AWS re:Invent 2019, the industrys largest cloud computing conference concluded last week. With over 65,000 attendees and 2500 sessions, the scale of the event only grows each year.

Andy Jassy, CEO

Its not just the scale, the pace of innovation at Amazon refuses to slow down. This years re:Invent witnessed more than 100 new features, products, and services added to AWS portfolio.

Here are three key themes that emerged from AWS re:Invent 2019:

1. Redefining Edge Computing

Traditionally, the cloud is considered to be a highly centralized resource, much like an IBM mainframe. But the advent of edge computing has made the cloud truly distributed. Developers dont need to work around the limitations of latency and the performance trade-off involved in deploying applications in remote data centers.

Edge computing is often used either in the context of delivering static content through CDN or moving the processing closer to IoT devices. But, AWS has redefined edge computing in more than one way. It has built a continuum of compute by delivering a new form of edge computing.

First, there are AWS Outposts - hardware appliances that customers can rent from Amazon to run within their data center. Customers can launch Amazon EC2 instances on AWS Outposts, and manage them from the same set of tools such as CloudFormation and AWS Console. Each Outpost deployment is associated with an AWS region that is capable of running managed services such as Amazon RDS and Amazon S3.

If AWS Outposts are confined to the data center, AWS Local Zones make cloud hyper-local by bringing compute, storage, and network services closer to users within a city or a metro. Each AWS Local Zone location is an extension of an AWS Region where customers can deploy latency-sensitive applications using AWS services in geographic proximity to end-users. Developers can now deploy applications across availability zones that span traditional and local zones. The new distributed architecture of cloud opens up additional avenues for developers and businesses building modern applications for AR/VR experiences, smart cities, connected cars and more. The Los Angeles AWS Local Zone is generally available by invitation.

Amazon is expanding the footprint of AWS to telecom providers that offer 5G networks. AWS Wavelength Zones are AWS infrastructure deployments that embed AWS compute and storage services within telecommunications providers data centers at the edge of the 5G network. Wavelength brings the power of the AWS cloud to the network edge to enable latency-sensitive use cases that require near-real-time responses.

From the data center to the metro to the telco infrastructure, AWS is bringing the cloud to new territories. Amazon is certainly redefining edge computing.

2. Investments in Next-Gen Hardware

Amazon is investing in a new breed of chips and hardware that makes AWS infrastructure efficient and cost-effective.

Since the acquisition of Annapurna Labs in 2016, Amazon has been moving software-based heavy lifting to purpose-built hardware. Nitro System, a collection of hardware accelerators, offloads hypervisor, storage, and network to custom chips freeing up resources on EC2 to deliver the best performance.

AWS Graviton2 processors use a combination of hardware from ARM and Nitro System. The new breed of EC2 instances based on Graviton2 uses the Nitro System that features the Nitro security chip with dedicated hardware and software for security functions, and support encrypted EBS storage volumes by default. When compared to the first generation of Graviton processor-based EC2 instances, the current generation of instances delivers 40% price performance.

Amazon has also announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances, a family of instances exclusively built for machine learning inference applications. Combined with 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 100Gbps networking, these instances deliver unmatched performance for running applications that depend on machine learning inference. Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips that are purpose-built for accelerating inference.

3. Big Bets on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Amazon continues to expand the AI and ML portfolio through new services and platform offerings. At re:Invent 2019, AWS announced multiple services that take advantage of ML and AI.

Amazon CodeGuru is a managed service that helps developers proactively improve code quality and application performance through AI-driven recommendations. The service comes with a reviewer and profiler that can detect and identify issues in code. Amazon CodeGuru can review and profile Java code targeting the Java Virtual Machine.

Venturing into enterprise search, AWS has launched Amazon Kendra, a managed service that brings intelligent, contextual search to applications. Amazon Kendra can discover and parse documents stored in a variety of mediums including file systems, web sites, Box, DropBox, Salesforce, SharePoint, RDBMS and Amazon S3.

Amazon Fraud Detector is a service that can identify potentially fraudulent online activities such as online payment fraud and the creation of fake accounts. Based on the experience of fraud detection from Amazon.com, AWS has built this service to help customers integrate sophisticated fraud detection techniques in their applications.

Amazon SageMaker, the platform as a service (PaaS) offering from AWS has got new capabilities that make developers and data scientists productive. Built on top of Jupyter Notebooks, Amazon SageMaker now has a full-blown development environment. Branded as Amazon SageMaker Studio, the new tooling experience includes debugging, pipeline management, integrated deployment, and model monitoring. The platform is tightly integrated with Git and Jupyter Notebooks to bring collaboration among developers.

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Three Key Takeaways From AWS re:Invent 2019 - Forbes