The turkey has been eaten and the low cost TVs have been bought, which indicators that it’s time to partake of the subsequent time-honored custom within the vacation schedule: Attending AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas.
In 2023, Roughly 65,000 individuals attended re:Invent, making it one of many largest expertise conferences on the schedule. The convention this 12 months is anticipated to draw an analogous variety of individuals for about 2,500 periods unfold throughout a dozen or so casinos alongside the Strip.
AWS’s annual shindig isn’t solely a terrific place to find out about how you can maximize the general public cloud service, but in addition to find out about vendor options. About 2,000 firms exhibited within the expo final 12 months, together with a whole lot of distributors hawking varied massive knowledge administration, superior analytics, and AI choices.
As re:Invent 2024 will get going, listed here are 5 issues to maintain an eye fixed out for.
1. New AWS CEO Matt Garman
New AWS CEO Matt Garman
This would be the first re:Invent as CEO for Matt Garman, who was employed to interchange Adam Selipsky in June. Nevertheless it’s not the primary re:Invent for Garman, who has labored for AWS since 2006. As an AWS insider and an AWS lifer, Garman is being counted upon to ship a brand new section of progress for AWS in ways in which Selipsky didn’t.
As is customized, Garman will ship the primary government keynote, scheduled for Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. PT; you possibly can watch livestreams of all the keynotes right here. This would be the first time that many AWS prospects and companions get to listen to from Garman himself, and so it will likely be the primary impression for a lot of.
What kind of model does Garman have? Earlier than he left for the highest job in 2021, Andy Jassy was well-known for delivering lengthy, enjoyable keynote addresses. In his quick three-year tenure as AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky, who was employed from Salesforce and Tableau (though he labored at AWS earlier than), delivered keynotes that have been kind of forgettable.
Garman, who Jassy reportedly thought-about for the highest job earlier than selecting the outsider Selipsky to basically maintain down the fort throughout Covid, has been described as a “wartime CEO” for AWS. It will likely be fascinating to see how this performs in entrance of the troops in Vegas.
2. Low-Stage Providers or Excessive-Stage Apps?
AWS is famously tight-lipped about merchandise underneath improvement, so there’s no telling what the tri of high AWS executives–Garman on Tuesday, VP of AI Swami Sivasubramanian on Wednesday, and CTO Werner Vogels on Thursday–have up their collective sleeves. Undoubtedly, there will probably be surprises.
CTO Werner Vogels in entrance of the 200+ plus AWS providers
One essential query is whether or not AWS’s technique will shift underneath Garman. The corporate at present provides about 200 low-level providers, in keeping with this AWS white paper. Will Garman proceed that technique, or maybe his ascension indicators a sea-change at AWS and a transfer towards delivering extra full-fledged purposes?
AWS does ship some purposes, after all, nevertheless it has appeared been reluctant to roll out extra SaaS purposes that will compete with its companions. Nonetheless, income progress has been a priority over the previous three years underneath Selpisky, so maybe there will probably be some modifications (or maybe not).
3. Present Progress in GenAI
Ever since OpenAI dropped ChatGPT on the world smack dab within the center of re:Invent 2022, the momentum behind generative AI has been rising. AWS has responded to this market shift in a number of methods, together with by ramping up availability of Nvidia GPU situations in addition to its personal Inferentia and Trainium chips; launching Amazon Q, its GenAI-powered AI assistant; and delivering LLM checkpointing for PyTorch, amongst many different strikes.
Will AWS unveil a local vector database?
On the vector database entrance, AWS has added vector capabilities to lots of its databases, enabling them to play roles in retrieval-augmented technology (RAG) GenAI workflows. It has additionally mixed vector search and graph capabilities. What AWS lacks is its personal native vector database, which we identified final 12 months. AWS up to now has caught with hybrid vector capabilities in present databases, however will that reduce the mustard as GenAI workloads scale up? Solely time will inform.
Extra broadly, AWS wants to indicate that it’s transferring shortly and decisively in GenAI because it fights a notion that it trails its two public cloud rivals, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, by way of GenAI capabilities. The corporate has invested hundreds of thousands in an bold plan to coach its personal massive language mannequin (LLM), referred to as Olympus, which can reportedly transcend its present Titan line of LLMs, however up to now, Olympus hasn’t been launched. The departure of Matt Wooden, the previous VP of AI, to PwC final month additionally doesn’t assist.
4. Exhibit Management in Agentic AI
The AI house has moved shortly from the chatbot and copilot section immediately into semi- or fully-autonomous brokers, or agentic AI. This represents a chance for AWS to indicate market management.
We at the moment are within the period of Agentic AI (Creativa-Photos/Shutterstock)
AWS provides some semi-autonomous brokers through Amazon Q, which it unveiled final 12 months. In Might, the corporate bolstered Q with new Developer Brokers, which may basically perform as junior-level programmers or enterprise analysts. The corporate has been vocal concerning the potential for Q to automate rote duties, akin to writing boilerplate Java code, and now it might want to take it to the subsequent degree.
As rivals Salesforce, Microsoft, and Anthropic make inroads into agentic AI, AWS will probably be underneath the gun to maintain in entrance of this subsequent wave of AI. With the world’s largest cloud platform and a number of the finest AI builders on the earth, the potential for nice issues is there, however it will likely be as much as AWS management to make it occur.
5. Influence of Return-to-Workplace
There will probably be one massive wild card looming just like the Sphere in Vegas? How will Andy Jassy’s company-wide return-to-office requirement influence morale and productiveness on the largest cloud computing firm?
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy desires all workers again within the workplace beginning in January 2025
Jassy, who in 2021 went from AWS CEO to succeeding Jeff Bezos within the high job on the on-line bookseller, issued his edict in September that every one Amazon workers return to the workplace 5 days every week beginning in 2025.
That requirement has not been sitting properly with a few of Amazon’s 1.5 million workers. Fortune reported that Amazon workers are “rage making use of” for different jobs, and speculated that Jassy’s requirement might have the identical influence as layoffs. AWS has let 27,000 workers go over the previous three years underneath two rounds of layoffs underneath Selipsky, and this may very well be in impact the third spherical.
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