UPDATED 00:54 EDT / OCTOBER 08 2015

NEWS

AWS re:Invent 2015 news roundup | #reinvent

Amazon Web Services’ Senior Vice President Andy Jassy took to the stage at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas yesterday to announce a whole raft of new services during his keynote.

In just two hours, AWS lifted the lid on Snowball, QuickSight, Kinesis Firehose, Inspector, a new Database Migration Service, the Schema Conversion Tool, Config Rules and the MariaDB database engine. There were also major announcements from the consulting firm Accenture Plc, which announced a new AWS Business Group, and from Big Data firm Teradata Corp., which has made its Teradata Database warehousing and analytic solution available on the AWS cloud. In addition, Jassy also found the time to reveal AWS now has a $7.3 billion annual revenue rate. Not bad for one day.

Amazon Snowball dumps Big Data into to the cloud

Kicking off with what’s probably the most curious announcement of the day, for a company that’s 100% cloud-orientated anyway, AWS unveiled its first piece of HARDWARE, a 50 TB storage server for dumping massive datasets into its cloud.

The idea behind Snowball is simple enough. Amazon has a lot of big customers, and those big customers have lots of Big Data. So much in fact, that it’s just not practical to upload all of that data into AWS’ cloud from their on-premise data centers. As Jassy pointed out on stage, uploading 100 TB to its cloud via a 100 MB connection would take exactly 100 days, which is far too long to be practical. The solution – AWS ships out its Snowball servers, customers upload their data into the box, then ship it straight back to AWS for fast uploading to its cloud. SiliconANGLE‘s Duncan Riley has more about how it all works here.

snowball2

AWS moves into business intelligence with QuickSight

Just as exciting is the launch of AWS QuickSight, a new business intelligence (BI) service hosted in the cloud. Available in preview mode from today, QuickSight will set customers back just “a tenth of the cost of traditional business intelligence providers” said Jassy in his keynote.

That alone will make the service appealing, but Amazon isn’t just trying to beat its competitors on cost – the service itself is pretty damn hot too. Jassy revealed QuickSight is powered by AWS’ new Super-Fast Parallel In-Memory Computation Engine (dubbed SPICE) and can provide visualizations in under 60 seconds, automatically configuring which types of visualization to show first.

“As soon as we recognize an AWS customer and we take all of their data and store it in the various AWS stores,” Jassy said, “we move it to our query engine.”

QuickSight also offers a simple SQL-like interface that can query data held in SPICE, allowing customers to use existing business intelligence tools like Tableau, Domo, Qlik and TIBCO.

“We’re excited that AWS is providing a new way for Tableau customers to leverage their data hosted on AWS,” said Dan Jewett, Vice President, Product Management at Tableau. “Having a fast-performance, in-memory engine that works well with Tableau’s visual analytics will allow our customers to see and understand their data both quickly and efficiently.”

Read more about the solution here.

QuickSight

Kinesis Firehose streams data to the cloud

Next up is Kinesis Firehose, a new service designed to push data from mobile and Web apps, or telemetry systems, into AWS’s storage for further analysis.

Jassy said Kinesis Firehose is compatible with both S3 and RedShift out of the box, with support for other storage services to be introduced later. The way it works is you create an Amazon Kinesis Firehose Delivery Stream in the AWS Management Console and specify the target Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon Redshift table, and the time frequency at which you want data delivered to the destination. Kinesis Firehose can also be configured to batch, compress, and encrypt streaming data before delivery at specified time intervals.

Read more about Kinesis Firehose here.

Amazon Inspector ensures compliance and security

Jassy also revealed a new service designed to automatically find security and compliance problems. Amazon Inspector is an automated service that scans customer’s data to identify potential vulnerabilities, so it can warn customers and propose fixes. The solution draws upon Amazon’s more than twenty-years of expertise, Jassy said in his speech. It generates reports on customer’s security posture and suggests actions they should take.

“You can tell which assessments were done, what findings they have, and what they actually did to remediate,” Jassy explained.

Read more about Amazon Inspector here.

Teradata jumps into the AWS cloud-based

Announced separately, Big Data vendor Teradata Corp. said it’s expanding beyond its own cloud to land on both AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Teradata Database on AWS will be available in Q1 2016 on a pay-per-use basis, the company said. This is a big departure for Teradata, which up until now had only offer its enterprise-class database as an on-premise option atop its own expensive hardware, or through its own cloud. The company said the move was made in response to customers who want to run its database and/or other data warehouses atop of AWS, hence the move was essential really or it could lose out to rival firms.

“In terms of convenience, security, performance, and market adoption, cloud computing has proven its value,” Chris Twogood, Teradata’s Vice President of Product and Services Marketing said in a statement. “By incorporating AWS as the first public cloud offering for deploying a production Teradata Database, we will make it easier for companies of all sizes to become data-driven with best-in-class data warehousing and analytics.”

Read more about Teradata on AWS here.

AWS announces a venture with Accenture

In another development that could possibly prove to be even more significant than today’s product releases, AWS has announced the creation of a business group alongside Accenture Plc aimed at helping enterprises migrate to the cloud.

SiliconANGLE‘s Paul Gillin writes that the move “gives AWS both the reach and the scope to compete with legacy heavyweights”. The initiative is primarily aimed at transformation services and Big Data analytics to begin with, helping customers to familiarize themselves and become more efficient while moving their infrastructure to AWS.

“The Accenture AWS Business Group has been created to empower these organizations to rapidly achieve the agility benefits of moving to AWS so they can eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing their IT infrastructure,” explained Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Support at AWS. “Instead, organizations will be able to focus on adopting new IT operating models, addressing new market opportunities, and growing their business, at the same time they reduce their overall IT costs.”

Read more about the new AWS/Accenture venture here.

AWS unveils new Database Migration Service, Schema Conversion Tool, and MariaDB database engine

Last but not least, Amazon launched a new set of tools aimed at making it easier to deploy databases in production on its cloud. These include the new Database Migration Service that lets companies move entire databases onto the AWS cloud, giving them the opportunity to run at a lower cost.

Databases are pretty complex things though, which is why AWS also launched a free Schema Conversion Tool in tandem with the above service. The Schema Conversion Tool is all about compatibility, altering the schema and database code so companies are sure their existing databases will run on AWS without a hitch after migrating.

And staying with databases, AWS wrapped things up with a new database engine for MariaDB, which means customers can easily deploy a MariaDB database on its cloud via the AWS Management Console in just a few clicks.


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