by Jan Michael Carpo, Reporter
On the fourth and final day of AWS re:Invent 2023, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has invited Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon.com’s Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, to share his global tech insights and predictions for the coming year.
Dr. Werner Vogels, Vice President and CTO of Amazon.com (IMAGE CREDIT: www.aboutamazon.com)
In his keynote speech, Dr. Vogel talked about “The Frugal Architect,” a principle that advocates for cost as a pivotal design requirement. He says that most companies today are being challenged to consider cost to business and many are now making trade-offs to architect robust yet cost-effective systems.
Revisiting the evolution of distributed systems, where hardware limitations once restricted ambitions, he shares that today’s tech environment is much different now because there is always the potential for the Cloud. He also explained why artificial intelligence (AI) is something that every builder must consider when developing systems, noting how hardware constraints are now driving a lot of creativity among IT architects.
“Think about all the systems that we are building, and I’ll cite my experiences at the city of Amazon for the past 20 years. If I think back to pre-Cloud days, I’d be good at predicting how much capacity is needed. If consulted on the maintenance decision, I’d ensure we’ll have 15% hardware over the expected peak for that year. Still, nothing could happen to us,” he said while continuing to share best practices for designing resilient and cost-aware architecture.
During the event, Dr. Vogel also shared stories of modern applications on how AWS is now providing its customers with the needed guidance, services, and technology to be able to adapt. He cited the case of Public Broadcasting System (PBS), a private, non-profit corporation in the US that offers a wide variety of educational and entertainment programming through TV or online content, and how it was able to slash streaming costs by 80% through migration to AWS and by refactoring to use cloud-native services.
As for his outlook into the future, Dr. Vogel says the coming years will be filled with innovation in areas designed to democratize access to technology — and it starts with generative AI. He sees generative AI becoming culturally aware, with LLMs trained on culturally diverse data gaining a better understanding of the human experience, making it more accessible. He also sees women’s healthcare eventually reaching an inflection point as FemTech investment surges and abundant data unlocks improved diagnoses and patient outcomes.
He also believes that AI assistants will evolve from basic code generators into tireless collaborators who will provide support throughout the software development lifecycle. Finally, education will also evolve to match the speed of tech innovation. The executive from Amazon.com also shared key insights on how to better harness today’s large language models (LLMs) as the world transitions to AI. He notes that while AI can make predictions, it is still humans who make the final decision.
To end the session, Dr. Vogels also introduced several new tools, including the Amazon SageMaker Studio Code Editor and the new Amazon Inspector capabilities.
Below are the other key highlights:
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
- Amazon SageMaker Studio adds web-based interface, Code Editor, flexible workspaces, and streamlines user onboarding — the new SageMaker Studio is a web-based interface that loads faster and provides consistent access to ones preferred integrated development environment (IDE) and SageMaker resources and tooling, irrespective of IDE choice.
- New – Code Editor, based on Code-OSS VS Code Open Source now available in Amazon SageMaker Studio – the new Code Editor is based on Code-OSS, Visual Studio Code Open Source, and provides access to the familiar environment and tools of the popular IDE that machine learning (ML) developers know and love, fully integrated with the broader SageMaker Studio feature set.
- Reduce model deployment costs by 50% on average using the latest features of Amazon SageMaker – the Amazon SageMaker now supports new inference capabilities that can help any business reduce deployment costs and latency. One can also create inference component-based endpoints and deploy machine learning models to a SageMaker endpoint.
Developer Tools
- IDE extension for AWS Application Composer enhances visual modern applications development with AI-generated IaC – now, one can use AWS Application Composer directly in the IDE to visually build modern applications and iteratively develop the infrastructure as code templates with Amazon CodeWhisperer.
Management Tools
- New myApplications in the AWS Management Console simplifies managing your application resources — myApplications is supporting application operations, a new set of capabilities that help you get started with your applications on AWS, operate them with less effort, and move faster at scale. With myApplication in the AWS Management Console, one can easily manage and monitor the cost, health, security posture, and performance of their applications on AWS.
- Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals for automatic instrumentation of your applications (preview) — Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals can automatically instrument applications based on best practices for application performance. There is no manual effort, no custom code, and no custom dashboards. Users also get a pre-built, standardized dashboard showing the most important metrics, such as volume of requests, availability, latency, and more, for the performance of their applications.
Security
- Three new capabilities for Amazon Inspector broaden the realm of vulnerability scanning for workloads — Amazon Inspector is adding 3 new capabilities to increase the realm of possibilities when scanning workloads for software vulnerabilities:
- Amazon Inspector introduces a new set of open-source plugins and an API allowing its users to assess container images for software vulnerabilities at build time directly from continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines wherever they may be running.Amazon Inspector can now continuously monitor a user’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances without installing an agent or additional software (in preview).
- Amazon Inspector uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) and automated reasoning to provide assisted code remediation for every AWS Lambda function.
To learn more about AWS re:Invent, check out this link.