AWS Unleashes a Torrent of New Data Services

If you like your technology enhancements on the fast and furious side, you undoubtedly liked what you saw during AWS CEO Andy Jassy’s keynote address this morning, when he unveiled nearly a couple dozen new or improved services for the world’s largest cloud.

We’ve already told you about two of the biggest announcements made today, including AWS SageMaker, which seeks to democratize the creation and use of machine learning models, and Amazon Neptune, the company’s new hosted graph database. SageMaker is generally available now, while Neptune is just a preview at the moment.

Here’s a rundown on everything else Jassy talked about during his nearly three-hour keynote. We’ll start with the high-level data services, including:

• Amazon Aurora – AWS has overhauled its scale-out relational database with several new capabilities, including support for multi-master, multi Availability Zone reads and writes, which should improve scalability, uptime, and performance. In 2018, users will get support for multiple regions for globally distributed databases. Aurora Serverless, meanwhile, will make starting, scaling up, and shutting down relational DBs easier.
• Amazon DynamoDB – AWS has configured its hosted NoSQL database to support multi-master, multi-region configurations for fast local performance among a globally dispersed user base, giving Apache Cassandra a run for its money.
• S3 Select –A new API that gives developers the capability to pull out only the object data they need using standard SQL expressions, which AWS says can improve data access performance by up to 400%.
• New EC2 instances, including Bare Metal instance, storage optimized (H1) instances, and newly improved general purpose M4 instances
• Amazon GuardDuty – A new machine learning-powered threat detection service that finds anomalous activity buried within hundreds of thousands of AWS computing instances spread across multiple accounts and networks.
• Amazon EKS – Elastic Container Service (EKS) is a new offering that brings Kubernetes containers to AWS as a fully managed service .
• AWS Fargate – A new service to make it easier to manage clusters of Elastic Container Service (ECS) and EKS servers.
• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams  — A new option that runs atop its real-time data streaming platform that gives customers the capability to ingest and store video, audio and other time-encoded data.
• Amazon Rekognition Video – A new services that lets developers build systems that automatically identify objects, scenes, and activities within video. Will be useful for automatically opening the garage door upon recognizing a certain license plate in the driveway, or detecting when the dog is on the coach, Jassy says.
• Amazon Comprehend – A new deep learning-powered, fully managed natural language processing (NLP) offering that’s available now.
• Amazon Translate – A new service, also powered by deep learning, that provides automatic translation of text between different languages; English and Spanish are supported today with more languages expected in the future.
• Amazon Transcribe – A new automatic speech recognition system that uses audio as a source and outputs text; available as a preview today
• AWS DeepLens – a wireless video camera that has deep learning capabilities embedded in it.
• Greengrass ML Inference – A new service for running machine learning models created using SageMaker at the edge.
• Amazon FreeRTOS – A new, IoT-connected operating system for microcontroller-based edge devices.
• AWS IoT Analytics – A new collection of services for storing and analyzing IoT data.
• AWS IoT Device Defender – a new service for defining and enforcing security policies for fleets of devices (coming in 2018)
• AWS IoT Device Management – A new service that’s available now for securely onboarding, organizing, monitoring, and remotely managing IoT devices at scale.
• AWS IoT 1-Click – One-click creation of AWS Lambda trigger for any device (now availed in preview)
• Amazon Sumerian – A new service designed to make it easy to build virtual reality, augmented reality, and 3D applications for certain devices, including the Daydream, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and iOS mobile devices.

Jassy encouraged AWS re:Invent attendees to go out and use these new tools, as well as the roughly 1,275 new services and features that the company has launched this year. “That’s on average three and a half new capacities, new features per day for you to take advantage of. You’re not going to find that if you’re not using the cloud,” he said.

“This is the time — the Golden Age of computing,” Jassy concluded. “Go out there and change your company, change the customer experience, and we’ll be there every step of the way to help.”

Related Items:

AWS Takes the ‘Muck’ Out of ML with SageMaker

AWS Unveils Graph Database, Called Neptune

What Will Amazon Announce at Re:Invent?