AWS Add Services to Encourage Enterprises to Make Cloud Transformation

Amazon Web Services announces a long list of new features and services as it encourages enterprises to move ever more data center workloads to the AWS cloud.

The Amazon Aurora service is a cloud database that launched at the re:Invent 2014 conference. Initially, Aurora provided compatibility with the open-source MySQL database; at the re:Invent 2016 event, it was announced the open-source PostgreSQL database also will be supported.

Amazon’s Alexa consumer AI service found on Amazon Echo devices is being extended to a new commercial service called Lex, to create conversational interfaces using voice and text.

The new Amazon Polly service will enable developers to transform text into spoken word through natural-sounding speech capabilities. The service is launching with 47 lifelike voices and support for 24 languages.

An element of Amazon’s expanded AI capabilities, the new Rekognition service comprehends images, recognized scenes, objects and faces.

Amazon took direct aim at low-cost cloud competitor DigitalOcean by launching the Amazon Lightsail service. Lightsail provides a low-cost set of virtual private services options starting at $5 a month.

Among the major announcements at re:Invent 2015 was the debut of Amazon’s Snowball appliance for data transfer of 50TB. At re:Invent 2016, Amazon is going bigger, announcing AWS Snowmobile, a 100PB container housed in a truck that comes to customer data centers to, quite literally, load data.

There are times when devices don’t have connectivity or it makes more sense to process data at the edge of the network. That’s where the new AWS Greengrass service comes into play. Greengrass extends AWS to devices so they can act locally on the data they generate.

AWS now has a specific service called OpsWorks for Chef Automate that helps developers bring DevOps approaches brought from the Chef automation solution to the Amazon cloud.

The new Amazon EC2 Systems Manager provides users with a system for cloud software system management, helping to ensure consistent configurations.

The new Codebuild service is a fully managed capability for enabling developers to compile source code and run unit tests.

X-Ray is a new AWS service that helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications in production to find root causes of performance issues.

The new Personal Health Dashboard is a service that provides developers with visibility into service health issues that may be affecting their applications.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are a major risk facing cloud users. The new AWS Shield service standard edition provides protection for all EC2 customers. The AWS Shield Advanced service provides a 24×7 DDoS response team and additional DDoS protection for the most advanced attacks.

With the new Amazon Pinpoint service, organizations can identify the customers they want to engage with through targeted campaigns to improve user engagement.

The new AWS Batch service provides a managed batch process capability.

Rather than just announce a Kubernetes-as-a-service offering for container orchestration, Amazon announced its own Blox effort. Blox is a collection of open-source tools for container management and orchestration.

The new AWS Step Functions service provides tools that enable developers to coordinate functional components with visual workflows.