 ended with a bang at AWS Re:Invent conference. AWS annual conference sets the agenda for what happened that year and what's coming the next. Here is what happened in 2021 and what's next in 2022 in cloud computing.

AWS made a significant number of?announcements?and covered a great deal of ground during what has become one of the signature events on the tech industry calendar. The public cloud giant unveiled a host of new products and services, from migration tools and storage enhancements to developer solutions and a host of compute innovations.

Here are six insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s many interviews during AWS re:Invent 2021 by co-hosts Dave Vellante (pictured), John Furrier and others.?

1. An early warning system for the cybersecurity world emerges

Two of theCUBE’s interviews highlighted an important and timely trend in the cybersecurity space: Companies are building an early warning system to detect global vulnerabilities at scale.

Retired Gen.?Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency and the founder and co-chief executive of IronNet Inc., described how his company is creating the equivalent of a virtual radar system to track threats as they begin to disrupt systems, and share that information proactively across the public and private sectors.

“We build the picture to bring people together,” Alexander said during an?interview?with theCUBE. “It can get fellow companies to help them defend, offering collective defense, knowledge sharing, crowdsourcing. At the same time, the government can see that attack going on and say, ‘My job is to stop that.’”

A test of this collective defense system actually began playing out as re:Invent progressed in Las Vegas. The discovery in late November of a?major vulnerability in Log4j, an open-source tool that gathers data from applications, triggered alarm bells throughout the cybersecurity community as companies began to track attacks based on the exploit.

CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., which leverages its?Threat Graph?and?OverWatch?solutions to monitor signs of malicious activity, recently issued a?bulletin?noting a high volume of unknown actors were scanning and attempting exploitation of the Log4j vulnerability.

“CrowdStrike has millions of sensors out in our customer environments,”?Jessica Alexander, vice president of cloud product sales and alliances at CrowdStrike, said during a?conversation?with theCUBE at re:Invent. “They’re feeding trillions of events into the cloud, and we’re able to correlate this data in real time, so this gives us a very unique perspective into what’s happening in adversary activity out in the world.”

2. Continued growth of fintech startups signals an important shift in the enterprise financial landscape

Over the past decade, the corporate mantra was that every company had to become a digital company. In the current decade, that axiom may flip to a new reality: Every company will also be a financial services business.

A number of fintech startups, founded over the past 10 years, are starting to expand rapidly and exert influence on the global financial system. An example of this can be found in?Stripe Inc.

Stripe built its business by handling payments processing for?small firms. Today, it has a?$95 billion valuation?and processes transactions for clients such as?Amazon and Google.

More significantly, Stripe represents a trend that has been evolving for some time. As it grows its customer base and expands in financial clout, Stripe is also building economic architecture that its clients are leveraging as well.

The social media giant TikTok recently?announced?its own move into financial services through a deal with Stripe to build a tip engine for content creators on the platform.

“The mission of Stripe is to grow the GDP of the internet,”?Kenneth Chestnut, global head of technology for go-to-market partnerships at Stripe, said during an?interview?with theCUBE. “The general trend of businesses moving online will continue to accelerate, and we want to provide economic infrastructure to support those businesses.”

3. Red Hat is pursuing a focused effort to differentiate RHEL in the cloud

It did not receive as much publicity as other AWS announcements during re:Invent, but there was significant operating system news released just prior to the conference start when the public cloud provider?announced Amazon Linux 2022?in preview.

Why was this significant? For starters, Amazon Linux 2022 will be?based?on Red Hat’s community Linux version – Fedora. The?size and expertise?of the Fedora ecosystem has made it a valuable testing ground for features that stand a good chance of being integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The significant clout behind Amazon’s embrace of Fedora will most likely result in further boosting the?widely adopted?RHEL distribution.

The Linux announcement followed the?April debut?of Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, or ROSA, a managed version for container-based applications. AWS has noticed large sets of RHEL customers running RHEL on EC2 who also want the ROSA offering,?according to Manu Parbhakar, head of strategic partnerships for AWS, in an interview with theCUBE.

The latest announcement signals an interest by both Red Hat and AWS in focusing on RHEL as a key ingredient in meeting clients’ enterprise needs.

