AWS brings new offerings on cloud security, supply chain and more

At a time, when top tech companies have announced rounds of layoffs and a recession seems to be on the horizon, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud arm of e-commerce major Amazon, brings a slew of cloud offerings to help enterprises “navigate new and uncertain environments”.  

This year's AWS re:Invent returned as the first in-person event since 2019, and the 11th overall and more than 300,000 people around the world are registered to virtually attend this week’s sessions, while more than 50,000 are attending in Las Vegas. 

“The cloud is more cost-effective and many customers are saving 30%-40% at least,” Selipsky, who took over the CEO position with the departure of Andy Jassy earlier in 2021, said, adding that "cloud supports agility with fewer resources". 

Selipsky’s keynote had a strong focus on data and he said as organisations stand to produce more data than ever over the next five years, the company launched integrations and other capabilities to make data extraction and analysis easier. One of the several launches was the announcement of Amazon DataZone, a new data management service that is designed to "help organisations easily find, organise, and share data across their organisations, while ensuring its governed appropriately", he said. For businesses, it would mean that they can make timely, better-informed decisions, based on accurate and up-to-date information available. 

The cloud provider also announced a "zero ETL future" at the event. In a nutshell, ETL or extract, transform, load systems take large volumes of raw data from multiple sources, converts it for analysis, and loads that data into your warehouse. Putting them together has been a significant challenge for data scientists and engineers. The solution, now in preview, is the introduction of Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift to give customers using the Aurora database and the Redshift data warehouse, the ability to move data without having to perform ETL on it. 

Selipsky also focused on cloud security calling it the most critical area for organisations. To that end, AWS also released a preview of its new data lake, Amazon Security Lake. “The platform will allow security teams to work at petabyte scale, building a data lake with just a few clicks,” Selipsky said. The solution automatically collects and aggregates security data for AWS partner solutions including Cisco, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. It also lets teams add their own data sources, such as from internal applications or infrastructure logs. 

“The new Amazon Security Lake service looks to centralise all of an organisation’s security data from across a number of different sources, whether from the cloud or on-premise, in one place, in order to drill down precisely into security threats,” he added. 

The cloud major also unveiled Elastic Compute instances that are powered by new AWS-designed Graviton chips, and are designed for high-performance computing workloads. This new Graviton3E chip — a variant of the existing Graviton line — promises significant performance improvements, including 35% better performance for workloads, said the CEO. 

Finally, AWS announced a solution for the supply chain disruptions in today’s world. The company announced a new supply chain solution called AWS Supply Chain. “With AWS Supply Chain you get a unified view of your supply chain data, ML-powered insights, recommended actions and built-in collaboration capabilities, so you can react quickly to unexpected issues,” Selipsky said, adding that the solution is "designed to strip away the complexity associated with managing these kinds of data".  

Many of AWS’ announcements have involved machine learning in some form. According to Selipsky, the company is focused on building machine learning and AI capabilities directly into other AWS services “to make it easier for customers to accomplish their business goals."

In the third quarter, AWS posted more than $5.4 billion in operating profit, lifting the company to an operating profit of more than $2.5 billion, (rather than the loss nearly $2.9 billion that Amazon as a whole would have posted without its cloud unit). That was despite the slowest year-over-year quarterly revenue growth on record for AWS, which remains the cloud infrastructure services leader, with 34% of the market, in contrast to its rivals, that is, 21% for Microsoft Azure and 11% for Google Cloud, according to Synergy Research Group's report launched in October 2022.

And while global spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022, according to a October 31 forecast from Gartner, which is higher than the 18.8% growth forecast for 2022, Sid Nag, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, cautioned, "cloud spending could decrease if overall IT budgets shrink, given that cloud continues to be the largest chunk of IT spend and proportionate budget growth." 

Nonetheless, Nag said that cloud computing will continue to be a “bastion of safety and innovation, supporting growth during uncertain times due to its agile, elastic and scalable nature”.