Day 1: re:Invent 2024 from the basement

I'm not at re:Invent this year. It's ok, I was able to go last year, and will attempt to attend next year. But, I am observing from afar, from the comfort of my home and probably JFK27 tomorrow where others like me will attend watch parties and talk about how much walking is involved when you attend a conference like re:Invent.

Vegas or New York, I am still here to follow the announcements, try out new services and capabilities, and start trying to figure out how I am going to share what I've learned with customers, as that is a major part of my job.

So here are some things I noticed from the first day of keynotes.

Pleasantly today's keynotes were not entirely focused on Generative AI. GenAI is of course a major center of gravity, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future at AWS (and all big tech companies), but at the last couple big AWS Events it seemed like little else mattered. In fact, some of the announcements today that really stood out to me were centered around data and analytics, distributed systems and storage, with some GenAI sprinkled on top.

I was really excited to see Amazon Aurora DSQL launch. In my mind, it feels like we are headed to a place where the choice will be between Amazon DynamoDB for key-value/NoSQL or Aurora DSQL for relational data. Both scale to zero, both offer all of the levers to pull you'd expect to see from a cloud native service, and well, both seem like the future compared to just about everything else. I'm very excited to see how this new service takes off and matures over time.

The announcement around our next generation of SageMaker Studio was also very interesting, and when combined with the Amazon S3 Tables launch, it feels like data/analytics/ai/ml are all finally being thought of as one big suite of powerful services–a modern data architecture.

On the GenAI front, I was pleased to see the Nova models during Andy Jassy's talk. I'm really excited to start hacking on them with Chat-CLI and other projects I am working on, and curious to see how they fit with other models available through Amazon Bedrock and other providers. It's great we are continuing to invest in developing our own point of view here.

There's been so many announcements and its only the end of Day 1. If you want an easy way to follow all the news, do check out this really nice (and unofficial) AWS News website!