“We’re starting to shift focus into really differentiating RHEL on the AWS platform,”?Gunnar Hellekson, director of product management for Linux and virtualization at Red Hat, said during a?conversation?with theCUBE. “Integrating natively with AWS services makes it easier to operate in AWS.”

4. The 2020 acquisition of Spot has put a turbo boost behind NetApp’s business

When NetApp Inc.?acquired Spot.io?for $450 million in June 2020, there was a modest amount of press coverage at the time. What perhaps no one anticipated was that NetApp would reformulate much of its business model around the acquisition.

Over the past 18 months, NetApp acquired several more companies to complement its Spot purchase and introduced a number of new products and services based on the cloud compute broker’s platform. At the time of the acquisition, NetApp?claimed?that Spot’s technology could save up to 90% of public cloud compute and storage expenses.

The company has made several acquisitions within the past year to support Spot, including?Data Mechanics Inc.?in June to enhance its Spot Wave offering for optimizing Spark workloads in the cloud. NetApp also added cloud optimization software firm?CloudCheckr Inc.?in October, which has been integrated with Spot.

After?debuting Spot Security?in late October, NetApp released earnings that showed its public cloud segment, which includes Spot,?grew 155%?year-over-year from the previous quarter.

“Four companies in the last 12 months for Spot,”?Anthony Lye, executive vice president and general manager for public cloud at NetApp, said during an?interview?with theCUBE. “We really believe that as a company, now we can address all of the potential opportunities, whether it’s a legacy application, whether it’s a virtual desktop, whether it’s a cloud native application. That’s really proven to be one of the most successful acquisitions NetApp has ever done.”

5. As workload needs drive broader adoption of AI, Nvidia and AWS continue to pursue processor innovation

One of the key conversations during re:Invent revolved around how?new kinds of workloads?were motivating AWS and its partners to provide new AI-powered solutions to meet enterprise demand.

This dynamic is playing out in the processor world, most notably in the partnership between AWS and Nvidia Corp. During the conference, AWS?announced?a new set of EC2 instances, designed for GPU workloads and featuring Nvidia’s T4G Tensor Core.

AWS also?highlighted?G4 and G5 instances tailored for machine learning inference leveraging Nvidia’s AI libraries. Use of these technologies is spreading, manifested in everything from video streaming for consumers to energy generation.

“AWS has been a great partner and one of the first cloud providers ever to provide GPUs to the cloud,”?Ian Buck, general manager and vice president for Tesla Data Center Business at Nvidia, said during an?interview?with theCUBE. “Netflix is using G4 instances to do video effects and animation content from anywhere in the world. Siemens Energy is actually using AI combined with simulation to do predictive maintenance on their energy plants. AI is driving breakthroughs and innovations across so many segments, so many different use cases.”

6. 5G is coming on fast and cloud will be a major force for change in the mobile tech market

The AWS?announcement?during re:Invent that it would introduce an offering for the private 5G market represents an intriguing new chapter in the company’s “coopetition” model. It may also be the forerunner to a much broader strategic move into the mobile space by the public cloud giant.

As is often the case with AWS, the announcement that it would provide high-bandwidth, low-latency service through a private 5G network places it directly in competition with existing partners. AWS is already collaborating with?Verizon,?Telefonica Germany?and?Boingo?to provide a similar service.

However, nestled within a re:Invent?interview?with?George Elissaios, director of product management at AWS, can be found a hint about AWS’ long game when it comes to 5G.

“Think of college campuses, convention centers, manufacturing floors; what customers really need to be able to do is leverage the power of the mobile networks,” Elissaios said. “However, doing that by yourself is pretty hard. So that’s what we aim to enable here.”

A strategy to leverage the power of mobile networks has plenty of room to grow. Elissaios went on to note that the private 5G offering, once connected to a user’s local network, can cover hundreds of thousands of square feet. That’s a lot of mobile devices, and now they are all running on small cell radios, managed through the AWS cloud.

Perhaps it was no accident that, in his end-of-year?tech predictions?for 2022, AWS chief technology officer?Werner Vogels?based three of his five forecasts on edge and mobile connectivity.

“Ubiquitous connectivity will take us from intelligent spaces to intelligent cities, intelligent countries, and, finally, toward an intelligent world,” Vogels said.