Okay, hello Cloud Gurus, how y'all doing. I'm Scott Pletcher,
back at ya with another batch of AWS news goodness.
This week, AWS and Slack extend their partnership in a somewhat
unexpected way.
Mobile developers get some nifty new helper libraries,
and SageMaker Ground Truth extends into the third dimension.
Plus, we announced the guru of the week, right here on AWS This Week.
[inaudible]
Well, Slack and Amazon have been up to some more wheeling and dealing lately.
Recently, Slack announced that it will use the Amazon Chime SDK to provide
in-app video and audio services to users.
Now, this might come as a surprise, given Slack's popularity and Chime's,
well, lack of popularity,
but from an architectural and business standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.
Audio and video conferencing is considered table stakes among collaboration
tools nowadays. And if it isn't a differentiator for Slack,
why not just use somebody else's ready-made service?
Slack and AWS are certainly not strangers.
Since launching back in 2014,
Slack has run its service on the AWS platform,
taking advantage of the same services we do for the same reasons we do -
scalability, global reach, and efficiency.
This move is part of a bigger deal in which Slack will be almost doubling their
committed spend with AWS to around $425 million US dollars
over the next five years.
Another interesting part of this deal is that it makes Slack available to all
employees.
Maybe for all those Amazon employees this might be the end of the awkward
sounding, "I'll Chime you",
only to be replaced with the once awkward, now strangely hip sounding,
"I'll Slack you".
If you are a mobile developer who uses AWS Amplify,
I can already hear you doing that little happy dance. Recently,
AWS announced the general availability of Amplify iOS and
Amplify Android, which aimed to make mobile development more streamlined.
In the past,
you had to dig deep into the mobile SDKs and usually reference the API at a
pretty low level.
Amplify iOS and Amplify Android are platform specific helper
libraries organized by use case.
So you can perform common functions with just a few lines of code.
These libraries provide methods for authentication analytics, offline,
and real time data stores and even predictions for AI use
cases.
Contrary to what some might think machine learning systems
don't just start out with abilities.
Oftentimes there needs to be a training process involved where the algorithm can
learn patterns from a set of known accurate data and machine
learning circles. This known good data is called ground truth.
Now, despite all of our technological advancements,
sometimes we have to rely on good old human intelligence to create that ground
truth data.
In 2018, AWS announced SageMaker Ground Truth,
which is a tool that helps customers farm out data grooming and
augmentation to an army of ready and willing humans.
This week,
AWS announced that SageMaker Ground Truth is now capable of supporting three
dimensional data sets.
Such data sets as commonly collected and used in scenarios like self
driving cars and autonomous drones that operate in three
dimensional space.
Now these 3D data sets can be more efficiently and effectively labeled,
which in turn makes them more valuable for training smarter ML
models.
I most certainly want my pizza delivery drone to be able to get to me as fast as
three-dimensionally possible.
Yes, it's that time again, time for us to announce the Guru of the Week.
This week, we tested your knowledge on service control policies and
congratulations are in order for Stefan Papp,
cofounder of Freedom Data in Armenia.
By the way Stefan, loved your company's website front page.
I spent a good five minutes playing with that logo.
If you think you are Guru of the Week material,
head on over to this week's question linked down below.
That my friends is all the AWS news that's fit to print this week.
Stay safe, take care of one another, and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.
[inaudible].