Re:Invent Roundup: It’s AWS Anywhere

Between November 30 and December 18 2020, AWS made a stream of exciting announcements in their redefined re:Invent conference. For obvious reasons, AWS had to switch up the formula of their flagship event (which is usually a jam-packed week in Las Vegas) and chose to drip feed their announcements over a period of three weeks.

So what are the main talking points? How will these announcements affect certain businesses and industries? How will developers be impacted? And, overall are we seeing AWS move in a new direction?

On the latest episode of the Cloud Talk podcast, three experts from Rackspace Technology join Jeff DeVerter to break down what some of these announcements mean for businesses and IT professionals and share their opinions on which developments are the most interesting.

Here are some of the topics discussed during this 30-minute podcast:

• ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere – container services for on-premises customers
• AWS Lambda and Container Image Support – support inside Lambda for containers
• Amazon Monotron – new services for industrial customers
• ML Detect – the powerful combination of IoT and machine learning
• Management tools such as Fault Injection Simulator and Cloud Shell
• Database updates such as Babelfish and Aurora Serverless v2
• The evolution of the AWS developer experience

Taylor Bird, VP, AWS Solutions & Partnerships at Rackspace Technology, explains the significance of AWS expanding its container services to reach private cloud customers. “This is interesting behavior from Amazon. To say, ‘We are the leader in a lot of public cloud innovations, and now we’re going to start offering services that are available for the private and hybrid cloud. So we want you to start running AWS software and services in your data centers.’ This is something we haven’t really seen from Amazon in a number of years.”

Amir Kashani, VP, Cloud Native Development & IoT at Rackspace Technology, discusses Amazon Monotron and what it means for the industrial sector. “Monotron is one of the only end-to-end solutions that includes hardware for gathering data all the way through to cloud infrastructure. This is applicable to industrial IoT use cases where there’s a whole host of machinery and equipment and gathering data gives you enormous insight into operational efficiency. Amazon is definitely working their way out the cloud ecosystem; they’re in industry now.”

Josh Prewitt, VP, Public Cloud Solutions at Rackspace Technology, explains why Babelfish is a shot across the bow to Microsoft. “I think that Babelfish is really a shot across the bow and reinvigoration of the cloud wars. You’ve got a ton of folks who are locked into their MS SQL licenses that are extremely expensive, and Amazon is saying, ‘We can solve that problem for you really easily, just plug this in.’ I think that’s huge. I think that we’re going to see a lot of people take advantage of it. And, you know, it makes you wonder what’s going to happen on the Azure side, and what Microsoft comes up with to compete with that.”