One of the many announcements made by Amazon Web Services Inc. at the kickoff of re:Invent 2018 in Las Vegas on Monday evening was a network service that automates traffic routing through edge locations. The AWS Global Accelerator will route customers’ network traffic across multiple cloud regions.

“What you’re seeing is Amazon recognizing that internet of things at the edge is sensors, it’s wind farms,” said John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the opening day analysis at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. “Amazon is recognizing this, increasing power and compute to the edge, offering connectivity options where there isn’t any, making things faster with compute, and then moving up the stack. This is going to be a big part of this show.”

Furrier was joined at the conference by co-hosts Justin Warren (@jpwarren) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), and they discussed the release of new products and expectations for additional insight from AWS executives on business strategy.

Bringing compute to data

The recognition by AWS of enterprise interest in bringing more connectivity to edge computing is also an acknowledgment that as volume increases, the rising amount of data will demand compute power to process it.

“I can only imagine the explosion we’re going to see in data coming from sensors and IoT,” Walls said.

In addition to the Global Accelerator, AWS also introduced a new Arm-based cloud chip for running applications at lower cost, a network adapter that the company claims will deliver the equivalent of on-premises performance for computing clusters, and enhancements for “serverless” computing. Analysts viewed the most recent announcements as another example of how AWS has made itself ubiquitous in the enterprise.

“That was their idea, to be the utility service that is the one true way that you should use it,” Warren said. “It will be ubiquitous in the same way that you have power as a utility; you rent it and just use it, and you build other things on top of that. It’s interesting to see that Amazon themselves are building things on top of what they’ve already created.”

The week-long conference is expected to generate additional news, and the analysts will be looking for insight from AWS executives on the company’s strategy for overcoming resistance to migrate certain legacy applications to the cloud, such as payroll, along with how the firm plans to deal with rising interest in containers.

“I’m trying to look for chess moves on the board,” Furrier said. “Containers and Kubernetes is a big one.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent:

Photo: AWS