Nov 29 2023
Cloud

AWS re:Invent 2023: The Ongoing Transformation of Cloud Computing

At its flagship annual event, Amazon Web Services introduced updated generative AI offerings and new strategic partnerships that are poised to accelerate the evolution of cloud operations.

Over the years, more and more organizations have turned to hybrid cloud environments as they seek solutions that provide agility, scalability, security and room for innovation. As one of the world’s leading cloud service providers, Amazon Web Services remains at the forefront of the continuing evolution of cloud computing and operations.

From the outset of this year’s AWS re:Invent conference, generative artificial intelligence took center stage. AWS is infusing many of its key offerings with AI capabilities designed to enable its customers to deploy the power of AI in their own use cases across multiple industries.

AWS is the world’s leading cloud service provider, and CEO Adam Selipsky pointed out in his opening keynote that “innovators all over the world are relying on AWS to drive their businesses, including leading enterprises from across every industry,” especially financial services, healthcare and the automotive industry. He noted major customers such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, Pfizer,  BMW and Ford are “just a smattering of the leaders we're working with to shape the futures of these industries.”

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AWS Enhances Generative AI Offerings for the Cloud

AWS re:Invent kicked off this year with a keynote from Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of AWS Utility Computing, who highlighted many of the company’s innovative new offerings. Unsurprisingly, many of them feature new AI capabilities.

According to a press release heralding the start of the event, “Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform how we do business and serve our customers. AWS offers a range of pre-trained AI services that provide ready-to-use intelligence for your applications. In this post, we explore the new AI service capabilities and how they are enhanced using foundation models (FMs).”

Among the key services highlighted in the opening keynote were Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics, Amazon Personalize and Amazon Lex, which leverage FMs to enhance customer contact centers through language translation services, content and product recommendations and more robust conversational responses for customer FAQs.   

AWS Introduces New AI-Powered Services

On the first full day of this year’s event, Selipsky highlighted AWS’s new services supported by generative AI, especially helpful for customers that don’t have the resources or skills to develop their own FMs.

Selipsky expressed his excitement in announcing Amazon Q, “a new type of generative AI–powered assistant designed to work for you at work. Q lets you answer questions quickly with natural language interactions. You can easily chat, generate content, take actions. That's all informed by an understanding of your systems, your data repositories, your operations.”

He emphasized the need to consider data governance in the design of Amazon Q. “We know how important rock-solid security and privacy are, so Q understands and respects your existing identities, your roles and your permissions. If a user does not have permission to access something without Q, they cannot access it with Q either.”

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Selipsky said AWS hopes Amazon Q will enable developers and builders to be “more efficient, more knowledgeable and more proficient. So, for starters, Amazon Q is your expert assistant for building on AWS, how to supercharge work for developers and IT pros. We've trained Amazon Q on 17 years’ worth of AWS knowledge so it can transform the way you think, optimize and operate applications workloads on AWS. And we put Amazon Q where you work. So, it's ready to assist you in the AWS Management Console and documentation in your IDE [integrated development environment] via CodeWhisperer and in your team chat rooms, like Slack. You can chat with Amazon Q to explore AWS capabilities, learn on familiar technologies, architect solutions — it's an expert in AWS, architected patterns, best practices and solution implementations.”

In addition to the assistance Amazon Q will offer, AWS intends to support developers with enhancements to CodeWhisperer. “Last year, we released Amazon CodeWhisperer, which helps you build applications faster and more securely by generating code suggestions in near real time. Now, with CodeWhisperer, developers use a natural language prompt and then receive accurate code suggestions in every popular IDE and for 15 of the most popular programming languages,” Selipsky said.

Adam Selipsky
Q lets you answer questions quickly with natural language interactions. You can easily chat, generate content, take actions.”

Adam Selipsky CEO, AWS

Developers Will Benefit from AWS’s Partnership with Salesforce

In addition to its product and services enhancements, AWS announced a more integrated partnership with Salesforce.

“In 2016, Salesforce chose AWS as their primary cloud provider. And today, Salesforce uses AWS compute storage data services to power key services like Salesforce data, cloud and many others,” Selipsky said. “Yesterday, we announced that we're significantly expanding our partnership to bring new capabilities to our mutual customers. We're making it easier for developers to quickly build and deploy generative AI applications by bringing together Amazon Bedrock with Salesforce’s Einstein platform. We're also helping to unify data management with our new zero ETL [extract, transform, load] integrations between Salesforce Data Cloud and AWS storage, compute and data analytics services so that customers can get even better insights faster.”

Selipsky noted that the partnership should also create tighter integrations between Salesforce Service Cloud and Amazon Connect. Also, for the first time, Salesforce is going to be putting its products on the AWS Marketplace, “making it even easier for AWS customers to buy and to manage Salesforce offerings. So, with this expanded partnership, AWS and Salesforce customers are going to get new powerful ways to innovate and build applications.”

Keep this page bookmarked for articles from the event, and follow along on X (formerly Twitter) at @BizTechMagazine and the official conference twitter feed, @AWSreInvent.

Photography by AWS
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