Hosted by Amazon Web Services, re:Invent is a global conference where the e-commerce giant showcases the latest in cloud computing technology and other exciting developments in the technology space. With re:Invent wrapping up for 2023, here are some of the biggest announcements that came from Amazon this year.
Amazon S3 Service Upgrades
For AWS’ larger organization clients, they unveiled several core upgrades that improve the service. AWS offers 200 services that support approximately 1.5 million businesses worldwide, enabling many small and mid-level companies to maintain an online presence.
Internet business giants also collaborate with AWS in spaces like e-commerce and iGaming. These sites need to uphold a lot of traffic securely, which is why services that offer hundreds of bingo, casino, and other live events like Paddy Power Bingo have enlisted AWS support in the past. Many big online businesses host on their servers, though use other AWS infrastructure like Redshift or CloudFront.
At re:Invent, Amazon unveiled basic hardware upgrades to improve AWS’s core offerings. This mainly came in the form of the S3 Express One Zone. This is a new cloud storage class that is 10x faster than its S3 Standard predecessor. It helps tackle latency, which was one of cloud computing’s biggest challenges during its earlier days.
With an S3 Express One Zone, hundreds of thousands of requests can be handled every second at just milliseconds of latency. Amazon said that clients get more from this new storage class if it’s used to support data-intensive or frequently accessed applications.
Additional Security Services
As always, security is an ongoing concern for AWS and other cloud services. At this year’s re:Invent, Amazon announced a litany of new features that help its customers manage their data and how it is used.
For example, 65 new functions have been added to the AWS Control Tower interface. They aim to uphold digital sovereignty – the idea that an entity remains in control of its data output, as described by Techopedia. While entire countries have enshrined digital sovereignty in recent years, the new Control Tower upgrades seek to give AWS client businesses the same benefits.
Then there’s Amazon Detective, which received four new functions that will optimize security. As the name suggests, Amazon Detective is a security investigation visualization software designed to not only find vulnerabilities but portray them in an easy-to-understand way. Since many of AWS’ clients won’t have their knowledge or expertise in cloud computing, Detective needs to summarize security updates in a concise, streamlined way. The new capabilities will help clients save valuable time when bolstering their digital defenses.
Amazon Q & Generative AI
Quite predictably, AI was the talk of the town at re:Invent 2023. Generative AI rocked the world in 2023, a story summarized here by Science Alert. AWS is no stranger to machine learning, having used it for years to operate its sophisticated cloud networks and crunch all of the numbers involved. However, generative AI ushered in a new kind of intelligence with realistic chatbots, art generation, and even voice cloning. Amazon threw its hat into the ring this year, introducing Amazon Q.
Really excited to share with customers Amazon Q—a new type of generative AI-powered assistant that is specifically for work and can be tailored to your business.
— Andy Jassy (@ajassy) November 28, 2023
Amazon Q can help you get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, solve problems, generate content, and take…
Along with the Amazon Q personal assistant, AWS expanded its generative AI abilities to other services like Amazon Connect. Each service is powered by its proprietary large language model, Bedrock, which itself is available to use for paying AWS customers.
