In March 2006, Amazon launched its own elastic compute cloud service (Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and cloud computing was officially born.
As a pioneer of cloud computing technology and a leader in the global cloud computing industry, Amazon Web Services has continued to lead the global cloud computing industry through continuous technological innovation in the 17 years since the birth of cloud computing.
Recently, Amazon Web Services re:invent 2023 global conference was held in Las Vegas, USA. So as an annual global feast for the cloud computing industry, what kind of future does this conference reveal for us?
The bellwether of the global cloud computing industry
For a long time, Amazon Web Services re:invent Global Conference has been praised by industry insiders as the vane of the cloud computing industry. This year's re:invent was even larger, attracting more than 350,000 virtual and in-person attendees, as well as more than 2,200 events including keynotes, exhibitions, hands-on labs, hackathons, and more. At this year's re:invent conference, Amazon Web Services released more than 200 new services and features, as well as more than 350 ongoing updates.
Cloud computing, pioneered by Amazon Web Services, can be said to truly benefit all enterprises. On the one hand, many large and medium-sized enterprises, including the vast majority of the world's top 500 enterprises, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, NASDAQ, Pfizer, Novartis, Roche, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Siemens, Schneider and other well-known enterprises, are using the solutions provided by Amazon Web Services and its partners
On the other hand, because cloud computing has greatly lowered the threshold for the application of IT infrastructure, the majority of small and medium-sized enterprises have benefited a lot. According to a report from research firm Pitchbook, there are currently more than 1,000 unicorns or startups valued at more than $1 billion, and more than 80% of unicorns are running workloads on Amazon Web Services, including cybersecurity company Whiz, genomics company Dnanexus, generative AI startup Anthropic, Stability AI, and so on.
Chen Xiaojian, General Manager of the Product Department of Amazon Web Services Greater China, pointed out that Amazon Web Services has always adhered to the concept of working backwards, building products based on the needs of millions of customers, and continuing to lead technological innovation. As a pioneer of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services has not only been empowering customers' applications with the most secure and reliable enterprise-level capabilities, but also has never stopped exploring various methods and more optimized ways to find the best solution to solve customer pain points, which is also the origin and significance of the re:invent "Reinvent and Innovate" conference.
Amazon Web Services reinvents cloud computing
Chen Xiaojian said that innovation never ends, and as a technology company that writes innovation into its DNA, Amazon Web Services is reshaping cloud computing from the bottom of cloud computing.
1. Reinvent cloud infrastructure:Amazon Web Services' global infrastructure already spans 32 geographic regions around the world, with plans to add 5 more regions. Amazon Web Services now has three times as many data centers, 60 percent more services, and 40 percent more features than the second-largest cloud provider. Just last month, the Amazon Kuiper team successfully launched the first two prototype satellites into orbit.
2. Reshape storage:Amazon Web Services has announced the release of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new high-performance object storage that uses hardware and software specifically designed to accelerate data processing, delivering up to 10x faster performance than Amazon S3 standard storage, while being able to process millions of requests per minute with consistent millisecond latency while reducing request costs by 50%.
3. Reshape general-purpose computing chipsMore than 50,000 customers are already using Amazon's GR**ITON family of chips to reduce costs and increase efficiency for their businesses. Amazon EC2 C7G, M7G, and R7G instances powered by Amazon GR**ITON3 processors are generally available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) and China (Ningxia) Regions, providing higher performance, faster memory, and more energy efficiency. This year's Re:Invent conference also released two self-developed chips, Amazon GR**ITON4 and Amazon Trainium2, of which GR**ITon4 has a 30% higher performance than the previous generation, an increase of more than 50% in independent cores, and a more than 75% increase in memory bandwidthTrainium2 is 4x faster to train, 2x more energy efficient, and can deploy up to 100,000 chips in EC2 Ultraclusters than its predecessor.
4. Reshape serverless:In order to help customers achieve better business resilience and better cost effectiveness, Amazon Web Services has launched a series of serverless products such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon Lambda, and Amazon Fargate. At this year's Re:Invent, Amazon Web Services continues to deliver three new serverless service innovations, including Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, Amazon ElastiCache Serverless, and Amazon Redshift Serverless, enabling customers to scale their data infrastructure faster and easier to support their most challenging use cases.
