5 Big Announcements from AWS re:Invent You Might Have Missed
MSPs, VARs and similar channel partners, get a rundown of some of the news most applicable to your businesses.
![Business Megaphone Business Megaphone](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltb99c1f1bbe39f7f1/65243bda224704093fdb8b48/Business-Megaphone-2018.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Shutterstock
Many a channel partner’s customer operates an organization that’s spread across geographies and offices galore. With that kind of setup, managing a network in the cloud gets even harder. So, to address the problem, AWS came up with Cloud WAN, which delivers software-defined wide area networking.
“We started to think about how can we help these customers really overcome all the heavy lifting that you have to do if you have a very widespread network that you need to connect to the cloud,” Werner Vogels, AWS CTO, said at AWS re:Invent. “So today, I’m happy to announce AWS Cloud WAN, which gives you the ability to build, manage and monitor global traffic across a wide area network using AWS.”
Here’s how it works: Choose the region to use, then the locations to connect. Once these parameters are defined, “all the remote users and sites and data centers will connect to the geographically closest location using a VPN or direct connect,” Vogels said.
From there, the Cloud WAN platform will build the network “using the big AWS backbone … to give you a highly reliable and highly available software-defined, wide area network running over the AWS infrastructure,” Vogels said.
The capability is available in preview in multiple regions.
AWS also is adding more of its Local Zones throughout the world. This will come as welcome news for AWS channel partners supporting clients internationally. A Local Zone brings compute, storage and other AWS services closer to end users. This reduces latency.
AWS already has 16 Local Zones in the United States. Next year, though, it will bring more to almost two dozen countries, including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Kenya, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal and South Africa.
There’s a lot of talk these days about sustainability. And it’s not just among vendors — channel partners and their customers are in on the movement, too. Oftentimes, though, they need resources for monitoring sustainability initiatives.
AWS responded this week with the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. It’s a dashboard for calculating carbon emissions and forecasting how those numbers will change over time. It also accounts for the percentage of AWS energy consumption that stems from renewable sources. Those calculations will change as Amazon brings its different green energy projects to fruition.
On a similar note, AWS at AWS re:Invent announced it’s investing in 18 new renewable-energy (wind and solar) projects in the United States and Europe.
Enterprises want — and need — the capabilities of 5G cellular connectivity but they’re still waiting on service providers to flesh out networks.
Or they were, anyway.
This week at AWS re:Invent, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky debuted the company’s Private 5G managed service. Now, channel partners can deploy private 5G mobile networks throughout customer facilities — and AWS says that takes just days, rather than months.
With a few clicks in the AWS console, channel partners may specify where to build a mobile network and details the network capacity needed. AWS then delivers and maintains the requisite small cell radio units, servers, 5G core and radio access network (RAN) software, and SIM cards.
AWS is not charging upfront fees or per-device costs. End users pay only for the network capacity and throughput they request.
If you help end users corral structured and unstructured data for business insights and decision-making, AWS re:Invent had your back.
On the third day of its annual conference, the world’s largest public cloud provider debuted a range of new database capabilities. Many of the launches feature arcane components that will speak only to Channel Futures readers who specialize in data.
The big takeaway? AWS is working to remove the challenges associated with extracting value from all that structured and unstructured data floating around within organizations. Structured data, of course, often lives within databases and is fairly simple to pull. That unstructured counterpart is harder to control. It’s spread throughout the business, in various applications, on mobile devices and IoT services, and even on handwritten notes.
These days, though, end users are understanding that they have to rein it all in so they can increase revenue, track patterns and improve efficiency. Channel partners can provide vital consulting and hands-on services to aid in those efforts. When it comes to data, it’s all about “survival of the most informed,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon Machine Learning at AWS. Getting data into one place “will help you unlock new insights.”
If you help end users corral structured and unstructured data for business insights and decision-making, AWS re:Invent had your back.
On the third day of its annual conference, the world’s largest public cloud provider debuted a range of new database capabilities. Many of the launches feature arcane components that will speak only to Channel Futures readers who specialize in data.
The big takeaway? AWS is working to remove the challenges associated with extracting value from all that structured and unstructured data floating around within organizations. Structured data, of course, often lives within databases and is fairly simple to pull. That unstructured counterpart is harder to control. It’s spread throughout the business, in various applications, on mobile devices and IoT services, and even on handwritten notes.
These days, though, end users are understanding that they have to rein it all in so they can increase revenue, track patterns and improve efficiency. Channel partners can provide vital consulting and hands-on services to aid in those efforts. When it comes to data, it’s all about “survival of the most informed,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon Machine Learning at AWS. Getting data into one place “will help you unlock new insights.”
The 10th annual AWS re:Invent conference took place this week in person in Las Vegas and virtually.
The event featured a range of keynote speeches, from Amazon Web Services’ new CEO Adam Selipsky to outgoing channel chief Doug Yeum. (Yeum’s successor, Ruba Borno, officially starts her new job on Dec. 6.
Along with those speeches came a number of new announcements, an AWS re:Invent tradition. Every year at its conference, AWS unveils countless updates. Often, much of the news pertains to niche, specific subsegments of the channel. That’s why we’ve pulled five of the more widely applicable announcements that impact managed service providers, value-added resellers, systems integrators, consultants and other, similar partners.
Click through the short slideshow above for five of the takeaways you’ll want to know.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Kelly Teal or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like