Okay, hello Cloud Gurus. How y'all doing? I'm Scott Pletcher,
back with another batch of AWS news goodness.
This week we provide a recap of the AWS Summit Online.
We get access to a new ARM-based EC2 powerhouse,
and Amazon Kendra is now available to all.
And we announced the guru of the week.
All right. All right. All right.
Welcome to another episode of AWS This Week brought to you from right here in my
cozy underground bunker, and I assure you we are open.
With all this time hunkered down in the Pletcher compound,
I've been watching lots and lots of movies lately,
so I've strategically hidden several movie related Easter eggs in the dialogue
of this week's update,
let's just see how many you can uncover and comment down below.
The AWS virtual summit was held this week for the North American and Asia
Pacific regions.
The event was kicked off with a keynote from Dr Werner Vogels in which the good
doctor highlighted cost optimization and scalability,
especially in the context of so many organizations being forced into remote
work.
There were many breakout sessions covering a wide range of topics and our gurus
found the sessions on cost optimization, chaos engineering,
and advanced container security particularly enlightening.
Unfortunately, it wasn't all sunshine and roses.
Our Australian gurus reported poor video quality and sessions disappearing.
If you weren't able to attend, fear not my friend,
as you can watch all the sessions on demand at the link down below.
Say hello to my little friend. This is a Raspberry Pi. It's cheap,
it's versatile, and it's powered by an ARM compatible processor.
Now while these little computers are favorites of hackers and makers like
myself,
they aren't exactly known as computational powerhouses and,
as a result,
some people associate ARM power devices with little underpowered hobbyist
computers. In reality,
ARM architectures can perform just as well as any cutting edge x86 architecture
from Intel or AMD. This week,
AWS released several new ARM-based instance types containing Amazon's own
Graviton2 chip design.
The instances are available in up to 64 virtual CPU and support up to 256
gigabytes of memory.
What's more is that these new ARM instances can deliver the same performance as
comparable x86 instances for around 20% less cost.
Now a big caveat to ARM-based systems is that software has to be specifically
compiled to work on that architecture. Now even so,
lots of popular platforms are already available for ARMs such as Java,
Python, node.JS, MongoDB, nginx and more.
So if you feel the need, the need for speed, at a reasonable price,
go check them out. Pop quiz, hot shot.
How much time do you think we waste searching and sifting through our
ever-growing pile of digital data? Well,
according to an IDC study about $5,700 per employee per year in lost
productivity, which can quickly add up.
Enterprise search is not an easy problem to solve as most data is not in
friendly indexed structured format. Additionally,
people searching for things don't always know what to ask.
This week, AWS has generally released Amazon Kendra,
which is a managed enterprise search service augmented by machine learning
goodness. Kendra can crawl through file systems, databases,
internets and other applications, creating an index of all that stuff.
And then you can use natural language to query for the results.
Kendra can even understand domain knowledge like IT and life sciences,
which can befuddle more simplistic search engine.
And now on to the Guru of the Week. This week's guru is Tajinder Singh,
a software engineer from Ashburn, Virginia in the US.
A swag pack is on its way out to you as we speak,
and you've also been entered into a draw for tickets to this year's re-invent.
If that show does still go on.
That my friends is all the AWS news that's fit to print this week. Look,
I've got to get to the chopper so hasta la vista,
and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.
[inaudible].