What I Found Most Interesting from Amazon re:invent 2018

Amazon has completely crushed it again at this year’s re:invent conference.

They continue to innovate a truly frightening pace. And when I say frightening, I mean…in that it creates fear within me. It’s just doing so much, so quickly, that I can’t help but feel uncomfortable.

But it’s a good thing. I think. It’s definitely sending a great message to basically anyone in technology, which is, “We’re coming for you, and we just might implement your business as a special project next weekend”.

Anyway, they announced way too many things to focus on individually. Here were the ones that stood out to me.

Keep in mind that many of these projects by Amazon start off with very basic functionality, and only get good enough to replace a startup’s offering after multiple updates.

  • AWS Control Towwer: Shots fired at all the various AWS security startups out there, as this thing gives you a single place to go to manage your account’s security.

  • Security Hub: Gives you a single view of your highest-priority security alerts. Basically the beginnings of a SIEM and/or orchestration play.

  • AWS On-prem: Run AWS services locally.

  • Lake Formation: Create data lakes within AWS.

  • Global Accelerator: Basically a global performance and availability network.

  • Amazon Personalize: Create personalized recommendations using your own data, just like Amazon’s.

  • Amazon Textract: Automatically extrat text from all sorts of inputs.

  • Amazon Sagemaker: Train models using reinforcement learning.

  • Cloud Map: Map out your various applications and how they talk to each other.

  • Ground Station: Full-managed satellite communications service.

  • Amazon Deepracer: Train autonomous cars using a small but accurate physical scale model.

  • Quantum Ledger Database: They basically took the most powerful use case for Blockchain and made it a standalone service.

  • Managed Blockchain: No need to roll your own anymore.

  • Amazon Timestream: Their own version of a time-series database.

  • RoboMaker: Create, test, and deploy robotics applications.

  • C5n EC2 instances for super high bandwidth requirements

If I had to pick I’d say the top 5 were:

  1. AWS Control Towwer: Shots fired at all the various AWS security startups out there, as this thing gives you a single place to go to manage your account’s security.

  2. Security Hub: Gives you a single view of your highest-priority security alerts. Basically the beginnings of a SIEM and/or orchestration play.

  3. Quantum Ledger Database: They basically took the most powerful use case for Blockchain and made it a standalone service.

  4. Amazon Personalize: Create personalized recommendations using your own data, just like Amazon’s.

  5. Global Accelerator: Basically a global performance and availability network.

Other companies need to figure out how Amazon innovates at this pace, and copy it.

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