Good morning; it's time for Adam Selipsky's #awsreinvent keynote. I'm here at Sugarcane thanks to the fine folks at MongoDB, and I'm about to see whether or not this keynote is going to get me into "15 shots of whiskey, please" territory before 9AM.
Adam Selipsky walks on to "Sweet Child of Mine." I just lost $5; I was sure it'd be "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." On balance, this is why he's the CEO and I'm the gadfly...
"Why is all of this happening on AWS?" Because a lot of your competition was asleep at the wheel and still oh so very clearly DOES NOT GET THEIR CUSTOMERS, if I'm being honest. I wish it was otherwise; I don't want there to be only one reasonable choice to build upon; competition benefits everyone.
Talking about the AZ separation model. What a fantastic waste of money; why not just slap a pair of racks into a burned out warehouse and call it a day like Azure does?
(The entire AWS global infrastructure is an oft-overlooked but incredible differentiator.)
S3 Intelligent Tiering has saved customers over $2 billion.
Honestly, based upon what I've seen I'm surprised it's not more. That service has gotten awesomely cost efficient since launch; it should probably be your default storage class unless you're doing something "special."
Now talking about Graviton. He's right; it's time to use it. A watershed moment was Arm support by other cloud vendors; having a theoretical exodus path is important.
Now talking about generative AI. To his credit he's not claiming to be the industry leader in it, and there is significant value in the space.
Talking about the three layers of the stack. He's not wrong--but customers increasingly care about the top part, whereas AWS excels at the bottom part.
Talking about their GPU instances. I have customers who have done everything this side of "slitting throats" to get more of them. This is a very real, very painful challenge for customers today.
And Nvidia Jensen Huang takes the stage at what, his eighth cloud company keynote this year? At this point I think he's a DevRel guy who got frustrated at having his CFP submissions turned down so he found an alternate path to get to talk at more conferences.
Feels like he's going a bit off script here. But what's AWS gonna do, upset the guy who controls the only GPUs the industry is talking about? I think not!
Adam takes over again. "Now let's talk about capacity."
You just talked to the guy who could do something about it! You missed the window, Adam! If you want something from someone, you've gotta ask them in a situation in which they cannot possibly refuse!
Announcing AWS Trainium2. I'd be more excited about it if I saw any of the AI blog posts from folks way smarter than me talking about using Trainium chips. Instead we're here, where if I want to use Trainium instead of Nvidia chips I have to get a whole lot better at a lot of stuff very quickly...
Talking about how multiple providers of multiple models is the future. He kinda has to say that, otherwise he's ceding the sector to Microsoft / OpenAI / they're the same thing.
Didn't love the reference Adam made to "the events of the last ten days." Everyone knows OpenAI was a clownshow, but when YOU say it it just comes across as petty and insecure.
I'd love to see the OpenAI models in AWS and I am not even slightly kidding: I *do not trust* the OpenAI / Azure data security story. Run them on AWS and a lot of that fear goes away. I doubt I'm alone here.
Announcing Amazon Q, a generative AI assistant designed to help you at work and also storm the Capitol. Or alternately, to hurl you through time and space to help teach you life lessons.
Ooh, Amazon Q Code Transformation. It's designed to keep things current by replacing deprecated code and whatnot.
Here's an acid test: can it automatically upgrade my Lambda functions to use the latest runtime of its given language so I don't have to care about deprecations of things I haven't touched in years anymore?
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •The annual "AWS Customer Eye Chart, Automotive Edition" slide.
Honestly at this point it'd be visually cleaner and easier on the team to just put up the dozen or so companies on the planet who aren't using AWS.
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Talking about the AZ separation model. What a fantastic waste of money; why not just slap a pair of racks into a burned out warehouse and call it a day like Azure does?
(The entire AWS global infrastructure is an oft-overlooked but incredible differentiator.)
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •S3 Intelligent Tiering has saved customers over $2 billion.
Honestly, based upon what I've seen I'm surprised it's not more. That service has gotten awesomely cost efficient since launch; it should probably be your default storage class unless you're doing something "special."
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •First announcement of the day: new storage class for S3: S3 Express One Zone.
For those wondering, this is the last of four announcements I was told about in advance. Everything from here on out is as new to me as it is to you.
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •This is not a general purpose storage tier; super fast access, located in a single AZ, built for massive request volume. Think "ML project."
Pinterest has seen 10x faster write speed with a 40% cost reduction.
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Now talking about Graviton. He's right; it's time to use it. A watershed moment was Arm support by other cloud vendors; having a theoretical exodus path is important.
And now announcing Graviton 4!
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Didn't see that one coming; I thought it was still a year away based upon industy scuttlebutt.
But R8g instances are available today in preview. I'll be requesting one as my annual ec2 dev box upgrade!
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Now talking about generative AI. To his credit he's not claiming to be the industry leader in it, and there is significant value in the space.
Talking about the three layers of the stack. He's not wrong--but customers increasingly care about the top part, whereas AWS excels at the bottom part.
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Adam takes over again. "Now let's talk about capacity."
You just talked to the guy who could do something about it! You missed the window, Adam! If you want something from someone, you've gotta ask them in a situation in which they cannot possibly refuse!
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Instead we're here, where if I want to use Trainium instead of Nvidia chips I have to get a whole lot better at a lot of stuff very quickly...
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Giant logo wall of customers using Bedrock.
I do wonder what the inclusion criteria is. "One engineer somewhere spins it up for ten minutes," or something more strategic.
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Talking about Bedrock at Delta. Because nobody does "subterranean" quite like an airline?
Try the veal.
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Okay, apparently the gloves are off and there's no reason to be diplomatic anymore when it comes to comparing AWS's AI offerings to OpenAI's?
I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through.
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Announcement: Guardrails for Bedrock.
On some level this is the most corporate thing ever: "OMG computers have a sense of humor now" --> "holy crap how do we rip out its sense of humor?"
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Now talking about Amazon CodeWhisperer which I misheard earlier as GoatWhisperer and will forever be using instead.
It's GitHub Copilot before Copilot started being slapped everywhere as a brand and also massively improved.
Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Ooh, Amazon Q Code Transformation. It's designed to keep things current by replacing deprecated code and whatnot.
Here's an acid test: can it automatically upgrade my Lambda functions to use the latest runtime of its given language so I don't have to care about deprecations of things I haven't touched in years anymore?