AWS Unveils Slew of New Cloud Services at re:Invent 2017

At its 2017 re:Invent conference, which ran from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1 in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services announced a series of new services that expand its cloud offerings. At this year’s event, there was a particularly strong focus on machine learning services, with the debut of the SageMaker managed machine learning service being among the major announcements. Containers were also an area of focus for AWS, with the announcement of the Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), which provides a managed Kubernetes container orchestration system that is optimized for Amazon’s cloud. In this slide show, eWEEK looks at some of the many new services announced at AWS re:Invent 2017.

At re:Invent, Amazon launched its new Neptune graph database service in limited preview. In contrast to a traditional SQL database, a graph database stores data as a set of connected relationships, the company explained.

SageMaker is a new fully managed service that aims to make it easier to build, deploy and manage a machine learning workflow for analysis and insight. “We want all developers to be able to use machine learning much more expansively and successfully, irrespective of their machine learning skill level,” Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of machine learning at AWS, stated. “Amazon SageMaker removes a lot of the muck and complexity involved in machine learning to allow developers to easily get started and become competent in building, training and deploying models.”

AWS’ DeepLens camera is designed to work with SageMaker and Amazon’s machine learning services to help train and build visual machine learning models.

AWS’ new Transcribe service, which is currently available in preview, provides automatic conversion of speech into grammatically correct text.

Amazon Translate provides real-time language translation as well as automatic language recognition capabilities.

The new Amazon Comprehend service is able to understand text and pull insights and analysis from that data.

Glacier is AWS’ archival storage service that is intended for long-term storage. Some of Amazon’s customers have had a need to query the archival data, which to date hasn’t been a fast or easy process. The new Glacier Select service aims to solve that challenge by enabling AWS users to run queries on data stored at rest in Amazon Glacier.

The IoT Device Defender enables organizations to manage fleets of IoT devices to help minimize potential security risks.

The GuardDuty system analyzes API calls made to running virtual resources in a customer’s AWS account to help detect anomalous activity that could be indicative of a security risk.

The Amazon Kinesis Video Streams service is a new version of the AWS Kinesis streaming data service. The video streams edition enables users to securely ingest and store video, audio and other time-coded data.

AWS’ Rekognition video service is able to detect people and objects inside of videos and provide analysis for further inspection.

The new Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) provides a managed Kubernetes container orchestration system that is optimized for Amazon’s cloud. “EKS makes running Kubernetes as a managed service on top of AWS much, much easier,” Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, said during his keynote.

Fargate is a serverless service from AWS for deploying containers. “AWS Fargate allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters,” Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, said during his re:Invent keynote. “It totally changes the way that you can run containers.”

The AWS Cloud9 Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) is now generally available, providing developers with a cloud-based tool for writing, running and debugging code.

AWS’ new Serverless Application Repository service lets cloud users share and reuse serverless functions.

Amazon’s Lambda serverless service is being expanded and now includes support for AWS API Gateway VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) integration. Lambda is also being expanded with support for the .Net Core 2.0 and Go programming languages.

“If voice is the natural way for interacting with things in the home and for home automation, why not build something that you can actually use at work as well?” Werner Vogels, CTO of AWS, said during his re:Invent keynote. “Alexa for Business is a fully managed service for having many Alexa devices at work.”