When Amazon Web Services last held its re:Invent conference one year ago, the process of digital transformation was making slow but steady progress. Then the world was suddenly turned upside down and shaken vigorously.

A global pandemic, a huge shock to the world economy, and a major shift in how humans live and work suddenly reordered priorities. Nearly every business of any size was forced to move to a digital platform to continue to function effectively, which had profound implications for AWS as the world’s leading public cloud provider.

The question would no longer be how to migrate business operations to the cloud, because that question was largely settled. Now the focus for many firms would be how to manage the business once it was operating in the cloud. This has become the focus for AWS and every other major cloud provider as the clock ticks down on a tumultuous 2020 and ushers in what is, in many respects, a new decade.

“The next 10 years will be different,” said Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon and host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. “The cloud is now the center of innovation. The coming decade will bring a new ecosystem built around a hyper-disaggregated system that spans the public cloud, on-premises/hybrid installations, cross-cloud connections, and an expansion to the edge. The software and infrastructure innovations built on this system will touch every industry and power a digital revolution that will permanently change the lives of most people on the planet.”

Innovation across multiple computing platforms will be just one of the topics addressed during AWS re:Invent 2020, and theCUBE will cover the virtual three-week event beginning Dec. 1. Coverage will feature interviews with AWS executives, industry experts and thought leaders, with a focus on the latest advances in AWS technologies, the importance of data in the coming decade, the impact of the global pandemic on enterprises, partner ecosystem update, and what organizations should expect from cloud providers in the years ahead. (* Disclosure below.)

Less cost and faster processing

While the pandemic has clearly altered the enterprise landscape, demands on cloud providers remain similar to those of a year ago. Companies want cloud services that are less costly, faster, more secure and tailored for specific hybrid needs. Over the past nine months, AWS has offered plenty of evidence that this will also be its agenda moving forward.

Cloud costs have spawned the rise of a new movement to control expenses, known as FinOps, removing barriers between development/engineering and finance. A tightening in the economy, especially among hard-hit sectors, such as hospitality and travel, has brought renewed scrutiny to the price of digital transformation.

Within the past two months, AWS has reduced the cost for use of its popular SageMaker artificial intelligence service, launched a process to receive alerts if AWS expenses exceed budgeted limits, and highlighted up to 60% lower cost for its EC2 P4d instances announced in November.

“We think of the migrations and we only think about their technical success,” said Sasha Kipervarg, co-founder of Stealth Startup and former head of global cloud operations and special projects at LiveRamp Inc., during a recent interview with theCUBE. “If you migrate to the cloud and you do it technically and you containerize and it’s on schedule, but then you blow your budget, was it really a success?”

Companies may want to save money in the current climate, but speed remains a critical factor for users, especially since the number of businesses running on the cloud has swelled dramatically and digital competition has increased. And the road to providing higher performance at faster speeds generally runs through the processor.

AWS has made a series of announcements over the past year to keep pace with the need for speed. In June, the company announced general availability of Arm-based Graviton2 processors, with four times more compute cores and five times faster memory than previous A1 instances.

The company has also implemented new processing power through release in July of i3en.metal instances for VMware Cloud on AWS using the second-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor.

Hybrid and security support

Cloud users have made it clear they want hybrid solutions. A survey earlier this year found that 87% of enterprises had a hybrid cloud strategy, and AWS has responded this past year with a series of moves to address customer interest in options for where to run application workloads.

Last year’s re:Invent saw general availability for Outposts, Amazon’s hybrid cloud offering. The company has continued to extend the solution by adding 32 partners for its Outposts Ready Program in September, including Pure Storage Inc. and Citrix Systems Inc., and making S3 available to Outposts customers as though it was operating out of an AWS region.

Outposts is also playing a key role in supporting customer interest in compute services at the edge. The solution is a building block for Wavelength, a process for embedding Amazon servers in telco edge platforms. Over the past several months, AWS has been quietly opening mobile edge computing platforms in seven U.S. cities in partnership with Verizon Communications Inc. for the telco’s 5G edge deployment.

“The edge will be won by developers,” Vellante noted. “I see a lot of companies taking a top-down approach, throwing boxes over the fence to the edge as a way to just sell more compute. What Amazon is doing is bringing its cloud stack to the edge and giving developers a programmable infrastructure platform to create new applications for edge and IoT workloads.”

With cloud costs, 5G, edge and hybrid all occupying customer attention, there is still one factor that continues to be number one in the minds of many customers: security. The computing industry has seen a steady drumbeat of announcements from AWS in this area since January.

The cloud provider has rolled out new services and products, such as machine learning-driven Fraud Detector for online payments and Amazon Detective, which enables faster investigation into security issues affecting AWS workloads. To address potential issues with S3 vulnerabilities, AWS added security and access control features that control permissions and ownership of objects.

More recently, AWS announced general availability for Nitro Enclaves, which isolates compute environments within EC2 instances to protect workloads, and released Network Firewall, a new managed security service.

In an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE a year ago, just prior to re:Invent, AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy made the point that enterprises need to take more than just baby steps into the cloud. Meeting the demands of the customer experience would take bold transformation, according to Jassy, a belief that now seems quite prescient given how events have transpired since then.

“Enterprises realize that if they want to be successful, sustainable companies over time, they can’t just make small, incremental changes,” Jassy said. “They have to think about what their customers want and what’s the customer experience that’s going to be the one that’s demanded over time. And, usually, that requires a pretty big change or transformation.”

Big change has arrived, and AWS, as the dominant player in the public cloud market, finds itself poised to take a leading role for digital transformation well into the current decade.

Livestream of the AWS re:Invent 2020

The AWS re:Invent 2020 is a three-week virtual conference with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of the AWS re:Invent 2020, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual conference

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual experience include AWS’ Sandy Carter, vice president of AWS Public Sector partners; Dave Brown, VP of elastic compute cloud, EC2; and Matt Garman, VP of AWS sales and marketing.

Also joining theCUBE will be Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer of VMware; Trish Damkroger, VP and general manager of the Technical Computing Initiative at Intel; Justin Fitzhugh, VP of engineering – cloud engineering and release/quality at Snowflake; Ram Venkatesh, VP of engineering at Cloudera; Rik Tamm-Daniels, VP of strategic ecosystems and technology at Informatica; and Mark Lohmeyer, senior VP and GM of cloud services at VMware.

Other guests include Rick Turnock, global head of enterprise data services at Invesco; Chris Cagnazzi, senior VP and GM of the Cloud Solutions Group at Presidio; and Joe Duffy, founder and chief executive officer of Pulumi.

For the complete list of guests, click here.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS re:Invent 2020. Neither Amazon Web Services, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: AWS