General availability of EC2 Mac among announcements at Andy Jassy’s re:Invent keynote

Seattle headquartered Amazon Web Services (AWS) kicked off its ninth flagship annual event re:Invent on Tuesday.  New announcements in AWS CEO Andy Jassy’s keynote included Sagemaker solutions, general availability of EC2 Mac and tools for clients with manufacturing units. 

Held in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, the event this year has been the biggest ever for the company. According to Jassy, over 500,000 people have registered for the virtual event.

The buzz around this year’s re:Invent is also stronger, given that businesses across the world have accelerated the adoption of cloud-based services. According to the CEO, the company has a $46 billion in annualised revenue run rate and has been growing at 29% year-on-year.  

“While it took AWS just more than 10 years to grow to a $10 billion business, it took only 23 months to then grow to $20 billion in revenue, 13 months to move to $30 billion and just 12 months to get to $40 billion,” he said. 

Here is a list of some of the key announcements:

• AWS Graviton2- powered c6GN instances, which AWS claimed can deliver 100 Gbps of networking performance, and provide 40% better price to performance over established chip makers in the industry.  
• Three Sagemaker announcements, including AWS SageMaker Data Wrangler -- a solution that helps data scientists’ ready data for AI/ML based training; Sagemaker Pipelines, a service that helps automate workflows and audit trails. The third announcement was that Sagemaker Studio will now have a SageMaker Feature Store, which Jassy said will help make finding, organising and naming ML features easier. 
• General availability of EC2 Mac instances will now see the Mac mini on the AWS cloud. What this means is that developers who use iOS apps and Mac devices will now be able to get access to testing environments and will be able to build cloud-based solutions. 
• Proton container management service. Jassy announced the launch of the Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public as well as the public preview of AWS Proton. He said that with the addition of Proton, AWS would be able to offer an overall managed application deployment service for serverless and container applications. 
• Pushing for containerization, Jassy also announced ECS Anywhere (Amazon Elastic Container Service) and EKS Anywhere (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service), two solutions which will allow customers to run container services on the cloud as well as on their on-premise setups. Additionally, EKS will also be open sourced to give customers more flexibility for on-premise. 
• Amazon Monitron, which is a solution to be used by industrial customers to monitor equipment and communicate better between teams. Jassy said that most current solutions don’t have powerful sensors, are not consistent or do not know how to communicate the right data to the cloud. “So I’m excited to announce today the launch of Amazon Monitron, which is an end-to-end solution for equipment monitoring,” said Jassy. 
• Launch of AWS Panorama Appliance and AWS Panorama SDK, hardware devices which Jassy said would help on-premise cameras get the power of vision-enabled surveillance for better security. The solution is aimed at manufacturing units who would want to inspect manufacturing lines closely, or even be used in retail chains. 

According to Jassy, AWS is now the fifth largest enterprise IT company in the world, mainly driven by its infrastructure technology and the growth of cloud computing. 

Jassy believes there is room for growth, given that global IT spend on cloud is in single digits. 

"We keep reminding ourselves that we're part of a much broader global market segment and if you look at the total amount of global IT spends in the cloud, it's only 4 per cent at this point," Jassy said.