Here’s everything Amazon Web Services announced at AWS re:Invent

Amazon Web Services kicks off its AWS re:Invent event today from Las Vegas with a rapid-fire stream of announcements, including many unveilings of recent things it’s been working on. 

We know you might not have time to watch the whole keynote, so we’re taking that on and will deliver quick hits of the biggest news as they are announced, all in an easy-to-digest, easy-to-skim list. Here we go!

Stay tuned for more developments throughout the day.

Amazon Q

The big announcement for the day was Amazon Q, an AI-powered chatbot for AWS customers. During his keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky described it as being able to “easily chat, generate content and take actions. It’s all informed by an understanding of your systems, your data repositories and your operations.” Kyle reports that Q is trained on 17 years’ worth of AWS knowledge and will go beyond just answering questions — it will also do things like understand the nuances of app workloads and suggest AWS solutions and products for apps that only run for a few seconds. Read more.

Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock

The new Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock tool lets companies define and limit the kinds of language a model can use. For example, define topics that are out of bounds for the model, so it simply doesn’t answer irrelevant questions, Ron writes. Read more.

New chips

Amazon unveiled the latest generation of its chips for model training and inferencing (i.e., running trained models). Kyle writes that Amazon already discussed AWS Trainium2, designed to deliver up to 4x better performance and 2x better energy efficiency than the first-generation Trainium. The second chip was announced this morning, called the Graviton4, is intended for inferencing. The fourth generation in Amazon’s Graviton chip family (as implied by the “4” appended to “Graviton”), it’s distinct from Amazon’s other inferencing chip, Inferentia. Read more.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

Amazon has a major update to its S3 object storage service called Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new high-performance and low latency tier for S3. Frederic reports that One Zone will offer a major performance improvement for data-intensive applications, including AI/ML training, financial modeling and high-performance computing. Read more.

Going serverless

Amazon announced three new serverless offerings to make it easier to manage Aurora, ElastiCache and Redshift serverless services. Ron writes, “Because each of these options is serverless, it means that Amazon manages all of the hardware in the background, and delivers just the right amount of resources you need, scaling up when needed without IT having to deal with all of the back-end management work.” Read more.

Now that’s using your palm

AWS lifted the lid on a new palm-scanning identity service that allows companies to authenticate people when entering a physical premises. Paul reports that Amazon One Enterprise builds on the company’s existing Amazon One offering, which it debuted back in 2020 to enable biometric payments in Amazon’s own surveillance-powered cashierless stores. Visitors to Amazon Go stores can associate their payment card with their palm print, allowing them to enter the store and complete their transaction by hovering their hand over a scanner. Read more.

Virtual desktop environment

Amazon launched new $195 devices that allow enterprise users to access virtual desktop environments, like Amazon WorkSpaces, over the internet. Sarah writes that the devices are housed in Fire TV Cube hardware — a decision Amazon made to leverage existing expertise from the arm of the retail giant that makes streaming media players. The company explained its decision to build new hardware came from customer feedback about wanting to lower IT spending by replacing desktops and laptops with less expensive hardware. Read more.