Corey QuinnGood morning; it's time for Adam Selipsky's #awsreinvent keynote. I'm here at Sugarcane thanks to the fine folks at MongoDB, and I'm about to see whether or not this keynote is going to get me into "15 shots of whiskey, please" territory before 9AM.
Adam Selipsky walks on to "Sweet Child of Mine." I just lost $5; I was sure it'd be "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." On balance, this is why he's the CEO and I'm the gadfly...
The annual "AWS Customer Eye Chart, Automotive Edition" slide.
Honestly at this point it'd be visually cleaner and easier on the team to just put up the dozen or so companies on the planet who aren't using AWS.
"Why is all of this happening on AWS?" Because a lot of your competition was asleep at the wheel and still oh so very clearly DOES NOT GET THEIR CUSTOMERS, if I'm being honest. I wish it was otherwise; I don't want there to be only one reasonable choice to build upon; competition benefits everyone.
Talking about the AZ separation model. What a fantastic waste of money; why not just slap a pair of racks into a burned out warehouse and call it a day like Azure does?
(The entire AWS global infrastructure is an oft-overlooked but incredible differentiator.)
S3 Intelligent Tiering has saved customers over $2 billion.
Honestly, based upon what I've seen I'm surprised it's not more. That service has gotten awesomely cost efficient since launch; it should probably be your default storage class unless you're doing something "special."
First announcement of the day: new storage class for S3: S3 Express One Zone.
For those wondering, this is the last of four announcements I was told about in advance. Everything from here on out is as new to me as it is to you.
This is not a general purpose storage tier; super fast access, located in a single AZ, built for massive request volume. Think "ML project."
Pinterest has seen 10x faster write speed with a 40% cost reduction.
Now talking about Graviton. He's right; it's time to use it. A watershed moment was Arm support by other cloud vendors; having a theoretical exodus path is important.
And now announcing Graviton 4!
Didn't see that one coming; I thought it was still a year away based upon industy scuttlebutt.
But R8g instances are available today in preview. I'll be requesting one as my annual ec2 dev box upgrade!
Now talking about generative AI. To his credit he's not claiming to be the industry leader in it, and there is significant value in the space.
Talking about the three layers of the stack. He's not wrong--but customers increasingly care about the top part, whereas AWS excels at the bottom part.
Talking about their GPU instances. I have customers who have done everything this side of "slitting throats" to get more of them. This is a very real, very painful challenge for customers today.
And Nvidia Jensen Huang takes the stage at what, his eighth cloud company keynote this year? At this point I think he's a DevRel guy who got frustrated at having his CFP submissions turned down so he found an alternate path to get to talk at more conferences.
Feels like he's going a bit off script here. But what's AWS gonna do, upset the guy who controls the only GPUs the industry is talking about? I think not!
Adam takes over again. "Now let's talk about capacity."
You just talked to the guy who could do something about it! You missed the window, Adam! If you want something from someone, you've gotta ask them in a situation in which they cannot possibly refuse!
Announcing AWS Trainium2. I'd be more excited about it if I saw any of the AI blog posts from folks way smarter than me talking about using Trainium chips.
Instead we're here, where if I want to use Trainium instead of Nvidia chips I have to get a whole lot better at a lot of stuff very quickly...
Instead we're here, where if I want to use Trainium instead of Nvidia chips I have to get a whole lot better at a lot of stuff very quickly...
Giant logo wall of customers using Bedrock.
I do wonder what the inclusion criteria is. "One engineer somewhere spins it up for ten minutes," or something more strategic.
Talking about how multiple providers of multiple models is the future. He kinda has to say that, otherwise he's ceding the sector to Microsoft / OpenAI / they're the same thing.
Guest speaker Dario Amodei from Anthropic is up next. I've been playing with the Claude line a bit; they've got something going over there for sure.
Didn't love the reference Adam made to "the events of the last ten days." Everyone knows OpenAI was a clownshow, but when YOU say it it just comes across as petty and insecure.
I'd love to see the OpenAI models in AWS and I am not even slightly kidding: I *do not trust* the OpenAI / Azure data security story. Run them on AWS and a lot of that fear goes away. I doubt I'm alone here.
Now talking about Titan. "25 year track record with AI and ML." Yes, we all remember such hits as "Alexa," and "the awesome Amazon search results."
RAG with knowledge base s now available in Bedrock. This may be what I've been looking for in my "tune a model on my corpus of work" experiments...
Talking about Bedrock at Delta. Because nobody does "subterranean" quite like an airline?
Try the veal.
My overall problem with Bedrock is that it's supposed to provide a common API for different FMs, but each model wants its own payload format.
Okay, apparently the gloves are off and there's no reason to be diplomatic anymore when it comes to comparing AWS's AI offerings to OpenAI's?
I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through.
Announcement: Guardrails for Bedrock.
On some level this is the most corporate thing ever: "OMG computers have a sense of humor now" --> "holy crap how do we rip out its sense of humor?"
Pfizer is the next pfeatured customer; talking about how AI has saved them money on drug research.
Now talking about Amazon CodeWhisperer which I misheard earlier as GoatWhisperer and will forever be using instead.
