Watching the Werner Vogels keynote (watch here) was fascinating, the evolution of technology capabilities in the AWS platform, reflected the organisation requiring a different way to provide a solution out of need. Being able to support that need by building a completely new capability and having the underlying engineering capability to build and deliver it, is what all companies are striving for!
Transformation being evolutionary not revolutionary is an important state of mind. Building the strong foundations for change on top of public cloud means the adoption can be completed far quicker than ever before, but the whole organisation needs to be evolved to make the most of it.
The inclusion of an Australian company in the keynote was phenomenal, with NAB being represented by Yuri Misnik (watch here), providing an overview of how NAB is evolving through its focus on public cloud and the strategy of moving 35% of applications into the cloud in three years.
Looking at the rest of the conference, the number of additional features added has again smashed it out of the park. We are in the era of builders, and builders have been constrained by the legacy infrastructure they have had to use.
I wanted to highlight two further areas of the announcements that will make the development of new and interesting products straight forward, satellite relay enablement and easily build intelligent robot applications:
1. AWS Ground Station
A new service that makes it easy and cost-effective for customers to download data from satellites into AWS Global Infrastructure Regions using a fully managed network of 12 ground station antennas located around the world.
An example would be the proliferation of IoT capabilities in the agriculture area. In Australia there can be challenges relaying this data as these farms can be in very remote locations.
Low cost satellites are used to pull the data from IoT devices, a service like AWS Ground Station can be used to download the data from the satellites and stored in Amazon S3. Once in S3 advanced analysis can be performed using the data analytics capabilities on the platform.
2. AWS Robomaker
If you like creating and building robot capabilities, this is a new service that makes it easy for developers to develop, test, and deploy robotics applications, as well as build intelligent robotics functions using cloud services.
This extends the most widely used open source robotics software framework, Robot Operating System (ROS), with connectivity to AWS services including machine learning, monitoring, and analytics services to enable a robot to stream data, navigate, communicate, comprehend, and learn.
One of the key items is that the platform will allow the simulation of the software for testing. By accelerating the ability to simulate changes to software, the role out of changes can be completed in a safer way. Making deployments reliable and data driven means that companies can enhance fleets of robots and iterated rapidly on their capability.
Again the use of consumer and commercial robotics is still at Day 1, and services like this will allow next gen capabilities to be developed more quickly than ever before.
Finally….
AWS re:Invent is over for another year, and the features keep flowing. Companies are building and iterating on these capabilities, evolving their businesses to avoid disruption, ensuring that they are in the best position to keep evolving! I look forward to seeing what comes next and if you want to discuss these capabilities and how they can be used in your business please do not hesitate to reach out!