May 14, 2020
On this episode of The Six Five - Insiders Edition hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman welcome Jeff Barr, Vice President and Chief Evangelist at AWS to discuss AWS’ response to COVID-19 and exciting new product announcements.
AWS’ Response to COVID-19
During this COVID-19 pandemic, AWS has been focused on helping customers continue to operate as efficiently as possible. One of the first things the company did was make it easier for businesses to get access to Amazon Workspaces, a virtual desktop in the cloud. They also had special offers for Amazon Chime and Amazon WorkDocs to help companies facilitate collaboration.
In addition to helping customers, AWS launched the Diagnostic Development Initiative (DDI) to provide support for innovation around both testing and development of different kinds of solutions. They’ve also made AWS compute power more available to researchers who are studying different possible solutions and vaccines.
Finally, AWS launched a public data lake with curated data sets so experiments could actually run queries on real data which will hopefully allow scientists and researchers to find a cure faster.
AWS Virtual Summit
Traditionally, AWS hosts Global Summits throughout the year, but given the current stay-at-home orders still in place, they’ve had to pivot to a virtual summit the first of which was Wednesday, May 13.
The summit is free, online and anyone interested can join. The event is designed to bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Attendees will hear from CTO Werner Vogels, CEO Andy Jassy, and several other AWS employees who are subject matter experts in various AWS categories.
Breaking Down AWS Announcements
Jeff, Patrick and Daniel spent time discussing several of the new AWS announcements from the last few months that are making a difference for customers all over the world.
Amazon Macie
Macie is a security service that uses machine learning to automatically discover and protect sensitive data in AWS. This service has been around for about a year, but AWS has recently made some great additions including updating the machine learning models so customers can scan for even more types of private information. They’ve also added some customizability if customers have special data types that might have different kinds of proprietary or sensitive data inside.
The best part is AWS has lowered the price down to a fifth of what it previously cost so more customers are able to benefit from the different services.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Data is growing exponentially in quantity and size and Amazon Elasticsearch Service customers are needing new ways to store and access data as efficiently as possible, specifically data that was collected for the long-term. The current storage tier was called Hot for quickly accessed storage. AWS just introduced a new tier — Ultra Warm — that will hold the more historic data that customers don’t need as often and it will take slightly longer to access.
Amazon AppFlow
SaaS applications have been highly functional, but the data created and collected across these many applications has effectively been in a silo. Amazon AppFlow is a service that allows customers to securely transfer data between SaaS applications. Customers can unlock the access to that data, making it easier for data to flow from the SaaS app into AWS as well as the other way around. and the other way around as well. Customers can run data flows on a schedule, in response to an event, or on demand — basically whenever they need it.
Amazon Kendra
AWS’ enterprise search tool Kendra gives customers powerful natural language search capabilities across websites and applications so users can easily find information in the data spread across the enterprise.
While most search tools use keyword queries, Kendra is able to use natural language questions to search through portals, wikis, databases, and document repositories to find whatever is needed. It not only captures the data, but also the access permissions for the data too.
Amazon Augmented AI (A2I)
Many current machine learning applications require humans to review predictions to ensure results are correct. Amazon Augmented AI or A2I makes it easy to build the workflows required for these reviews and provides a built-in review system for common machine learning use cases.
Customers are able to choose three different categories of human reviewers. They can use the 500,000 global workers that make use of Mechanical Turk. There's a set of third party organizations that have a base of pre-authorized workers, or organizations can make use of a private pool or workers.
AWS Snow Family
The Snow Family devices are physical devices that have both storage and local compute power making it easy to migrate data into and out of AWS. Recently AWS launched an improved version of the Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices. These devices provide both block storage and Amazon S3-compatible object storage.
AWS did a hardware refresh, added additional processing power, and added some additional SSD storage inside. Now if you launch EC2 instances on the Snowball Edge those instances have access to this SSD powered storage.
You can use these devices for data collection, machine learning and processing, and storage in environments with limited connectivity giving customers the ability to use them basically anywhere.
Finally, AWS also made it easier for our customers to set up and manage the Snowball Family devices with AWS OpsHub, a graphical user interface where customers can unlock, configure, copy data to and from the device via drag and drop even if they're not connected to the Internet.
If you’d like to learn more about any of these announcements, be sure to visit the AWS website. Make sure to listen to the entire episode below and while you’re at it, be sure to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.