SAN FRANCISCO—Amazon Web Services April 9 unveiled a new wizard-based machine-learning analytics service for developers experienced—or even inexperienced—in analyzing loads of data from sensors, video cams or other automated data gatherers.
Thus, the Seattle-based cloud service giant has entered the burgeoning battle among service providers to provide analytics based on data from the Internet of things to IT specialists via monthly subscription.
“Even if you’re a developer who’s never worked in machine learning, you’ll be able to use this new service, so the ramp up should be easy,” AWS Senior Vice President of Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy (pictured) said at the one-day AWS Summit 2015 here at Moscone Center.
Machine-learning analytics provides the mathematical foundation needed to run an analysis and make sense of results. It enables users to turn piles of raw data into high-quality business-related predictions by finding and codifying patterns and relationships within the data.
Properly used, machine learning can serve as the basis for systems that perform fraud detection, demand forecasting, ad targeting and numerous other use cases. Amazon claims that with this new service, users will be able to scale out workloads ranging from small to very large, and do it on a pay-for-what-you-use basis.
The fully managed service uses historical data to build and deploy predictive models. These models can be used for a broad array of purposes, including detecting problematic transactions, preventing customer churn and improving customer support.
Amazon has been deploying this same highly scalable machine-learning IT by its own developers to generate more than 50 billion predictions a week, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr said in his blog.
Amazon Machine Learning’s APIs and wizards are provided in a self-service model. The app guides developers through the process of creating and tuning machine-learning models that can be deployed and scaled to support billions of predictions, Barr said.
Amazon Machine Learning is integrated with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), so that users can work directly with the data they’ve already stored in the AWS Cloud.
The service is available now. For more information, go here.