Takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2019 conference

Amazon Web Services announced several new services and products at the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas, a learning conference for the global cloud computing community. The conference that is being attended by over more than 65,000 thousand attendees from around the world commenced on December 2 and will conclude on December 6.

Here's a quick look at the new services and capabilities announced at the event.

Security Offerings

• Amazon Detective

Amazon Detective is a new service that makes it easy to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities. It automatically collects log data and utilizes machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to build a linked set of data to easily conduct faster and more efficient security investigations.

Amazon Detective can analyze trillions of events from multiple data sources and automatically creates a unified, interactive view of your resources, users, and the interactions between them over time. The service is currently available in preview in US-East (N. Virginia), US-East (Ohio), US-West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

• AWS IAM Access Analyzer

The new AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) makes it easy for security teams and administrators to provide multiple users with secure access to AWS resources. IAM Access Analyzer uses automated reasoning, a form of mathematical analysis that applies logic and mathematical inference to determine the possible access paths allowed by the policies.

In addition, the new AWS feature continuously monitors and analyzes any new or updated resource policy to help you understand the potential security implications. 

• AWS Nitro Enclaves

AWS Nitro Enclaves enables customers to process highly sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), healthcare, financial, by partitioning compute and memory resources within an instance to create an isolated computing environment. The service will be available in preview early next year.

Quantum computing services

• Amazon Braket 

Amazon Braket, a fully managed AWS service provides customers a single development environment to build quantum algorithms, test them on simulated quantum computers from third-party hardware providers including D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti, and try them on a range of different quantum hardware architectures.

• AWS Center for Quantum Computing

Amazon announced the development of a dedicated center where quantum experts from AWS and other leading academic institutions will assemble to research and develop new quantum computing technologies to overcome the long-term technical challenges surrounding the potential technology.

• Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab

A collaborative research program that seeks to help organizations explore the potential applications of the futuristic technology for their business, develop their own strategy for quantum computing, build internal expertise, and eventually deploy quantum applications to use it effectively.

New AI services

• Amazon Kendra 

A new enterprise search service that utilizes machine learning algorithms to deliver powerful natural language search capabilities, thereby providing high-quality results to common queries. The Machine learning models are regularly updated and tuned for each customer by analyzing and incorporating end-user search patterns and feedback.

• Amazon CodeGuru 

A fully managed service that leverages machine-learning models and learned best practices for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations. It incorporates:

1. A CodeGuru Reviewer that automatically detects critical defects and deviation during code reviews before their deployment in production and improve overall application performance and quality.
2. A CodeGuru Profiler that helps developers easily understand the runtime behavior of their applications, improve performance, and decrease compute costs. It analyzes the application runtime profile and provides intelligent recommendations and visualizations that guide developers on how to improve the performance of the most relevant parts of their code.

New Amazon SageMaker capabilities

Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that helps developers and data scientists build, train, monitor and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. AWS has now added the following new capabilities to the SageMaker:

• Amazon SageMaker Studio

The first fully Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for machine learning, delivers greater automation, integration, debugging, and monitoring for the development and deployment of machine learning models

• Amazon SageMaker Notebooks

It allows developers to spin up elastic machine learning notebooks in seconds and automates the process of sharing notebooks with a single-click reproducing the specific environment and library dependencies. 

• Amazon SageMaker Experiments

It helps developers organize and track iterations to machine learning models by automatically capturing the input parameters, configuration, and results, and stores them as ‘experiments’. 

• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot

It allows developers to submit simple data in CSV files and have machine learning models automatically generated, with full visibility to how the models are created so they can impact evolving them over time. It also provides developers the 50 different options to choose the best model for their use case.

• Amazon SageMaker Debugger

It provides real-time monitoring for machine learning models and warnings and remediation advice to improve predictive accuracy, reduce training times, and facilitate a greater understanding of machine learning models.

• Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor

It automatically detects concept drift in deployed models to discover when the performance of a model running in production begins to deviate from the original trained model.

First AWS Local Zone in Los Angeles

Amazon announced the opening of the first AWS Local Zones in Los Angeles, a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places select AWS services, like compute and storage services, closer to more end-users to deliver applications with single-digit millisecond latencies. These Local Zones are also connected to the parent region, giving applications running in AWS Local Zones fast, secure, and seamless access to the rest of AWS services.

Customers can now access the LA Local Zone through the AWS Management Console and API and can also seamlessly connect to the full range of services in the AWS US West (Oregon) Region through the same APIs and toolsets.

Amazon Managed (Apache) Cassandra Service

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service is a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service that enables you to run your Cassandra workloads in the AWS Cloud using the same Cassandra application code, Apache 2.0–licensed drivers, and tools that you use today.

Amazon Managed Cassandra Service offers consistent single-digit-millisecond server-side read and write performance, while also providing high availability and data durability.

AWS Fargate for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

Combining the power of AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers with the openness of Amazon EKS,  a fully-managed  Kubernetes service, the new offering allows customers to run Kubernetes-based applications on AWS without the need to manage servers and clusters.

With AWS Fargate, Kubernetes customers can enjoy the serverless benefits of Fargate, the best practices of Amazon EKS, and the extensibility of Kubernetes out of the box.

AWS-Verizon collaboration 

At re:Invent, AWS announced its collaboration with Verizon Communications to deliver 5G edge cloud computing. As part of the collaboration, Verizon’s 5G Edge platform will be integrated with AWS Wavelength, an Amazon offering enabling developers to build applications that deliver single-digit millisecond latencies to mobile devices and end-users.

Continuing our tradition of bringing new technology to market first we are excited to launch a mobile edge compute service -- integrating our 5G Edge platform with Wavelength to allow developers to build new categories of applications and network cloud experiences

Kyle Malady, CTO of Verizon