Generative AI is reshaping the future
From responsible AI to data security capabilities, Amazon Web Services has made multi-dimensional updates. We always put the stringent requirements of the enterprise at the forefront of our product design concept. As a pioneer and leader in cloud computing, Amazon Web Services believes in and practices this philosophy to ensure that we are the best choice for enterprises to build and apply generative AI. When talking about generative AI, the biggest hot topic at the moment, Chen Xiaojian said.
Chen Xiaojian pointed out that generative AI has become the primary focus of business leaders in various industries and organizations, and Amazon Web Services is reshaping every industry and changing everyone's life by lowering the threshold for related applications and making generative AI truly inclusive. At this year's Re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services also released the generative AI technology stack, which continues to invest in generative AI from three different levels.
1. Bottom layer: The infrastructure layer, which provides users with infrastructure for model training and inference. At Re:Invent 2023, Amazon Web Services and NVIDIA announced several important collaborations, including the availability of the first cloud AI supercomputer powered by NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip and Amazon Web Services UltraClusters technologyThe first NVIDIA DGX cloud to use NVIDIA's latest GH200 NVL32 chip is coming to Amazon Web ServicesThe two companies will use the world's fastest GPU-powered AI supercomputer and NVIDIA DGX cloud supercomputer for NVIDIA AI training, R&D, and custom model development through Project CEIBA. At the same time, Amazon Web Services also announced Amazon Trainium2, a dedicated chip for generative AI and machine Xi training, and the Amazon SageMaker HyperPod service, which can accelerate basic model training at scale and dramatically reduce training time.
2. Middle layer: The tool service layer, which provides tools to build and fine-tune the needs of the model using the basic model. Amazon Web Services believes that Amazon Bedrock is by far the easiest way to build and scale generative AI applications with large models. Customers from all walks of life are already using Amazon Bedrock to reinvent user experiences, products, and processes, and bring AI to the core of their businesses. Through model selection, model customization, model integration, and other steps, Amazon Web Services can help enterprises customize large models with their own data, create valuable generative AI applications, and truly serve their own businesses. In addition, Amazon Web Services can protect generative AI applications through responsible AI policies to protect customers' data security and privacy.
3. Top layer: the application layer, which provides applications built using the basic model. For enterprise users, Amazon Web Services has released Amazon Q, a generative AI job assistant tailored specifically for their business. Drawing on 17 years of knowledge and industry experience from Amazon Web Services, the assistant can answer a variety of professional questions from customers through multiple interfaces, allowing customers to quickly get answers, generate content, and take action through natural language interactions. For enterprise customers, Amazon Q is not only an Amazon Web Services expert, but also an enterprise business expert, business intelligence expert, and contact center expert who can help enterprises reshape the future of work.
Chen Xiaojian said that for generative AI, a strong data foundation is crucial, and a strong data foundation should be comprehensive, integrated, and governed. To this end, Amazon Web Services has released a series of services such as Amazon RDS for Db2, Amazon OpenSearch Serverless, Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon MemoryDB for Redis to meet different types of data processing needs through comprehensive data servicesIn addition, through the zero-ETL integration features of Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL and Amazon Redshift, customers do not need to build and manage complex extractions, Transform and load (ETL) data pipelines to connect and analyze data quickly and easilyWith the release of Amazon DataZone AI Recommendations Preview and Amazon Clean Rooms ML Preview, we can ensure effective governance of data while maintaining business agility.
Like all complex technologies such as cloud computing, satellite networks, and generative AI, although the future is unknown, as an explorer and pioneer of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services has always practiced innovative practices, breaking through complex technologies for customers, realizing the benefits of technology with remodeling, and helping customers continue to reshape their businesses with our reshaping of the underlying technology. Chen Xiaojian said.
This Amazon Web Services Re:Infent conference continues to innovate in the field of generative AI, while upgrading and iterating on basic products. Among them, the impressive main ones include: comprehensively deepening serverless, promoting the 'serverless' of all products such as database, data analysis, and AI, and continuing to maintain the leading layout in cloud native;We will continue to provide strong capability support for the development of generative AI, including not only more advanced computing resources brought by cooperation with chip vendors such as NVIDIA, but also a capability platform for 'select' multi-model access through Amazon Bedrock products, with more emphasis on ecological construction in the field of generative AI." Wang Chengfeng, research director of iResearch, said.