AWS launches slew of new services to fend off competition

• Bundle of services launched confirming its bid to stay ahead in the cloud game
• May be a victim of its own success as customers, partners may be overwhelmed

GLOBAL cloud player Amazon Web Services (AWS) Inc made a big splash of its new and extensive array of cloud services, and how it is the only public cloud computing vendor which has the depth and breadth that customers can rely upon to ensure success amidst growing competition from the other cloud competitors.

The series of new services announcements were designed to reinforce the notion that AWS is the cloud provider to choose from if customers want to succeed in moving their workloads to the cloud, in an easy, reliable and secure manner.

Speaking to some 43,000 delegates at this week’s ongoing re:Invent 2017 annual cloud conference in Las Vegas – an increase of more than 9,000 from last year’s event – AWS cloud czar Andy Jassy (pic) noted that when companies choose an infrastructure technology from which to build their business on, they’re really putting the survival of their company in the hands of the cloud partner, and this can make the difference between whether or not they survive.

“When builders build their applications and move them to the cloud, they don’t want to settle for a fraction of functionalities [that is available] from a leader. Because customers do realise that having everything is everything,” Jassy argued in front of partners, customers, analysts and members of the media during his more than two-hour long keynote address at the Sands Convention and Expo.

“And there’s nobody that has the functionality close to what AWS has, as we have the most incredibly robust and diverse fully-featured technology infrastructure services available today,” claimed the CEO of AWS.

Amongst the most significant announcements made were:

• Amazon Transcribe, an automatic speech recognition function designed to add speech-to-text-capability to applications. The service enables developers to analyse audio files stored in Amazon S3 and have the service return a text file of the transcribed speech. It currently supports English and Spanish with more languages to follow;
• Amazon Translate, a neural machine-based translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, language translation. The service claims to allow developers to easily translate large volumes of text efficiently as well as to localise websites and applications for international users. For now, it can translate short or long-form text and supports translation between English and six other languages (Arabic, French, German, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish), with more to come in 2018;
• Amazon Comprehend, a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. It identifies the language of the text, extracts key phrases, places, people, brands, or events and understands how positive or negative the text is, as well as automatically organises a collection of text files by topic;
• Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale;
• AWS DeepLens, a fully programmable video camera, designed to put deep learning into the hands of any developer. It includes a high definition (HD) video camera with on-board compute capable of running sophisticated deep learning computer vision models in real-time; and
• Amazon Video Rekognition, an extension of the image service launched last year that allows developers to add image and video analysis to applications. It also provides highly accurate facial analysis and recognition; is able to detect, analyse, and compare faces in a wide variety of uses, including verification, cataloging, people counting, and public safety use cases.

Other announcements include new databases support, new services in the Internet of Things (IoT) services and new container services.

Next page: Too much of a good thing?