It's GitHub Copilot before Copilot started being slapped everywhere as a brand and also massively improved.
Announcing Amazon Q, a generative AI assistant designed to help you at work and also storm the Capitol. Or alternately, to hurl you through time and space to help teach you life lessons.
Oh, this is what I stumbled across by accident a few days ago. Going super well!
Ooh, Amazon Q Code Transformation. It's designed to keep things current by replacing deprecated code and whatnot.
Here's an acid test: can it automatically upgrade my Lambda functions to use the latest runtime of its given language so I don't have to care about deprecations of things I haven't touched in years anymore?
And now Dr. Matt Wood is here to talk about Q some more.
"It's designed to become an expert in your business." Gotta be honest, I'm not sure some companies are themselves experts in their own businesses.
So "Q" means a bunch of different things, like "SageMaker" or "Copilot" or "Customer Obsession."
"What could go wrong with naming a service a single letter?"
Well, you're gonna have to fix the console search bar, as a first pass.
So Q is either $20 (business) or $25 (builder) a month, which is a big ask for an unproven service in preview.
GitHub Copilot launched in beta for free, and is now $19 a month.
Oh, and it's for a minimum of 10 users. Great. Great. Do they somehow think that's going to deter me from signing up and shitposting about it?
Then again, Q may be the thing that finally gets Amazonians to talk efficiently with other Amazonians. Maybe I'll have to broker fewer introductions?
Note that it's $20 per user, 10 user minimum, per billing period. Including the current one. It is November 28th.
True story: The first incarnation of The Duckbill Group was called "The Quinn Advisory Group," and the logo was a stylized Q. Had we not already reformed the company, we would have changed that branding immediately after January 6 because we are not, y'know. Idiots.
BMW guest speaker now, talking about the in-car AI powered stuff in their new cars. Study after study has shown that buttons are safer than touchscreens, but good UX has absolutely no place whatsoever at an AWS conference.
Coming soon to a head-on collision near you.
"Your data is your differentiator" is a bold slide to have in a keynote whose implicit theme is "please give us your data."
For a minute the background was showing a ball being passed from the left to the right, and Adam Selipsky was the lead character in a corporate version of "Pong."
I'm going to duck out early to head to the EnterpriseDB booth; come by after the keynote and ask me anything about the various things we've all just witnessed.
Darryl Ramm@Quinnypig Oh come on, it's not like AWS won't sell it back to you...🤔
Matt Brunt@Quinnypig "your data is our differentiator"
Nic Wise@Quinnypig 190TB of traffic. Now I see why BMW are expensive : to pay the bandwidth bill
falkduebbert@Quinnypig The UX-designers live in Moosach or Schwabingen and don't drive regularly. So they design like the thing they use: their smartphone
Metin Seven 🎨@Quinnypig Sweet memories! I clearly remember Avril Harrison's sketched portrait of Daniel M. Silva, the man behind Deluxe Paint (DPaint). 👍
Francis 🏴☠️ Gulotta
Ric Harvey 🇪🇺🌍💚@Quinnypig this is just a continuation of enterprise first day 2 thinking imho. I still say support the developers first and deliver for them, that’s how adoption works these days
Christopher Osborn@Quinnypig I’m looking forward to meeting Dorey, Eorey, Forey, Gorey…
Corey Gilmore@Quinnypig if there wasn’t a minimum number of users for Q then you lose out on the “where one of us goes, we go together” team/community aspect! WWG1WGA if you will. 🌌🧠
Justin Brodley@Quinnypig Their going for the Microsoft 365 Copilot model... just be glad they didn't require a minimum of 300 users....
Ben Ramsey@Quinnypig Did they do any focus groups on branding before launching this because the first thing that comes to mind is QAnon, and I’m sure that’s not something they want folks to think about when they hear Amazon Q…unless it is? 😂
@Quinnypig Maybe we’re supposed to think about it in terms of Amazon Q generating bullshit just like Q (of QAnon) generates bullshit.
Chris Abbey@ramsey @Quinnypig I was assuming they were going for Q from 007… the Quarter Master that gave you all the shiny toys and told you how to use them. While I had thought of the Q in GQP, I hadn’t even considered the Q from ST:TNG.
@Quinnypig Its a tale of two worlds.... next-gen AI-driven Redshift Nonsense... or Q...
R Tyler Croy 🦀@Quinnypig Q or "Amazon Q" for short
Sean Coates@Quinnypig Two teams talking to each other like you suggest is *too much pizza*.
She smashes@Quinnypig posts like this is why I prefer to catch up on reinvent fro you than the keynote 😂
Simon LucyI made this a life choice.
Kevin@Quinnypig why would you pick a name for an AI that reminds people of the huge misinformation group that is Qanon? Omg this is dumb.
Ben Kehoe
Bill, organizer of stuff@Quinnypig OMG, it's AWS Watson! 🤯
Nick Lockwood@Quinnypig uh, it's also associated with "loony wingnut pro-Trump conspiracy theorists" but I guess that didn't come up when they did their marketing research.
J Λ M Ξ S@Quinnypig should we refer to all of those as Q*?