AWS re:Invent 2016: News You Need to Know, Nov. 30

It’s been five years since the first AWS re:Invent conference and in that time AWS has grown to the largest public cloud provider by a huge margin. 

Recent research by Synergy finds that AWS has a 45 percent share of the worldwide public cloud market, more than twice the size of the next three public IaaS providers combined.

AWS re:Invent has also had a healthy growth trajectory, too. AWS CEO Andy Jassy says there are 32,000 attendees at AWS re:Invent this year. That’s about a 13,000 increase from last year. 

Jassy reflected on its growth in a keynote on Tuesday, where he talked about its adoption among startups, the public sector, and its partners. According to Jassy, AWS has a “very diverse and broad customer base, most of the tech startups…and then every imaginable vertical business segment in the enterprise is using AWS in a meaningful way.”

With such a diverse set of customers, AWS has introduced a range of new services and capabilities on Tuesday to address their needs.

Here are some of the highlights:

Artificial Intelligence

If it seems like everybody and their brother is talking about artificial intelligence (AI) this year, it’s because they are. Not one to be left out, AWS announced not one, but three AI services on Tuesday during the keynote. Here’s what they are, according to AWS:

You can read more about the AI services here.

Hybrid Services

AWS launched AWS Greengrass, a software “which allows customers to run AWS compute, messaging, data caching, and sync capabilities on connected devices.” It also launched a new Snowball data transfer appliance, the AWS Snowball Edge, that can transport two times more data than the original AWS Snowball (up to 100 TB).

New Compute Services

AWS has launched seven new compute instances, and two new hardware acceleration options on Tuesday. In addition, AWS launched Amazon Lightsail, a service that makes it easy to spin up virtual private servers that have bundled storage and networking.

One of the hardware acceleration options launched Tuesday is the new Amazon EC2 F1 instance which AWS says is the first cloud instance with programmable hardware for FPGA application acceleration which allows customers to increase performance by as much as 30x over CPUs.