Celebrating our 10th re:Invent As the 10th edition of re:Invent gets started here in Las Vegas, we take a look back at some of the event’s most .

Cloud is the opportunity to reimagine everything

What do Angelo-Giuseppi ‘Hank’ Luisetti, an American college basketball player; Florence Nightingale, a British nurse, social reformer, and pioneer in statistics; and Roscoe Brown, one of the first Black aviators to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, all have in common? Whether it was Luisetti pioneering an early version of the jump shot in the 1930s, to Nightingale driving huge reforms in healthcare in the late 1800s, to Brown breaking racial stereotypes as a distinguished, trailblazing pilot in World War II, they were all considered innovators in their specific field. And according to AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, they were all pathfinders: people who refused to accept the status quo and looked for a better way to do things–transforming their fields and communities in the process.

Pathfinding was the theme of Selipsky’s keynote at re:Invent this morning, his first since taking over as CEO earlier this year. Selipsky said AWS had come a long way in 15 years, looking back at how it disrupted the information technology industry when it launched in 2006, when the concept of cloud hardly existed. He described how IT and infrastructure was inflexible and slow, and suffocated innovation. AWS knew there could be a better path forward, then—and now. And according to Selipsky, the company is running as hard and fast now as it was back in 2006.

During his keynote, Selipksy made a suite of new service announcements showcasing AWS’s continued commitment to innovation, as well as inviting customers Nasdaq, United Airlines, Dish Wireless, and 3M on stage to share how AWS is helping them forge entirely new paths in their own industries.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky makes six major service announcements during keynote

Photo by Colin Young-Wolff

New instances powered by AWS-designed chips lower costs and increase energy efficiency

In 2006—when cell phones could flip, but they weren’t yet smart—a team of AWS engineers set themselves an ambitious goal of making almost infinite computing power available to anyone in the world. And they did it. The service they created, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), revolutionised the way people build businesses by offering on-demand access to the kind of compute power previously only available to Fortune 500 companies. Fifteen years on, and EC2 shows no sign of slowing down. Today’s announcement of three new Amazon EC2 instances (virtual servers that mimic the functionality of physical servers) powered by three new AWS-designed chips—AWS Graviton 3, AWS Trainium, and AWS Nitro SSD—will help customers:

Significantly improve the performance, cost, and energy-efficiency of the workloads they run on EC2

Speed up the time it takes to train machine learning models at lower cost

Ensure optimum storage performance for data intensive workloads

As part of the announcement, Selipsky said: “AWS is working with SAP to power SAP HANA Cloud with AWS Graviton processors.” Read the press release to find out more.

Making it easier to move off a mainframe

For those of us not so well-versed in the language of information technology, a mainframe, or ‘big iron’ as they are sometimes referred to, is a high-performance computer typically used by large companies for critical applications—such as storing and processing large amounts of customer data. While mainframes have been used for decades in industries including banking and healthcare, they are complex, expensive, and difficult to scale. That’s not to mention the fact that applications written for mainframes are increasingly hard to manage, as fewer and fewer engineers specialise in what’s essentially an outdated technology. Many organizations want to modernize their systems and move from mainframes to the cloud, but are held back by the sheer complexity and time-consuming nature of the process.

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