(Mostly Cloudy Photo)
Welcome to a special morning edition of Mostly Cloudy from re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas! Here’s a recap from the first day of Amazon Web Services’ flagship event as we await CEO Andy’s Jassy’s big Tuesday morning keynote.
Last Night in Cloud: When in doubt, play the hits
Last year at re:Invent 2018, the Monday evening keynote delivered by AWS vice president of infrastructure Peter DeSantis arguably stole the show on its first day. This year, he was given very little to work with.
During a 90-minute presentation Monday evening, when a sizable portion of the attendees from Cloud City was likely watching the second half of the thrilling Seahawks-Vikings matchup on their phones, DeSantis made almost no announcements. Instead, the keynote focused on technologies that AWS has been working on over the past year, specifically on bringing high-performance computing workloads into the cloud and on advanced infrastructure for pushing the boundaries of machine-learning research and usage.
Those are interesting topics in their own right, but they are relatively niche usages of AWS’s massive global cloud computing network. The number of companies or organizations that need true high-performance computing is relatively small, as evidenced by sales of high-performance computers over the last decade or so. Machine learning technology may one day be as ubiquitous as cloud compute and storage, but even a casual observer of AWS has heard many paeans to machine-learning infrastructure over the past few years of re:Invent.
Last year, DeSantis introduced two groundbreaking products that had attendees buzzing for days after his appearance. Graviton, a processor based on the low-energy Arm chip design, became the first Arm server processor with a realistic chance of reaching the masses. Firecracker, an open-source project that exposed how AWS runs its own serverless infrastructure, was extremely well received by both infrastructure enthusiasts and skeptics of AWS’s commitment to open source.
Nothing unveiled Monday night will come even close to making the same impact on the cloud leader’s standing among current and prospective customers. Anyone interested in pushing the envelope of high-performance computing and machine learning on AWS was likely already using (or was at least aware of) the existing technologies DeSantis highlighted during his keynote.
re:Invent attendees party at Sunday night’s Midnight Madness event, which seemed like more fun than Monday Night Live. (AWS Photo)
In fact, the only surprise that inadvertently emerged from the presentation was that AWS Inferentia, a custom-designed machine-learning processor introduced at re:Invent 2018, seems to be behind schedule. Last year AWS said that customers could expect to see Inferentia running this year, but on a slide referencing the chip, the words “coming soon” were still attached to its debut.
DeSantis did announce that AWS plans to roll out six new clean energy projects to power data centers outside the U.S., where it has focused most of its clean energy efforts to date. But no details were provided about the timing of those projects during his keynote or from official AWS PR sources, and while DeSantis was emphasizing how proud the company was to introduce a clean energy project in Australia, local tech media reported that the company had petitioned the Australian government to withhold details of its energy consumption from the public.
It was a curious address, and it was a little hard to figure out who the intended audience for such a presentation was supposed to be. It’s quite possible that Jassy big-footed anything truly interesting into his own marathon three-hour keynote address scheduled for Tuesday morning at 8am. And we can’t expect that every keynote every year is going to be a show stopper; even Apple watchers have stopped trying to pretend that every Apple event is a Super Big Deal.
But AWS kicked off re:Invent by emphasizing the things it has already been doing in two areas where it faces stronger competition from legacy players and cloud upstarts. In past years, the cloud giant has set the terms for the upcoming year with a parade of announcements reaffirming its position as the top player in the cloud.
This year, Monday night felt like one of those holiday letters detailing how wonderful the family is doing and listing all the amazing things each member accomplished over the past year. Nobody likes to read those.
Disclosure: AWS paid for my accommodations in Las Vegas.
Yesterday at re:Invent 2019
Commentary: Andy Jassy aims to reinvent Amazon Web Services for the cloud’s next generation (Silicon Angle)
AWS CEO Andy Jassy speaks at re:Invent 2018 (AWS Photo)
This is a pretty good State of the Cloud overview taken from a wide-ranging interview with Jassy, showing just how quickly the company has become an enterprise tech power player and how its mission is changing as it courts new types of customers. Key quote: “Most of the big initial challenges of transforming the cloud are not technical,” (Jassy) responded. “They’re about leadership — executive leadership.”
How Amazon Web Services is getting ready for quantum computing (Mostly Cloudy)
Probably the biggest announcement of the day was Braket, a quantum computing service (named after a term for labeling quantum states) developed in partnership with three major quantum computing companies that will help software developers learn how to take advantage of this emerging technology. Fun fact: as a 2010 April Fool’s joke, AWS “announced” a cloud quantum computing service.
Amazon lets doctors record your conversations and put them in your medical files (CNBC)
Lots of doctors welcome new technologies that can help them better diagnose their patients, but bemoan the fact that they now can spend as much time in front of a keyboard writing up reports as seeing actual patients. Amazon Medical Transcribe is designed to record conversations between doctors and patients and transcribe that conversation for the patient’s medical record, and even if properly managed will likely set off all the same privacy alarm bells that Google’s cloud health care ambitions did a few weeks ago.
Amazon’s kooky new keyboard lets humans and AI write music together (Fast Company)
Don’t you already get the sense that an AI system is already writing a lot of pop music? DeepComposer is a fun experiment on what can emerge from human-computer collaboration, even if Fast Company’s time with the keyboard is unlikely to become a smash hit.
New Amazon tool simplifies delivery of containerized machine learning models (Techcrunch)
As Kubernetes becomes a larger part of modern tech infrastructure, cloud customers will look for anything that can help them spare developers or machine-learning scientists from having to figure out how to build their applications around it. SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes seems like a no-brainer for companies using SageMaker to build and deploy machine-learning models on infrastructure that runs Kubernetes.
And Now, A Word…
What should I write about over the next few days at re:Invent? I’ve got a few ideas cooking, but reply to this email with ideas, suggestions, and NBA gambling tips.
Around the Cloud
Oxide Computer Company: Initial boot sequence (Oxide)
The first day of the biggest cloud computing event on the planet seems like as good a day as any to announce plans for a new server company designed to bring next-generation infrastructure techniques to on-premises data center operators. Founded by three super-interesting people who strongly believe that hardware and software should be designed in concert, Oxide is one to watch.
Microsoft, Google and VW pile in, so what's behind Norway's data center boom? (ZDNet)
Cloud companies have been building Nordic data centers for several years, thanks to the proximity of those countries to Central Europe and their climate, which helps save money on cooling costs. But Norway recently changed its tax policies around electricity usage to make it even cheaper for data-center operators, and they’ve taken notice.
What can undersea cables tell us about earthquakes? (ZDNet)
Now that telecom companies and cloud operators have run fiber-optic cables all over the oceans of the world, seismologists are wondering how they can use that investment to measure changes in the earth’s crust. Several fiber-optic cables land along the seismically active West Coast, and they could help researchers monitor or even detect the next big event.
Canalys: Chinese cloud infrastructure spending reaches almost $3B a quarter (Techcrunch)
China is now the second-largest market for cloud computing behind the U.S., which was inevitable given the size of its market and lack of legacy technology baggage, but the speed at which that growth unfolded is still amazing. Chinese companies — mainly Alibaba — dominate domestic cloud computing, while AWS is in an unfamiliar position looking up at the homegrown companies favored by the Chinese government.
