Okay. Hello Cloud Gurus, how y'all doing?
Scott Pletcher here with another carefully curated set of AWS news suitable for
framing. This week, AWS continues to build bridges to mainframe shops,
AWS Lookout for metrics gets a rear view mirror,
and our little buddy DeepRacer gets some guardrails. This is AWS this week.
How often have you been sitting around the conference room and thought, 'Hey,
let's migrate our mainframe to AWS. Just fire up our 3270 terminals,
bring everybody outta retirement and start copy pasting'?
If only it were that easy, right? Announced back at re:Invent 2021,
AWS Mainframe Modernization service is now generally available.
But what in the world does AWS know about mainframes?
Well through acquisitions and partnerships with companies who specialize in
mainframe migration, AWS's assembled a pretty decent crew. Blue Age,
which AWS acquired last year,
are the people who brought us the ability to run COBOL code on Lambda.
AWS has also partnered with Microfocus who offer a suite of mainframe
migration tools, but tools alone won't get the job done.
Most mainframe shops have decades of business logic embedded in tens of
thousands of lines of COBOL or PL/1 code.
We're not exactly talking a simple lift and shift here,
but a major replatforming effort. To this end,
AWS has also established a Migration Acceleration Program for Mainframe
and created a Mainframe Modernization Partner Competency.
Come on our mainframes really still a thing? Absolutely.
Especially in the banking, insurance, and healthcare industries.
According to Reuters,
about 80% of the in-person commerce transactions and 95% of
ATM transactions still rely on COBOL code running on
mainframes.
The Amazon Lookout family of services are a perfect example of taking some
complicated machine learning processes and abstracting them into easily
accessible real world value add turnkey services. At the core,
Amazon Lookout services use anomaly detection algorithms to identify things that
are out of the ordinary and bring those things to your attention.
Amazon lookout for equipment can pick up on subtle changes in equipment
performance, and allow for more proactive maintenance.
Lookout for Vision can perform visual inspections at scale and help with quality
assurance.
Amazon Lookout for Metrics can provide that same anomaly detection across a
variety of AWS and third party services. Recently,
AWS announced that Amazon Lookout for Metrics can now backtest on CloudWatch.
Previously,
we could only check the anomalies in CloudWatch from the point at which we
initiated coverage forward.
This backtesting mode allows Amazon Lookout for Metrics to look back in time,
to create a more accurate baseline.
And that's real useful for organizations that have seasonal fluctuations or
other ebbs and flows that aren't necessarily anomalies.
Unintended consequences - we've probably all had our share of those things.
For example,
let's say you launch a DeepRacer league within your organization as a fun way to
increase employee engagement and learn some new skills.
Let's say your league takes off and gets super competitive between the folks
over on the application development team and the network engineering team.
Let's say at the end of the month,
you get a panicked call from your accounts payable people asking why your AWS
bill is three times higher than it's ever been. I get it.
It happens fortunately,
you now have some guardrails to apply to your DeepRacer dabbling, if you'd like.
AWS DeepRacer multi-mode now allows us to apply quotas to our participants,
reigning in the number of training hours, model counts,
and even turn on and turn off the ability to train.
No doubt this feature originated from organizations who likely found themselves
in the same place as our completely hypothetical example.
And before we go, one last little tidbit,
you may soon be thanking AWS for improving the quality of your fast food french
fries. Miso Robotics, the company behind Flippy,
a robotic fry station,
has announced a partnership with AWS to use AWS RoboMaker to vastly accelerate
their simulation and development processes.
The Flippy 2 fry robots have already been ordered by several quick-service
restaurant chains as they prefer to be called,
including my own guilty indulgence of choice, White Castle. I, for one,
welcome our new fry robot overlords and thank them in advance for their tireless
service. Thank you as well for joining me this week,
as that's just about all the AWS news it's fit to print, stay safe,
take care of one another and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.