Flux7 Blog

While all the news from re:Invent is just too much for a single article, in today’s blog, we continue with our round-up of new features and services announced this week at the annual AWS re:Invent conference. We kick off with several quantum computing announcements that are closely aligned to the HPC and ML themes we discussed yesterday.

Quantum computing offers a new paradigm for solving computationally complex problems that modern computers are unable to solve due to processing power limits. Speeding computation in areas like ML, quantum computing has the potential to meaningfully impact things like drug discoveries and quantum financial transactions. Getting enterprises one step closer to the promise of quantum computing are three new AWS offerings: 

• Amazon Braket
  A new, fully managed AWS service, Amazon Braket enables scientists, researchers, and developers to explore, evaluate, and experiment with computers from quantum hardware providers in a single place, gaining in-house experience as they plan for the future. Amazon Braket is now in preview. 

• AWS Center for Quantum Computing
  Bringing together quantum computing experts from Amazon, Caltech, and other top academic research institutions to collaborate on the research and development of new quantum computing technologies, the AWS Center for Quantum Computing seeks to accelerate the development of quantum computing technologies and applications. 

• AWS Quantum Solutions Lab
  Rounding out the new quantum computing offerings is the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab which connects customers with quantum computing experts to collaborate on experiments and develop internal expertise and quantum applications that address practical uses of quantum computing.

New Instance Types

Andy Jassy unveiled several new EC2 container service instance types, including:

• Amazon EC2 M6g, R6g and C6g instances
  

The new series of instances — M6g general-purpose, C6g compute-optimized, and R6g memory-optimized — are expected to deliver up to 40% better price performance over the current generation M5 instance and is purported to be the best choice for apps built on open-source software, e.g. application servers, AWS microservices, gaming servers, mid-size data stores, and caching fleets. Currently in preview, with GA expected shortly. 

• Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances

ECE Inf1 instances for EC2 feature customized 64-bit Neoverse cores with AWS-designed 7mm silicon, up to 64 vCPUs, 25 Gbps enhanced networking, 18 Gbps EBS bandwidth, and 4x more compute cores, 5x faster memory, and 7x the performance initial Graviton offering. Inf 1 instances are generally available today.

Simplifying Containers with AWS Kubernetes

Did you know that 81% of cloud containers run in AWS and of the Kubernetes run in the cloud, 84% of it runs on AWS? Yet, of those enterprises new to cloud containers, 40% turn to AWS Fargate. With stats like these, it’s easy to understand why AWS has several container offerings. And, with the announcement of Amazon Fargate for Amazon EKS, Amazon now has four. Amazon Fargate for EKS seeks to make it even easier for operators to run Kubernetes-based applications on AWS without the need to manage servers and clusters.

AWS Enhances Data Management

“Not your father’s data requirements” is how Andy Jassy kicked off the segment of his talk in which he addressed the new data requirements of organizations amassing large sums of data in the cloud. While the cloud has enabled a new era of data-driven business due to its speed and cost-effectiveness, accumulated data tends to remain in data silos, making ML painful and slow.  Companies need new tools to reap ML intelligence and data lakes are a popular way of doing so. 

According to Jassy, many AWS customers are building their data lakes on top of S3 as their data lake base, which is why they announced yesterday Amazon S3 Access Points that simplify the process of managing data access at scale for applications using shared data sets on S3. S3 Access Points allow operators to easily customize access permission rules for each application; any access point can be restricted to a VPC to free S3 data within your private network, and;  operators can easily create hundreds of access points on a single bucket. Amazon S3 Access Points are available in all AWS Regions today.

In addition, Jassy announced: 

• GA of Amazon Redshift RA3 nodes with managed storage that allows you to scale compute separately from storage.
• AQUA, or Advanced Query Accelerator for Amazon Redshift, is a high-speed cache architecture that allows you to do compute on raw storage without having to worry about moving the data. Available in preview today, AQUA is expected mid-2020.
• UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a new fully managed, low-cost, warm storage tier. Jassy touted it as having better durability, and less cost at almost a 90% cost reduction over existing options. UltraWarm is available in preview today.
• Amazon Managed (Apache) Cassandra Service keeps you from provisioning, patching, or managing servers, and allows you to operate at scale. With no clusters to manage and single-digit millisecond performance at any scale, operators can choose provisioned or on-demand capacity and automatically scale. Amazon Managed Cassandra Service is now in preview.

• And, speaking of latency, the last announcement we’re covering today is AWS Wavelength. The new solution minimizes the network hops and latency to connect to an application from a 5G device, bringing AWS services to the edge of the 5G network. Specifically, Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage services at the edge of telecommunications providers’ 5G networks, thereby providing access to AWS services in the region. AWS and Verizon touted the solution on stage as empowering developers to build apps for mobile end-users with single-digit millisecond latencies over 5G networks. Think game and live video streaming or machine learning inference at the edge.  Wavelength is currently in preview in Chicago.

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Written by Flux7 Labs

Flux7 is the only Sherpa on the DevOps journey that assesses, designs, and teaches while implementing a holistic solution for its enterprise customers, thus giving its clients the skills needed to manage and expand on the technology moving forward. Not a reseller or an MSP, Flux7 recommendations are 100% focused on customer requirements and creating the most efficient infrastructure possible that automates operations, streamlines and enhances development, and supports specific business goals.