The new head of Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky, made his Re:Invent debut as CEO on Tuesday with a glut of announcements for compute, networking and data.
The former Tableau boss returned to the cloud giant earlier in the year to take over from Andy Jassy, who has now taken over the top job of its parent company, Amazon.
Jassy’s Re:Invent keynotes were notoriously long and always full of new products. Selipsky gave a much shorter presentation than his predecessor, but there was no skimping on the announcements.
It started with a new in-house processor – Graviton 3 – which will power new Amazon Ec2 C7g instances. Available in preview, EC2 C7g instances will provide the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for compute-intensive workloads such as high-performance computing, gaming, video encoding, and CPU-based machine learning inference, according to Selipsky.
What’s more, these instances are the first in the cloud to feature cutting edge DDR5 memory technology, which AWS said will provide 50% more bandwidth than DDR4 memory. C7g instances will provide 20% higher networking bandwidth compared to previous generation C6g instances based on the Graviton 2 processors.
Selipsky also unveiled Inf1 Instances for EC2, also in preview, which is a Trainium-based AWS service. AWS Trainium is the second machine learning chip built by AWS that is optimised for high-performance deep learning training. Selipsky said the Trn1 instances will deliver “best price performance” for training deep learning models in the cloud, which includes use cases such as natural language processing and image recognition. They support up to 16 Trainium accelerators, up to 800 Gbps of EFA networking throughput and ultra-high-speed intra-instance connectivity for the fastest ML training in Amazon EC2.
Moving on to data, Selipsky announced AWS Mainframe Modernization, a new platform for mainframe migration. This will allow customers to shift and modernise their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS. This service currently supports two main migration patterns: re-platforming and automated refactoring.
The announcements also included 5G, which is becoming increasingly prominent at AWS events. On Tuesday it was a preview of AWS Private 5G, a new managed service that helps enterprises set up and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities in just days. It takes just a few clicks in an AWS console for customers to specify where they want to build a mobile network and the network capacity needed for their devices. From there AWS delivers and maintains the small cell radio units, servers, 5G core and radio access network (RAN) software, and subscriber identity modules (SIM cards) required to set up a private 5G network and connect devices.