Five key announcements from AWS re: Invent 2021

New solutions in robotics, quantum, application integration and artificial intelligence-machine learning are some of the key focus areas for Amazon Web Services’ annual cloud computing event, underway at Las Vegas currently.    

On this note, here’s looking at the five key announcements from AWS re: Invent 2021.   

New compute solutions

There were a bunch of announcements for compute, some of which includes two families of storage-optimised instances on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Im4gn and Is4gen, which, AWS said can offer up to 30tb of NVMe storage using AWS Nitro SSD devices.    

AWS also announced the launch of three AWS Outposts servers.     

AWS Outpost is the company’s managed services that extend the solutions from AWS infrastructure, AWS services and APIs to data centers or co-location spaces.     

Artificial intelligence and data analytics

Through a set of solutions for partners called as AI for Data analytics (AIDA), AWS continues its push for ML-AI, with an interest towards predictive analytics capabilities in workspaces.    

AWS said that the solution will provide businesses who need to use data, but have limited knowledge of how it functions, with data science capabilities.     

AIDA will be helpful in monitoring costs, customer acquisitions, retentions and help with workforce schedules, supply pre-positioning, among others.     

New Management tools

Preventive and detective controls for AWS regions to restrict access to certain Application Programming Interfaces (API), along with user monitoring for applications on Amazon Cloudwatch, which is AWS’ monitoring and management service that provides data and insights for AWS, hybrid and on-premise applications.     

AWS also launched Amazon CloudWatch Evidently, which it said will make it easier for developers to introduce experiments and feature management in the applications.     

Robotics services

Many enterprises face challengers in operating with different types of robots and the different software components, especially the automated ones such as autonomous guided vehicles (AGV), autonomous mobile vehicles (AMR) and robotic manipulators.   

AWS Internet of things based RoboRunner aims to solve this by providing a tool that can manage different brands and types of robots involved in automation and bring them under a single purview.   

Also read: AWS previews RoboRunner, an IoT tool to manage robot fleets 

Quantum and security solutions    

AWS announced the Amazon Braket Hybrid jobs solution, that it said will help enterprises to run hybrid quantum- classical workloads.    

Hybrid quantum-classical computing refers to an architecture where large quantum circuits are broken into smaller sub-circuits and are evaluated separately.     

In terms of security, a new solution to detect secrets in source code or configuration files, such as passwords and API keys, were showcased. Called as the CodeGuru Reviewer Secrets Detector, the automated tool, AWS said will help with practices relating to the centralization and governance of secrets, such as passwords and API keys.    

The Amazon Inspector, a service to automate security assessment, has now been updated to provide automated assessment scans, support for container-based workloads, and improved risk scoring, among others.