At the recent AWS re: Invent 2021, Amazon Web Services announced launches including Graviton3, the most powerful CPU by AWS, and the new 5G product to encourage businesses to roll out private networks.
Three years after unveiling the first generation of its Graviton chip-powered instances in 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that the third generation of the processors – the Graviton3 – will power all-new Amazon Elastic Compute 2 (EC2) C7g instances.
It announced three new Amazon EC2 instances powered by AWS-designed chips to improve the performance, cost, and energy efficiency of workloads running on Amazon EC2.
According to AWS, the new Graviton3-powered instances will deliver up to 25 per cent faster compute performance and up to two times higher floating-point performance than the current generation of EC2 C6g Graviton2-powered instances. The company said that the new Graviton3 instances are also up to two times faster when running cryptographic workloads compared to Graviton2 instances, the company said.
Jeff Barr, the Chief Evangelist for the AWS, said these new chips and instances should be useful for a wide variety of workloads, including compute-intensive “HPC, batch processing, electronic design automation (EDA), media encoding, scientific modelling, ad serving, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning Inferencing.”
With the chip shortage showing no sign of abating, cloud providers need to build and use their custom chips to create broader offerings as the cloud expands to encompass more use cases and continues to replace on-prem compute workloads.
New storage services
Meanwhile, the need for data storage in the cloud has not stopped growing, in fact — it’s accelerating faster than ever. According to the latest market research, within the next four years, enterprise data stored by organisations will triple, and nearly 90 per cent of enterprise data will be stored in the cloud.
To tackle that, the tech giant announced new storage services and capabilities that deliver more options and better protect data.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service Glacier Instant Retrieval is a storage class that provides retrieval access in milliseconds for archive data.
- Amazon FSx for OpenZFS is a managed file storage service that makes it easy to move on-prem data residing in commodity file servers to AWS without changing application code or how the data is managed.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store Snapshots Archive is a new storage tier that reduces the cost of archiving snapshots by up to 75 per cent.
- AWS Backup now supports centralised data protection and automated compliance reporting for Amazon S3, as well as for VMware workloads running on AWS and on-prem.
The new storage innovations provide customers flexibility in managing storage while lowering costs and improving data management and protection capabilities.
“Every business today is a data business. One of the most important decisions that a business will make is where to store their data,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President, Block and Object Storage at AWS. “As these latest storage services and capabilities show, AWS is the most powerful and lowest cost way to access and protect data. Our rapid innovation makes it the best storage choice for customers now and in the future.”
The company also revealed AWS Private 5G, a new managed service that allows enterprises to set up and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities. AWS says that with just a few clicks, customers can specify where the network will be, what kind of capacity they need, and then get everything they need, with the process taking just days rather than months.
“There’s nothing like AWS Private 5G network out there,” said AWS CEO Adam Selipsky as he unveiled the new offering. “You get all the goodness of mobile technology without the pain of long planning cycles, complex integrations and the high upfront costs.”
All network setup and deployment is automated, with the platform can scale capacity when needed, such as if a customer needs to support additional devices and increased network traffic.
The tech behemoth also announced the AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere which allows customers to find, subscribe, deploy and govern dozens of new container offerings directly onto the Kubernetes environment of their choice with a couple of simple commands.
AI For Data Analytics
Continuing its investment in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) with a set of partner solutions called AI for Data Analytics (AIDA), AWS expanded predictive analytics capabilities in workspaces. The solutions are aimed at business users who use data but have limited data science experience, according to AWS.
AIDA can help predict customer churn, create playbooks for the next best actions and offers, predict the lifetime value of prospects and existing customers to adjust the costs of acquisition and retention, and lower operational costs with supply pre-positioning and workforce scheduling, among other capabilities.
The launch of Amplify Studio, a new visual development environment, has made it easy for developers to create web application user interfaces with minimal coding, while still being able to fully customise the apps’ design and behaviour using familiar programming languages such as JavaScript.
Tol help enterprises to build, manage, and monitor a unified global network that connects cloud and on-prem data centre environments faster, AWS Cloud WAN, a managed wide area network (WAN) service, was launched. Cloud WAN provides a central dashboard that enterprises can connect their on-prem branch offices, data centres, and Amazon Virtual Private Clouds across the AWS global network.
Lastly, since it’s become crucial for organisations to measure their emissions to track their progress toward net-zero carbon, AWS announced that it would help build a sustainable business for its customers by providing them with the carbon footprint of their use of AWS services to meet their carbon reduction goals.
Knowing the carbon emissions associated with their use of AWS services will help its customers with their reporting. Furthermore, a new sustainability pillar for the AWS Well-Architected Framework, announced at the event, will help organisations learn, measure, and improve their workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing.
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