With AWS re:Invent in full swing the keynote for today was nicely summarised into a 90 second video (below). We’ve been through and outlined everything into a simple post for you here with the What, How and Where for everything announced and there is some great stuff!
We will be covering all this and the rest of the announcements to come in our Monthly AWS User Group event on the 7th December so make sure that you come along and have some time with our panel of experts and meet your industry peers.
Amazon Rekognition
What is it?
An image processing platform designed to use deep learning to understand images and return labels based on a confidence level of accuracy.
How can I use it?
This can be used to help you tag, sort and index all sorts of image libraries on a grand scale. It also has uses for smart recognition such as video surveillance and security compliance to compare badge ID images to faces.
Where do I find out more?
Amazon Rekognition is available now in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) Regions part of the Free Tier which will allow you to process up to 5,000 images per month.
>> Read the official AWS blog post here
Amazon Lex
What is it?
You can use Amazon Lex to build chatbots and other types of web & mobile applications that support engaging, lifelike interactions. Your bots can provide information, power your application, streamline work activities, or provide a control mechanism for robots, drones, and toys
How can I use it?
You can define your own bot using some of the standard protocols or create your own from scratch using the components within the Lex console.
Where do I find out more?
Amazon Lex is available in preview form in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. Once you have signed up you can make 10,000 text requests and 5,000 speech requests each month at no charge for the first year. After that you will pay $4.00 for each 1,000 speech requests and $0.75 for every 1,000 text requests.
>> Read the official AWS blog post here
Amazon Polly
What is it?
Polly is a new voice to text services that converts text to lifelike speech that you can use in your own tools and applications. Polly currently supports a total of 47 male & female voices spread across 24 languages, with additional languages and voices on the roadmap.
How can I use it?
There are already many applications like this which can be used for training applications, voice overs on videos, blog posts to mp3 etc etc but Polly is promising to provide a more natural sound with multiple languages and regional dialects that many of the current robotic voice to text programs have.
Where do I find out more?
Polly is available now in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), and EU (Ireland) Regions. You can use Polly to process 5 million characters per month at no charge. After that, you pay $0.000004 per character, or about $0.004 per minute of generated audio
>> Read the official AWS blog post here
Elastic GPU
What is it?
Elastic GPU will allow the ability to add graphics acceleration to existing EC2 instance types. When you use G2 or P2 instances, the instance size will determine the number of GPUs.
How can I use it?
You can choose the EC2 instance type and size that works best for your application and then indicate that you want to use an Elastic GPU when you launch the instance, and take your pick of four different sizes:
Where do I find out more?
Currently only available as preview but there is a certification program being run if you would like to find out more on how you can use this.
>> Read the official AWS blog post here
AWS Greengrass
What is it?
Greengrass builds on AWS IoT and AWS Lambda, and can also access other AWS services. it is built for offline operation and greatly simplifies the implementation of local processing. Code running in the field can collect, filter, and aggregate freshly collected data and then push it up to the cloud for long-term storage and further aggregation.
How can I use it?
You will be able to register new hub devices, configure the desired set of Lambda functions, and create a deployment package for delivery to the device. From there, you will associate the lightweight devices with the hub.
Where do I find out more?
AWS Greengrass is being launched in Limited Preview.
Each AWS customer will be able to use up 3 devices for one year at no charge. Beyond that, the monthly cost for each active Greengrass Core is $0.16 ($1.49 per year) for up to 10,000 devices
>> Read the official AWS blog post here
Snowball Edge & Snowmobile
What is it?
These offerings expand the scope of the current import / export service Snowball, adding more connectivity, more storage, horizontal scalability via clustering, new storage endpoints that can be accessed from existing S3 and NFS clients, and Lambda-powered local processing.
How can I use it?
Snowball Edge can copy over 100TB of data in around 19 hours. Snowmobile uses secure data trucks that can store up to 100 PB of data and can help you to move exabytes to AWS in a matter of weeks.
Where do I find out more?
You can order Snowball Edge with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. It arrives with your S3 buckets, Lambda code, and clustering configuration pre-installed. Once the appliance arrives, connect it to your local network and set the IP address either manually or with DHCP. Finally, you verify the integrity of the Snowball Edge device and unlock it for use
Snowmobile initial launch is aimed at data import (on-premises to AWS). This is not a self-serve product.
>>Read the official AWS Snowball Edge blog post here
>>Read the official AWS Snowmobile blog post here
Amazon Aurora – Updates
What is it?
More feature updates to the already popular Aurora, it is now fully compatible with the open source version of PostgreSQL (version 9.6.1).
How can I use it?
Improve performance and monitoring with the new functionality and features with up to 2x the performance of PostgreSQL running in traditional environments.
Where do I find out more?
A preview of PostgreSQL compatibility for Amazon Aurora is available in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region today and you can sign up now for access!
>> Read the official AWS blog post here
Amazon Lightsail
What is it?
With a couple of clicks you can choose a configuration from a menu and launch a virtual machine preconfigured with SSD-based storage, DNS management, and a static IP address.
How can I use it?
You can launch your favorite operating system (Amazon Linux AMI, Ubuntu, CentOS, FreeBSD, or Debian), developer stack (LAMP, LEMP, MEAN, or Node.js), or application (Drupal, Joomla, Redmine, GitLab, and many others)
Where do I find out more?
Amazon Lightsail offers flat-rate pricing plans start at $5 per month including a generous allowance for data transfer in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, and plans to expand it to other regions in the near future.
>> Read the official AWS blog post here
Amazon Athena
What is it?
Athena is a new serverless query service that makes it easy to analyze large amounts of data stored in Amazon S3 using Standard SQL.
How can I use it?
You can run your queries from the AWS Management Console or from a SQL clients such as SQL Workbench, and you can use Amazon QuickSight to visualize your data. You can also download and use the Athena JDBC driver and run queries from your favorite Business Intelligence tool.
Where do I find out more?
Amazon Athena is available now in the US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions today and will become available in other regions in the coming months.
You pay only for the queries that you run; you are charged based on the amount of data scanned by each query (the console will display this information after each query).
>> Read the official AWS blog post here
Also Announced
New EC2 Instance Types.
Based on customer feedback and requirements AWS have announced four new EC2 Instance types.
- General Purpose — t2.xlarge, t2.2xlarge; more CPU and compute
- Memory Optimised — r4
- Storage Optimised — I3
- Compute Optimised — C5
Come along to discuss all these and the rest of the announcements at our Monthly AWS User Group event on the 7th December and have some time with our panel of experts and meet your industry peers.
The post AWS re:Invent 2016 Keynote Summary appeared first on PolarSeven Cloud Consulting.