AWS re:Invent: Selipsky Marks AWS Milestone with Glimpse of the Future

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky looked to both the past and the future in his keynote speech at AWS re:Invent Tuesday.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the customer and partner event, and the 15th anniversary of AWS. As such, Selipsky was in the mood to reminisce.

“We have come a long way together in the past 15 years,” he said. He addressed both those gathered at the event in Las Vegas, and attendees watching online.

AWS’ Adam Selipsky

“It’s hard to believe when we first got started, the concept of cloud computing barely existed. But back then IT and infrastructure just weren’t working. It was expensive. It was slow. And it was inflexible. It suffocated innovation. And of course, it was dominated by old-guard vendors who loved the expense and the lock-in. But we knew there had to be a better path forward for all of us.”

Selipsky then leaped to today to give an idea of the scale of the public cloud giant.

“Today Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) now holds more than 100 trillion objects. More than 16 million new instances spin up on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) every day. AWS now offers over 200 services, compute, storage, database, scene learning, analytics and AI solutions.

“There are now millions of customers in every industry across every use case and around the world, running their mission critical applications on AWS. We have an enormous partner ecosystem of over 100,000 partners. The AWS cloud now spans over 81 availability zones, and 25 geographic regions around the world.”

Selipsky said that in the 15 years since launching AWS, the cloud has become not just another tech revolution, “but an enabler of a fundamental shift in the way that businesses function.”

“There’s no industry that hasn’t been touched, and no business that can’t be radically disrupted. And every one of us here today is part of that movement.”

‘It’s Still Early Days’

Yet Selipsky said that “despite what feels like massive adoption, we’re actually just getting started.”

He cited analyst estimates that perhaps only 5%-15% of IT spending has moved to the cloud.

“There are so many workloads that are going to move in the coming years, such innovation yet to come, such an opportunity for all of us, together. We’re building evermore powerful capabilities, pushing the edge of the cloud to new places with things like 5G and IoT. We’re driving toward seamless integration of data analytics and machine learning that will be transformative. And we’re services and applications to specific customer use cases and industries. The possibilities there are endless.

The CEO promised AWS would keep innovating and went on to announce a slew of product updates and launches. Here are some highlights.

AWS Mainframe Modernization

AWS Mainframe Modernization is a new platform for mainframe migration and modernization. Selipsky said it allows customers to migrate and modernize their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS.

The service currently supports two main migration patterns – re-platforming and automated refactoring – allowing customers to select their best-fit migration path and associated toolchains based on their migration assessment results.

AWS Private 5G

Selipsky also announced the preview of AWS Private 5G, a new managed service that helps enterprises set up and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities in days instead of months.

He said with just a few clicks in the AWS console, customers specify where they want to build a mobile network and the network capacity needed for their devices. AWS then delivers and maintains the small cell radio units, servers, 5G core and radio access network (RAN) software, and SIM cards required to set up a private 5G network and connect devices. AWS Private 5G automates the setup and deployment of the network and scales capacity on demand to support additional devices and increased network traffic.

There are no upfront fees or per-device costs, and customers pay only for the network capacity and throughput they request.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas

Amazon SageMaker Canvas is a new visual, no-code capability that allows organizations to build ML models and generate accurate predictions without writing code or requiring ML expertise. Its user interface lets users browse and access disparate data sources in the cloud or on-premises, combine data sets with the click of a button, train accurate models, and then generate new predictions once new data is available.