It’s evident that Amazon Web Services, Inc. heard the concerns of its  customers and potential clients,as it has launched some much-needed products to transform the way the enterprise takes on the cloud computing challenge.

Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), took the stage to launch the Amazon re:Invent 2015 event hosted in Las Vegas. In his keynote, Jassy spelled out Amazon’s position toward the enterprise consumer and the latest developments both being implemented and in the pipeline. Those weren’t the only announcements, as AWS highlighted some of its latest strategic partnerships and innovations for consumers and the company’s partners.

The model

Amazon sees itself as delivering the fastest, most comprehensive infrastructure combined with a platform for utilization that operates and scales as needed based on a customer’s dynamic means, according to Jassy. For financial institutions, this means that resources can be allocated in periods of high demand, Black Friday for example, with the increase in the number of transactions from a normal day and the dynamic allocation of necessary scaling translating directly into lower costs as firms pay only for what’s utilized.

Consumers and partners

The notoriety of the companies who do business with AWS and have decided to adopt its platform from day one or later is enormous. Huge players, such as Netflix, Pfizer, and even the USDA, public and private, all see AWS as their future.

General Electric Company’s CIO Jim Fowler announced its plans to adopt AWS going forward. Ahead of GE in its use of AWS is Capital One Financial, whose CIO, Rob Alexander, revealed the latest Capital One App for iPhone and soon iPad and Android.

In growing partnerships, Accenture, LLP’s CSO, Omar Abbosh, announced deepening ties with AWS and the AWS Marketplace by announcing the formation of Accenture AWS Business Group in an effort to help firms move to the cloud. It joins over 2,500 integrated systems partners who have already partnered with Amazon and the over 1 million active consumers.

‘Seven freedoms’ that AWS enables

1. Freedom to build unfettered: Developers should be allowed to focus on being creative makers instead of solving the same problem over and over again or dealing with infrastructure.
2. Freedom to get the real value from your data: Insights should be allowed to be shared, and the data that’s generated should provide real changes that can drive business decisions.
3. Freedom to get data into and out of the cloud easily: The ability for enterprise consumers to easily move their data in and out of the cloud as needed, securely and quickly.
4. Freedom to from bad database relationships: Databases of the past are expensive, proprietary and difficult, and AWS sees itself as a solution.
5. Freedom to migrate: Moving data should be easy so that enterprise consumers can focus on innovating and not how they’re going to get what they need where it belongs.
6. Freedom to secure your cake and eat it too: Security and performance are achievable, and one doesn’t need to be chosen over the other. Most firms saw greater compliance and security by switching to AWS.
7. The freedom to say yes: CIOs should be able to say yes to developers and the other creative minds of the firm because the cost of implementing new ideas is greatly reduced using AWS.

Delivering on freedom with new products

Those freedoms, in many cases, came with an accompanying product announcement that demonstrated how AWS is delivering on its promises of more freedom.

Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a simple business intelligence platform that allows for fast analysis of data and utilizes AWS Autograph to automatically recommend a visualization of the data that’s been analyzed. It also suggests what relationships exist in the data and can pull from any allowed data stored in any form on AWS.

This new analytical tool is powered by a new proprietary technology called SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) and can be used “to share the data, to give it to non-technical individuals for insight” at a price tag of one-tenth the cost of other options, according to AWS.

Amazon Kinesis Firehose

Amazon Kinesis Firehose takes Kinesis Streams to the next level by allowing simple storage allocation of real-time data that’s generated. This is all achieved with one simple API now instead of previously needing an entire team to engineer an application around.

Amazon Snowball

Amazon Snowball is a highly secure storage container with an Amazon Kindle interface set in a tamper-proof enclosure. It supplies 50 terabytes of secure, end-to-end encrypted storage that allows firms to mail their sensitive data to Amazon for upload. This speeds up the data migration process and is considerably cheaper than existing alternatives in the market at only $200 per job, according to Amazon.

AWS Database Migration Service and MariaDB

AWS Database Migration Service allows production databases to move quickly with minimal downtime. MariaDB is a similar service also announced at the event that allows migration from open-source MySQL and is maintained by the company.

Schema Conversion Tool

This tool allows database engines to reliably be migrated and the appropriate transformations of tools to take place. This allows for enterprise consumers to shift away from proprietary to more openly supported database engines.

AWS Config Rules

The AWS Config Rules allows users to set up compliance rules for resources and triggers automatic preset actions if that rule is violated.

Amazon Inspector

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment tool that looks for vulnerabilities and potential security threats and either sends an alert or can be programmed to provide a solution. The tool, in essence, deals with problems before they happen.

You can watch the entire keynote on Amazon Web Services site, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Amazon re:Invent 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE