All Things Distributed

12/20/2016
All Things Distributed - All Things Distributed
All Things Distributed

Werner Vogels' weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems.
Expanding the AWS Cloud Introducing the AWS Europe

(London) Region
By Werner Vogels on 14 December 2016 12:00 AM PST | Comments (0)
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Werner Vogels
CTO - Amazon.com
Other places
In November 2015, Amazon Web Services announced that it would launch a new AWS infrastructure
region in the United Kingdom. Today, I'm happy to announce that the AWS Europe (London) Region, our
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16th technology infrastructure region globally, is now generally available for use by customers worldwide.
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UK companies are using AWS to innovate across diverse industries, such as energy, manufacturing,
medicaments, retail, media, and financial services and the UK is home to some of the world's most
forward-thinking businesses. These include startups like Fanduel, JustEat, and Monzo to enterprises such
as British Gas, Trainline, Travis Perkins, News UK, the Financial Times.
The British Government is also helping to drive innovation and has embraced a cloud-first policy for
technology adoption. Take Peterborough City Council as an example. The council has deployed IoT
Weather Stations in Schools across the City and is using the sensor information collated in a Data Lake to
gain insights on whether the weather or pollution plays a part in learning outcomes.
London has also established itself as a critical center for the financial services sector and a significant hub
for venture capital activity across all Europe. The City's thriving venture capital and start-up accelerator
communities are fueling growth and innovation, making it one of the most important locations in the world
to do business. AWS is working with incubators and accelerators such as SeedCamp and Techstars, in
London; Ignite100 in Newcastle; and DotForge in Sheffield and Manchester to help startups make the
most of the cloud.
We believe in our customers and are investing for the long term. With the AWS Europe (London) Region,
we look to better serve end users in the UK. With the launch of the AWS Europe (London) Region, AWS
can enable many more UK enterprise, public sector and startup customers to reduce IT costs, address
data locality needs, and embark on rapid transformations in critical new areas, such as big data analysis
and Internet of Things.
All around us we see that the AWS capabilities foster a culture of experimentation with businesses of all
sizes. AWS is not only affordable but it is secure and scales reliably to drive efficiencies into business
transformations. I have been humbled by just how much our UK customers have been able to achieve
using AWS technology so far. In just this past month we've had HSBC, ARM, Missguided, and most
recently at re:Invent 2016, Trainline, talking with us about how they are using AWS to transform and scale
their businesses.
Following are just a few of the reasons that customers have given us for building their business on the
AWS Cloud:
Blend seamlessly into the digital world: With the rising importance of technology-driven business
transformation, an emphasis on certain enterprise and consumer-based opportunities emerges.
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Expanding the AWS Cloud Introducing
the AWS Europe (London) Region
Expanding the AWS Cloud: Introducing
the AWS Canada (Central) Region
Transforming Development with AWS
Bringing the Magic of Amazon AI and
Alexa to Apps on AWS.
MXNet - Deep Learning Framework of
Choice at AWS
Spice up your Analytics: Amazon
QuickSight Now Generally Available in
N. Virginia, Oregon, and Ireland.
Meet the Teams Competing for the
Alexa Prize
Welcoming Adrian Cockcroft to the
AWS Team.
Expanding the AWS Cloud: Introducing
the AWS US East (Ohio) Region
Accelerating Data: Faster and More
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To take advantage of the game-changing opportunities, businesses are looking to blend into the
digital world. Take GoSquared, a UK startup that runs all its development and production processes
on AWS, as an example. GoSquared provides various analytics services that web and mobile
companies can use to understand their customers' behaviors. With AWS, GoSquared can process
Accelerating Data: Faster and More

Scalable ElastiCache for Redis
Introducing the Alexa Prize, Its Day
One for Voice
tens of billions of data points every day from four continents to provide customers with a single view.
Allez, rendez-vous Paris An AWS

Region is coming to France!
Use catalysts for real-time business models: The Internet of Things (IoT) is undoubtedly driving a
A Hungry Neighbor is an Angry

Neighbor
philosophy of interconnecting people, process, and machines to create massive volumes of data that
has potential for disruptive change.
The BMW Group is using AWS for its new connected-car application that collects sensor data from
BMW 7 Series cars to give drivers dynamically updated map information. BMW built its new car-as-asensor (CARASSO) service in only six months leveraging several AWS services. By running on AWS,
CARASSO can adapt to rapidly changing load requirements that can scale up and down by two
orders of magnitude within 24 hours. By 2018, CARASSO is expected to process data collected by a
fleet of 100,000 vehicles traveling more than eight billion kilometers.
Mobilize business operations by computing everywhere: Computing and data processing within
the confines of a data center or office is easy. There is much interesting and potentially valuable data
New Ways to Discover and Use Alexa

Skills
Expanding the Cloud: Introducing the
AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region
Serverless Reference Architectures
with AWS Lambda
10 Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon
Web Services
Expanding the Cloud: Introducing the
AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region
out in the field, if only it could be collected, processed, and turned into actionable intelligence.
London Calling! An AWS Region is

coming to the UK!
This data could be located miles below the surface of the Earth in a mine or an oil well, in a sensitive
Expanding the Cloud: Introducing

Amazon QuickSight
and safety-critical location like a hospital or a factory, or even on another planet. At re:Invent 2016,
AWS announced Greengrass (in limited preview), a new service designed to extend the AWS
programming model to small, simple, field-based devices.
Parse real time information to generate visibility : Big data tools have enabled organizations to
manage resources, anticipate activity relevant to their business, and make informed decisions faster.
Real-time monitoring and evaluation of events have led to a positive impact on performance or
operations.
Channel 4 (in the UK) chose AWS to help monetize volumes of platform data. By running on AWS
and using Amazon EMR, the broadcast company can collect and analyze vast amounts of data in real
time to deliver highly targeted ads to viewers during a 60-minute program.
Extract valuable insights with machine learning: The world is witnessing the emergence of a
broad and powerful range of new systemscomputer programs that can teach themselves to grow
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and change when exposed to new data.

Fraud.net is a good example of this. Fraud.net use AWS to support highly scalable, big data
applications that run machine learning processes for real-time analytics. Fraud.net uses AWS to build
and train machine learning models in detecting online payment fraud. Fraud.net uses Amazon
Machine Learning to provide more than 20 machine learning models and relies on Amazon
DynamoDB and AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning or managing servers.
Develop the next-generation software application that is capable of action: Chances are that
you may already be using artificial intelligence as you interact with applications that not only sense
and comprehend but are capable of action, especially when one views solutions through the lens of
automation.
The Airbnb application, for instance, uses Aerosolve to deliver its dynamic pricing feature. Unbabel
uses a combination of artificial intelligence and human translation to deliver fast, cost-effective, highquality translation services globally. VizSense is yet another paragon that develops advanced visual
search and image recognition solutions to serve companies in e-commerce, mobile commerce, and
online advertising.
These short sketches illustrate the power of the cloud for customers, but it is still early days. With the
launch of the AWS Europe (London) Region, I look forward to seeing many more innovative use cases
enabled by AWS.
Our AWS Europe (London) Region is open for business now and we are excited to offer a complete
portfolio of servicesfrom our foundational service stack for compute, storage, and networking to our
more advanced solutions and applications. We look forward to broadening this portfolio to include more
services over the next several quarters.
For more information about the services we offer in our London region, see the Europe/Middle East/Af
rica tab of our Region Table.
For more information about how customers are innovating using AWS, see All AWS Customer Stories.
You can learn more about how we help connect the world to the cloud at AWS Global Infrastructure.
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Expanding the AWS Cloud: Introducing the AWS Canada

(Central) Region
By Werner Vogels on 08 December 2016 10:30 AM PST | Comments (0)
Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it would launch a new AWS infrastructure
region in Montreal, Quebec. Today, I'm happy to share that the Canada (Central) Region is available for
use by customers worldwide. The AWS Cloud now operates in 40 Availability Zones within 15 geographic
regions around the world, with seven more Availability Zones and three more regions coming online in
China, France, and the U.K. in the coming year.
The Canadian opportunity
Canada has set forth a bold innovation agenda grounded in entrepreneurship, scientific research, growing
small and medium-sized businesses with a focus on environmentally friendly technologies, and the
transition to a digital economy. This agenda leverages the transformative aspects of technology and
encourages Canadian companies, universities, governments, not-for-profits, and entrepreneurs to
contribute to building a durable innovation economy.
Given this, enterprises, public sector bodies, startups, and small businesses are looking to adopt agile,
scalable, and secure public cloud solutions. The new Canada (Central) Region offers a robust suite of
infrastructure, management, and developer services that can enable innovators to deploy market-leading
applications. Access to secure, scalable, low-cost AWS infrastructure in Canada allows customers to
innovate and provide tools to meet privacy, sovereignty, and compliance requirements.
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The new AWS Canada (Central) Region also continues the company's focus on delivering cloud
technologies to customers in an environmentally friendly way. AWS data centers in Canada will draw from
a regional electricity grid that is 99 percent powered by hydropower. For more information about AWS
efforts, see AWS & Sustainability.
Some examples of how current customers use AWS are:
Cost-effective solutions
Kik Interactive is a Canadian chat platform with hundreds of millions of users around the globe. It adopted
Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR and AWS Lambda to power its data warehouse, big data, and data
science applications, supporting the development of product features at a fraction of the cost of competing
solutions.
Rapid time to market
The Globe and Mail (Globe) is one of Canada's most read newspapers, with a national weekly circulation
of 4.7 million. To increase online readership, it worked with AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner
ClearScale to develop a personal recommendation capability. The solution, which leverages Amazon
Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon EMR to collect, store, and process the data, as well as AWS
CloudFormation and AWS OpsWorks to support the Globe's DevOps environment, was deployed in three
monthsless than half the time it would have taken had the newspaper built it on-premises.
Enterprise-class services available from Canada
Box is an enterprise content management and collaboration platform used by more than 41 million users
and 59,000 businessesincluding 59% of the Fortune 500. It relies on the scale and power of Amazon
Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to deliver in-region storage options to businesses and organizations
across the world in Canada, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Ireland, Germany, and the U.S., as part of its
Box Zones ecosystem. Having the ability to provide these services locally enables Box to better serve
Canadian enterprises looking for cloud solutions while ensuring their data is stored inside Canada.
Increasing agility
Lululemon Athletica is a Canadian athletic apparel company that is using AWS Lambda, AWS
CodePipeline, and AWS CodeDeploy to rapidly build and deploy their digital marketing and e-commerce
solutions for the upcoming 2016 holiday season. By using AWS to manage the continuous deployment
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and delivery of their applications, Lululemon personnel can focus on market differentiation instead of
maintaining custom infrastructure solutions.
Performance
The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, a public sector organization responsible for providing
valuations for more than 5 million properties in Ontario, runs its core property valuation engine 5,000
percent faster at one-tenth the cost by using AWS versus legacy IT architecture.
Security
SmartSimple, an AWS Canadian APN Partner, provides cloud-based grants and case and research
management solutions to Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, universities, and research
organizations around the world. With AWS' security, business continuity, scaling and agile capabilities,
SmartSimple can architect solutions on AWS so that their customers can comply with their privacy
requirements.
Market expansion
ScribbleLive provides a cloud platform that media companies use to cover breaking news on their
websites and engage with their audiences. Using AWS, ScribbleLive can scale to support news websites
and blogs in 14 languages worldwide and maintain high availability at peak capacity, all the while
decreasing operational costs by 35 percent.
Scalability
Vidyard is a revolutionary platform that provides business users with the ability to personalize and
strategically target messages through online video. The fast-growing, Canadian startup uses Amazon
EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon RDS, and AWS OpsWorks to scale quickly
while securely delivering seamless video upload and playback services for its customers.
AWS as your strategic cloud provider
As these customer stories show, we believe that the AWS Cloud can and will serve as the foundation for
Canada's innovation agenda. For more customer case studies, see All AWS Customer Stories.
We are excited to offer a robust portfolio of services from our foundational service stack for compute,
storage, and networking to our more advanced solutions and applications. We look forward to broadening
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this portfolio to include additional services over the next several quarters. For more information about the
services we offer in our Canada (Central) Region, see the Region Table.
With the launch of the Canada (Central) Region, AWS will enable enterprise customers and startups, as
well as government, education, and nonprofit organizations in Canada to deploy innovative and costeffective IT solutions in areas such as big data, machine learning, serverless computing, mobile, and
more. Millions of AWS customers have recognized the value of the cloud. The new Canada (Central)
Region provides a high-performance, enterprise-grade, scalable, and secure way for Canadian
organizations to do the same. You can learn more about our growing footprint at AWS Global
Infrastructure.
AWS lance sa nouvelle Rgion du Canada (Centre) Montral, Qubec

Par Werner Vogels, le 8 dcembre 2016
Plus tt cette anne, Amazon Web Services (AWS) a annonc avoir pour projet de lancer une nouvelle
infrastructure rgionale AWS Montral, Qubec. Aujourd'hui, j'ai le plaisir de vous annoncer que la
Rgion du Canada (Centre) est maintenant oprationnelle pour ses clients du monde entier. Le Cloud
AWS est maintenant disponible sur 40 zones de disponibilit rparties dans 15 rgions du monde. Sept
autres zones de disponibilit et trois autres rgions seront mises en ligne en Chine, en France et au
Royaume-Uni au cours de la prochaine anne.
Une occasion en or au Canada
Le Canada a lanc un programme audacieux d'innovation qui vise les cotechnologies et la transition
une conomie numrique et repose sur l'entreprenariat, la recherche scientifique et la croissance des
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PME. Ce programme vise l'exploitation de la puissance transformatrice des technologies et encourage les
entreprises, les universits, les gouvernements, les organismes sans but lucratif et les entrepreneurs du
Canada contribuer au dveloppement d'une conomie durable fonde sur l'innovation.
C'est pour cette raison que les entreprises, les entits du secteur public, les startups et les PME cherchent
adopter des solutions de nuage public qui sont flexibles, volutives et sres. La nouvelle Rgion du
Canada (Centre) offre une gamme solide de services d'infrastructure, de gestion et de dveloppement qui
permet aux innovateurs de dployer des applications de premier plan sur le march. Les clients, ayant
accs une infrastructure AWS scuritaire et volutive faible cot au Canada, peuvent innover et utiliser
des outils leur permettant de respecter les exigences en matire de protection de la vie prive, de
souverainet et de conformit.
La nouvelle Rgion AWS du Canada (Centre) soutient aussi l'objectif de la compagnie de fournir aux
clients les technologies infonuagiques d'une faon qui respecte l'environnement. Les centres de donnes
d'AWS au Canada seront aliments par un rseau lectrique rgional 99 pour cent hydrolectrique. Pour
en savoir plus sur les moyens dploys par AWS, voir AWS & Sustainability.
Voici quelques exemples d'utilisation des services d'AWS par les clients actuels :
Solutions rentables
Kik Interactive est une plateforme de clavardage canadienne qui a des centaines de millions d'utilisateurs
partout dans le monde. Elle a adopt Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR et AWS Lambda pour faire
fonctionner ses applications d'entrept de donnes, de mgadonnes et de science des donnes, ce qui
lui permet de mettre au point des fonctionnalits de produit la fraction du cot des solutions de la
concurrence.
Mise en march rapide
The Globe and Mail (Globe) est l'un des quotidiens les plus lus au Canada, tir 4,7 millions
d'exemplaires chaque semaine au pays. Pour augmenter son lectorat en ligne, il a utilis les services de
Clearscale, un partenaire du AWS Partner Network (APN), pour dvelopper sa capacit recevoir des
recommandations personnelles. La solution, qui fait usage de Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB et
Amazon EMR pour recueillir, stocker et traiter les donnes et AWS CloudFormation et AWS OpsWorks
pour soutenir l'environnement DevOps du Globe, a t dploye en trois mois seulementla moiti du
temps que cela aurait pris pour installer une telle solution locale pour le quotidien.
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Des services de classe entreprise offerts partir du Canada

Box est une plateforme de gestion de contenu et de collaboration pour les entreprises utilise par plus de
41 millions d'utilisateurs et 59 000 entreprises, y compris 59 % de celles figurant sur la liste de Fortune
500. Elle dpend de l'volutivit et de la puissance d'Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) pour
offrir des options de stockage rgionales aux entreprises et aux organisations du monde entier au
Canada, au Japon, Singapour, en Australie, en Irlande, en Allemagne et aux tats-Unis, dans le cadre
de son cosystme Box Zones. Avoir la capacit de fournir ces services localement permet Box de
mieux servir les entreprises canadiennes qui cherchent non seulement des solutions infonuagiques, mais
ce que leurs donnes soient stockes au Canada.
Agilit accrue
Lululemon Athletica est une compagnie de vtements de sport canadienne qui utilise AWS Lambda, AWS
CodePipeline et AWS CodeDeploy pour rapidement laborer et dployer des solutions de cybermarketing
et de commerce lectronique pour le temps des Ftes 2016. En utilisant AWS pour grer le dploiement
continu et la livraison de leurs applications, les membres du personnel de Lululemon peuvent se
concentrer se distinguer sur le march plutt que d'tre proccups par la gestion de solutions
d'infrastructure ponctuelles.
Performance
La Socit d'valuation foncire des municipalits (MPAC), un organisme du secteur public responsable
de l'valuation de plus de cinq millions de proprits en Ontario, exploite son principal moteur d'valuation
foncire 5 000 pour cent plus vite et un dixime du cot avec AWS par rapport leur architecture
informatique prexistante.
Scurit
SmartSimple, un partenaire canadien du rseau APN d'AWS, offre des bourses infonuagiques et des
solutions de gestion de dossiers et de recherche des compagnies figurant sur la liste de Fortune 500,
des organismes gouvernementaux, des universits et des organismes de recherche du monde entier.
Grce aux capacits offertes par AWS en matire de scurit, de continuit des affaires, d'volutivit et
d'agilit, SmartSimple peut mettre au point des solutions AWS qui permettent ses clients de se
conformer leurs exigences de protection de la vie prive.
Expansion du march
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ScribbleLive offre une plateforme infonuagique utilise par les socits de mdias pour couvrir les
nouvelles de dernire heure sur leurs sites Web et pour communiquer avec leurs publics. l'aide d'AWS,
ScribbleLive peut faire accrotre ses capacits pour soutenir les sites Web et les blogues de nouvelles
dans 14 langues travers le monde, ainsi que conserver une haute disponibilit pleine capacit tout en
diminuant les cots oprationnels de 35 pour cent.
volutivit
Vidyard est une plateforme rvolutionnaire qui donne aux entreprises la capacit de personnaliser et de
cibler de manire stratgique ses messages en utilisant la vido en ligne. Cette startup canadienne en
plein croissance utilise Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon RDS et AWS
OpsWorks pour faire accrotre ses capacits rapidement tout en offrant des services scuritaires de
tlversement vido en continu et de lecture vido pour ses clients.
AWS est votre fournisseur de services infonuagiques stratgique
Comme le dmontrent ces tmoignages clients, nous croyons que le nuage AWS peut et va servir de
fondement au programme d'innovation du Canada. Pour lire d'autres tudes de cas de clients, allez
Tous les tmoignages de clients AWS.
Nous sommes emballs de vous offrir un solide portefeuille de services, allant de notre gamme essentielle
pour le calcul, le stockage et la mise en rseau nos solutions et nos applications plus avances. Nous
avons hte d'largir ce portefeuille et d'y ajouter d'autres services au fil des prochains trimestres. Pour en
savoir plus sur les services que nous offrons dans notre Rgion du Canada (Centre), voir le Tableau des
rgions.
Grce la cration de la Rgion du Canada (Centre), AWS permettra aux entreprises, aux startups ainsi
qu'aux organismes gouvernementaux, aux organismes du milieu de l'ducation et aux organismes sans
but lucratif du Canada de dployer des solutions informatiques innovantes et rentables dans des
domaines comme les mgadonnes, l'apprentissage machine, l'informatique sans serveur, la tlphonie
mobile, et bien plus encore. Des millions de clients d'AWS ont reconnu la valeur du cloud. La nouvelle
Rgion du Canada (Centre) offre un moyen hautement performant, professionnel, volutif et sr qui
permettra aux organisations canadiennes de faire de mme. Vous pouvez en apprendre plus sur notre
empreinte croissante Infrastructure mondiale AWS.
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Transforming Development with AWS

By Werner Vogels on 01 December 2016 12:00 PM PST | Comments (0)
In my keynote at AWS re:Invent today, I announced 13 new features and services (in addition to the 15 we
announced yesterday).
My favorite parts of James Bond movies is are where 007 gets to visit Q to pick up and learn about new
tools of the trade: super-powered tools with special features which that he can use to complete his
missions, and, in some cases, get out of some nasty scrapes. Bond always seems to have the perfect tool
for every situation that he finds himself in. *
At AWS, we want to be the Q for developers, giving them the super-powered tools and services with deep
features in the Cloud. In the hands of builders, the impact of these services has been to completely
transform the way applications are developed, debugged, and delivered to customers.
I was joined by 32,000 James Bonds at the conference today from all around the world, and we introduced
new services focused on accelerating this transformation across development, testing and operations,
data and analytics, and computation itself.
Transformation in Development, Testing, & Operations
Although development and operations are often overlooked, they are the engines of agility for most
organizations. Today, cCompanies cannot afford to wait two or three years between releases, and;
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customers have found that continually releasing incremental functionality to customer frequently reduces
risk and improves quality.
Today, we're making available broad new services which that let builders prepare and operate their
applications more quickly and efficiently, and respond to changes in both their business and their operating
environment, swiftly. We launched the following new services and features today to help.
AWS OpsWorks for Chef : a fully managed Chef Automate environment, available through AWS
OpsWorks to fuel even more automation and reduce the heavy lifting associated with continuous
deployment.
Amazon EC2 Systems Manager : A collection of tools for package installation, patching, resource
configuration, and task automation on Amazon EC2.
AWS Codebuild: A new, fully managed, extensible service for compiling source code and running unit
tests, which is integrated with other application lifecycle management services such as AWS
CodeDeploy, AWS CodeCommit, and AWS CodePipeline for dramatically decreasing the time between
iterations of software.
Amazon X-Ray: A new service to analyze, visualize, and debug distributed applications, allowing builders
to identify performance bottlenecks and errors.
Personal Health Dashboard: A new personalized view of AWS service health for all customers, allowing
developers to gain visibility into service health issues which that may be affecting their application.
AWS Shield : protective Protective armor against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, available
as Shield Standard and Shield Advanced. Shield Standard gives DDoS protection to all customers using
API Gateway, Elastic Load Balancing, Route 53, CloudFront, and EC2. Shield Advanced protects against
more sophisticated DDoS attacks, with access to help through a 24x7 AWS DDoS response team.
Transformation in Data
In the old world, access to infrastructure resources was a big differentiator for big, wealthy companies. No
more. Today, any developer can have access to a wealth of infrastructure technology services which that
bring advanced technology to their fingertips times in the Cloud. The days of differentiation through
infrastructure are behind us; the technology is now evenly distributed.
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Instead, most companies today and in the future will differentiate themselves through the data that they
collect and have access to, and the way in which they can put that data to work for the benefit of their
customers. We rolled out three new services today to make that easier.:
Amazon Pinpoint : A data-driven engagement service for mobile apps. Define which segment of
customers to engage with, schedule a push notification engagement campaign, and track the results in
real-time.
AWS Batch: Fully- managed batch processing at any scale, with no batch processing software to install or
servers to manage.
Dynamically provision compute resources and optimize task distribution based on volume and resource
requirements
AWS Glue : A fully- managed data catalog and ETL service, which that makes it easy to move data
between data stores, while also simplifying and automating time time-consuming data discovery,
conversion, mapping, and job scheduling tasks.
Transformation in Compute
Amazon EC2 made it possible to build application architectures in a way we had always wanted to; and,
over the past decade, gave us the opportunity to build secure, resilient, available applications with
decoupled application components which that can be scaled independently, and updated more frequently.
When I talk to our customers, I hear time and again how they are taking these transformative principles,
and taking them to the next level, by building smaller, more discrete, distributed components using
containers and AWS Lambda.
Today, we're accelerating this transformation with a new distributed application coordination service, new
Lambda functionality, and an open source container framework.:
AWS Step Functions: Coordinate the components of distributed applications using visual workflows. Step
through functions at scale.
Lambda@Edge: Enable Lambda functions in Edge locations, and run functions in response to CloudFront
events. We also added C# support for AWS Lambda.
Blox: A collection of open source projects for container management and orchestration.
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Thirteen new services and major features focused on developers. We're excited to see how customers you
will put these new features to work.
*: Sean Connery is the definitive Bond.
Bringing the Magic of Amazon AI and Alexa to Apps on AWS.

By Werner Vogels on 30 November 2016 10:00 AM PST | Comments (2)
From the early days of Amazon, Machine learning (ML) has played a critical role in the value we bring to
our customers. Around 20 years ago, we used machine learning in our recommendation engine to
generate personalized recommendations for our customers. Today, there are thousands of machine
learning scientists and developers applying machine learning in various places, from recommendations to
fraud detection, from inventory levels to book classification to abusive review detection. There are many
more application areas where we use ML extensively: search, autonomous drones, robotics in fulfillment
centers, text processing and speech recognition (such as in Alexa) etc.
Among machine learning algorithms, a class of algorithms called deep learning has come to represent
those algorithms that can absorb huge volumes of data and learn elegant and useful patterns within that
data: faces inside photos, the meaning of a text, or the intent of a spoken word.After over 20 years of
developing these machine learning and deep learning algorithms and end user services listed above, we
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understand the needs of both the machine learning scientist community that builds these machine learning
algorithms as well as app developers who use them. We also have a great deal of machine learning
technology that can benefit machine scientists and developers working outside Amazon. Last week, I
wrote a blog about helping the machine learning scientist community select the right deep learning
framework from among many we support on AWS such as MxNet, TensorFlow, Caffe, etc.
Today, I want to focus on helping app developers who have chosen to develop their apps on AWS and
have in the past developed some of the seminal apps of our times on AWS, such as Netflix, AirBnB, or
Pinterest or created internet connected devices powered by AWS such as Alexa and Dropcam. Many app
developers have been intrigued by the magic of Alexa and other AI powered products they see being
offered or used by Amazon and want our help in developing their own magical apps that can hear, see,
speak, and understand the world around them.
For example, they want us to help them develop chatbots that understand natural language, build Alexastyle conversational experiences for mobile apps, dynamically generate speech without using expensive
voice actors, and recognize concepts and faces in images without requiring human annotators. However,
until now, very few developers have been able to build, deploy, and broadly scale applications with AI
capabilities because doing so required specialized expertise (with Ph.D.s in ML and neural networks) and
access to vast amounts of data. Effectively applying AI involves extensive manual effort to develop and
tune many different types of machine learning and deep learning algorithms (e.g. automatic speech
recognition, natural language understanding, image classification), collect and clean the training data, and
train and tune the machine learning models. And this process must be repeated for every object, face,
voice, and language feature in an application.
Today, I am excited to announce that we are launching three new Amazon AI services that eliminate all of
this heavy lifting, making AI broadly accessible to all app developers by offering Amazon's powerful and
proven deep learning algorithms and technologies as fully managed services that any developer can
access through an API call or a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. These services are Amazon
Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition that will help AWS app developers build these next
generation of magical, intelligent apps. Amazon AI services make the full power of Amazon's natural
language understanding, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and image analysis technologies available at
any scale, for any app, on any device, anywhere.
Amazon Lex
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After the launch of the Alexa Skill Kit (ASK), customers loved the ability to build voice bots or skills for
Alexa. They also started asking us to give them access to the technology that powers Alexa, so that they
can add a conversational interface (using voice or text) to their mobile apps. They also wanted the
capability to publish their bots on chat services like Facebook Messenger and Slack.
Amazon Lex is a new service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text. The same
conversational engine that powers Alexa is now available to any developer, making it easy to bring
sophisticated, natural language 'chatbots' to new and existing applications. The power of Alexa in the
hands of every developer, without having to know deep learning technologies like speech recognition, has
the potential of sparking innovation in entirely new categories of products and services. Developers can
now build powerful conversational interfaces quickly and easily, that operate at any scale, on any device.
The speech recognition and natural language understanding technology behind Amazon Lex and Alexa is
powered by deep learning models that have been trained on massive amounts of data. Developers can
simply specify a few sample phrases and the information required to complete a user's task, and Lex
builds the deep learning based intent model, guides the conversation, and executes the business logic
using AWS Lambda. Developers can build, test, and deploy chatbots directly from the AWS Management
Console. These chatbots can be accessed anywhere: from web applications, chat and messenger apps
such as Facebook Messenger (with support for exporting to Alexa Skills Kit and Slack support coming
soon), or connected devices. Developers can also effortlessly include their Amazon Lex bots in their own
iOS and Android mobile apps using the new Conversational Bots feature in AWS Mobile Hub.
Recently, a few selected customers participated in a private beta of Amazon Lex. They provided us with
valuable feedback as we rounded off Amazon Lex for a preview launch. I am excited to share some of the
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feedback from our beta customers HubSpot and Capital One.

HubSpot, a marketing and sales software leader, uses a chatbot called GrowthBot to help marketers and
sales personnel be more productive by providing access to relevant data and services. Dharmesh Shah,
HubSpot CTO and Founder, tells us that Amazon Lex enabled sophisticated natural language processing
capabilities on GrowthBot to provide a more intuitive UI for customers. Hubspot could take advantage of
advanced AI and ML capabilities provided by Amazon Lex, without having to code the algorithms.
Capital One offers a broad spectrum of financial products and services to consumers, small businesses,
and commercial clients through a variety of channels. Firoze Lafeer, CTO Capital One Labs, tells us that
Amazon Lex enables customers to query for information through voice or text in natural language and
derive key insights into their accounts. Because Amazon Lex is powered by Alexa's technology, it provides
Capital One with a high level of confidence that customer interactions are accurate, allowing easy
deployment and scaling of bots.
Amazon Polly
The concept of a computer being able to speak with a human-like voice goes back almost as long as
ENIAC (the first electronic programmable computer). The concept has been explored by many popular
science fiction movies and TV shows, such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" with HAL-9000 or the Star Trek
computer and Commander Data, which defined the perception of computer-generated speech.
Text-to-speech (TTS) systems have been largely adopted in a variety of real-life scenarios such as
telephony systems with automated speech responses or help for visually or speech-impaired people. Prof.
Stephen Hawking's voice is probably the most famous example of synthetic speech used to help the
disabled.
TTS systems have continuously evolved through the last few decades and are nowadays capable of
delivering a fairly natural-sounding speech. Today, TTS is used in a large variety of use cases and is
turning into a ubiquitous element of user interfaces. Alexa and its TTS voice is yet another step towards
building an intuitive and natural language interface that follows the pattern of human communication.
With Amazon Polly, we are making the same TTS technology used to build Alexa's voice to AWS
customers. It is now available to any developer aiming to power their apps with high-quality spoken output.
In order to mimic human speech, we needed to address a variety of challenges. We needed to learn how
to interpret various text structures such as acronyms, abbreviations, numbers, or homographs (words
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spelled the same but pronounced differently and having different meanings). For example:
I heard that Outlander is a good read, though I haven't read it yet, or
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or
St. Mary's Church is at 226 St. Mary's St.
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Last but not least, as the quality of TTS gets better and better, we expect a natural intonation matching the
semantics of synthesized texts. Traditional rule-based models and ML techniques, such as classification
and regression trees (CART) and hidden Markov models (HMM) present limitations to model the
complexity of this process. Deep learning has shown its capacity in representing complex and nonlinear
relationships at different levels of speech synthesis process. The TTS technology behind Amazon Polly
takes advantage of bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) networks using a massive amount of
data to train models that convert letters to sounds and predict the intonation contour. This technology
enables high naturalness, consistent intonation, and accurate processing of texts.
Amazon Polly customers have confirmed the high quality of generated speech for their use cases.
Duolingo uses Amazon Polly voices for language learning applications, where quality is critical. Severin
Hacker, the CTO of Duolingo, acknowledged that Amazon Polly voices are not just high in quality, but are
as good as natural human speech for teaching a language.
The Royal National Institute of Blind People uses the Amazon TTS technology to support the visually
impaired through their largest library of books in the UK. John Worsfold, Solutions Implementation
Manager at RNIB, confirmed that Amazon Polly's incredibly lifelike voices captivate and engage RNIB
readers.
Amazon Rekognition
We live in a world that is undergoing digital transformation at a rapid rate. One key outcome of this is the
explosive growth of images generated and consumed by applications and services across different
segments and industries. Whether it is a consumer app for photo sharing or printing, or the organization of
images in the archives of media and news organizations, or filtering images for public safety and security,
the need to derive insight from the visual content of the images continues to grow rapidly.
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There is an inherent gap between the number of images created and stored, and the ability to capture the
insight that can be derived from these images. Put simply, most image stores are not searchable,
organized, or actionable. While a few solutions exist, customers have told us that they don't scale well, are
not reliable, are too expensive, rely on complex pipelines to annotate, verify, and process massive amount
of data for training and testing algorithms, need a team of highly specialized and skilled data scientists,
and require costly and highly specialized hardware. For companies that have successfully built a pipeline
for image analysis, the processes of maintaining, improving, and keeping up with the research in this
space proves to be high friction. Amazon Rekognition solves these problems.
Amazon Rekognition is a fully managed, deep-learningbased image analysis service, built by our
computer vision scientists with the same proven technology that has already analyzed billions of images
daily on Amazon Prime Photos. Amazon Rekognition democratizes the application of deep learning
technique for detecting objects, scenes, concepts, and faces in your images, comparing faces between
two images, and performing search functionality across millions of facial feature vectors that your business
can store with Amazon Rekognition. Amazon Rekognition's easy-to-use API, which is integrated with
Amazon S3 and AWS Lambda, brings deep learning to your object store.
Getting started with Rekognition is simple. Let's walk through some of the core features of Rekognition
that help you build powerful search, filter, organization, and verification applications for images.
Object and scene detection
Given an image, Amazon Rekognition detects objects, scenes, and concepts and then generates labels,
each with a confidence score. Businesses can use this metadata to create searchable indexes for social
sharing and printing apps, categorization for news and media image archives, or filters for targeted
advertisement. If you are uploading your images to Amazon S3, it is easy to invoke an AWS Lambda
function that passes the image to Amazon Rekognition and persist the labels with confidence scores into
an Elasticsearch index.
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Facial Analysis
With any given image, you can now detect faces present, and derive face attributes like demographic
information, sentiment, and key landmarks from the face. With this fast and accurate API, retail businesses
can respond to their customers online or in store immediately by delivering targeted ads. Also, these
attributes can be stored in Amazon Redshift to generate deeper insights of their customers.
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Face recognition
Amazon Rekognition's face comparison and face search features can provide businesses with face-based
authentication, verification of identity, and the ability to detect the presence of a specific person in a
collection of images. Whether simply comparing faces present in two images using CompareFaces API, or
creating a collection of faces by invoking Amazon Rekognition's IndexFace API, businesses can rely on
our focus on security and privacy, as no images are stored by Rekognition. Each detected face is
transformed into an irreversible vector representation, and this feature vector (and not the underlying
image itself) is used for comparison and search.
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I am pleased to share some of the positive feedbacks from our beta customers.
Redfin is a full-service brokerage that uses modern technology to help people buy and sell houses. Yong
Huang, Director of Big Data & Analytics, Redfin, tell us that Redfin users love to browse images of
properties on their site and mobile apps and they want to make it easier for their users to sift through
hundreds of millions of listing and images. He also added that Amazon Rekognition generates a rich set of
tags directly from images of properties. This makes it relatively simple for them to build a smart search
feature that helps customers discover houses based on their specific needs. And, because Amazon
Rekognition accepts Amazon S3 URLs, it is a huge time-saver for them to detect objects, scenes, and
faces without having to move images around.
Summing it all up
We are in the early days of machine learning and artificial intelligence. As we say in Amazon, we are still in
Day 1. Yet, we are already seeing the tremendous value and magical experience Amazon AI can bring to
everyday apps. We want to enable all types of developers to build intelligence in to their applications. For
data scientists, they can use our P2 instances, Amazon EMR Spark MLLib, deep learning AMIs, MxNet
and Amazon ML to build their own ML models. For app developers, we believe that these three Amazon AI
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services enable them to build next-generation apps to hear, see, and speak with humans and the world
around us.
We'll also be hosting a Machine Learning " State of the Union" that covers all the three new AmazonAI
services announced today along with demos from Motorola Solutions and Ohio Health head over to
Mirage (as we added more seating!). Also, we have a series of breakout sessions on using MXNet at AWS
re:Invent on November 30th at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.
MXNet - Deep Learning Framework of Choice at AWS

Machine learning is playing an increasingly important role in many areas of our businesses and our lives
and is being employed in a range of computing tasks where programming explicit algorithms is infeasible.
At Amazon, machine learning has been key to many of our business processes, from recommendations to
fraud detection, from inventory levels to book classification to abusive review detection. And there are
many more application areas where we use machine learning extensively: search, autonomous drones,
robotics in fulfillment centers, text and speech recognitions, etc.
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Among machine learning algorithms, a class of algorithms called deep learning hascome to represent
those algorithms that can absorb huge volumes of data and learn elegant and useful patterns within that
data: faces inside photos, the meaning of a text, or the intent of a spoken word. A set of programming
models has emerged to help developers define and train AI models with deep learning; along with open
source frameworks that put deep learning in the hands of mere mortals. Some examples of popular deep
learning frameworks that we support on AWS include Caffe, CNTK, MXNet, TensorFlow, Theano, and
Torch.
Among all these popular frameworks, we have concluded that MXNet is the most scalable framework. We
believe that the AI community would benefit from putting more effort behind MXNet. Today, we are
announcing that MXNet will be our deep learning framework of choice. AWS will contribute code and
improved documentation as well as invest in the ecosystem around MXNet. We will partner with other
organizations to further advance MXNet.
AWS and Support for Deep Learning Frameworks
At AWS, we believe in giving choice to our customers. Our goal is to support our customers with tools,
systems, and software of their choice by providing the right set of instances, software (AMIs), and
managed services. Just like in Amazon RDSwhere we support multiple open source engines like
MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB, in the area of deep learning frameworks, we will support all popular
deep learning frameworks by providing the best set of EC2 instances and appropriate software tools for
them.
Amazon EC2, with its broad set of instance types and GPUs with large amounts of memory, has become
the center of gravity for deep learning training. To that end, we recently made a set of tools available to
make it as easy as possible to get started: a Deep Learning AMI, which comes pre-installed with the
popular open source deep learning frameworks mentioned earlier; GPU-acceleration through CUDA
drivers which are already installed, pre-configured, and ready to rock; and supporting tools such as
Anaconda and Jupyter. Developers can also use the distributed Deep Learning CloudFormation template
to spin up a scale-out, elastic cluster of P2 instances using this AMI for even larger training runs.
As Amazon and AWS continue to invest in several technologies powered by deep learning, we will
continue to improve all of these frameworks in terms of usability, scalability, and features. However, we
plan to contribute significantly to one in particular, MXNet.
Choosing a Deep Learning Framework
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Developers, data scientists, and researchers consider three major factors when selecting a deep learning
framework:
The ability to scale to multiple GPUs (across multiple hosts) to train larger, more sophisticated
models with larger, more sophisticated datasets. Deep learning models can take days or weeks to
train, so even modest improvements here make a huge difference in the speed at which new models
can be developed and evaluated.
Development speed and programmability, especially the opportunity to use languages they are
already familiar with, so that they can quickly build new models and update existing ones.
Portability to run on a broad range of devices and platforms, because deep learning models have to
run in many, many different places: from laptops and server farms with great networking and tons of
computing power to mobiles and connected devices which are often in remote locations, with less
reliable networking and considerably less computing power.
The same three things are important to developers at AWS and many of our customers. After a thorough
evaluation, we have selected MXNet as our deep learning framework of choice , where we plan to use
it broadly in existing and upcoming new services.
As part of that commitment, we will be actively promoting and supporting open source development
through code contributions (we've made quite a few already), improving the developer experience and
documentation online and on AWS, and investing in supporting tools for visualization, development, and
migration from other frameworks.
Background on MXNet
MXNet is a fully featured, flexibly programmable, and ultra-scalable deep learning framework supporting
state of the art in deep learning models, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long shortterm memory networks (LSTMs). MXNet has its roots in academia and came about through the
collaboration and contributions of researchers at several top universities. Founding institutions include the
University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University.
"MXNet, born and bred here at CMU, is the most scalable framework for deep learning I have seen, and is
a great example of what makes this area of computer science so beautiful - that you have different
disciplines which all work so well together: imaginative linear algebra working in a novel way with massive
distributed computation leading to a whole new ball game for deep learning. We're excited about
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Amazon's investment in MXNet, and can't wait to see MXNet go from strength to strength" Andrew Moore
Dean of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Scaling MXNet
The efficiency by which a deep learning framework scales out across multiple cores is one of its defining
features. More efficient scaling allows you to significantly increase the rate at which you can train new
models, or dramatically increase the sophistication of your model for the same amount of training time.
This is an area where MXNet shines: we trained a popular image analysis algorithm, Inception v3
(implemented in MXNet and running on P2 instances), using an increasing number of GPUs. Not only did
MXNet have the fastest throughput of any library we evaluated (as measured by the number of images
trained per second), but the throughput rose by almost the same rate as the number of GPUs used for
training (with a scaling efficiency of 85%).
Developing With MXNet
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In addition to scalability, MXNet offers the ability to both mix programming models (imperative and
declarative), and code in a wide number of programming languages, including Python, C++, R, Scala,
Julia, Matlab, and JavaScript.
Efficient Models & Portability In MXNet
Computational efficiency is important (and goes hand in hand with scalability) but nearly as important is
the memory footprint. MXNet can consume as little as 4 GB of memory when serving deep networks with
as many as 1000 layers. It is also portable across platforms, and the core library (with all dependencies)
fits into a single C++ source file and can be compiled for both Android and iOS. You can even run it in your
browser using the JavaScript extensions!
Learn more about MXNet
We're excited about MXNet. If you would like to learn more, you can check out the MXNet home page, or
GitHub repository for more information, and can get started right now, using the Deep Learning AMI, or on
your own machine. We'll also be hosting a Machine Learning "State of the Union" and a series of breakout
sessions and workshops on using MXNet at AWS re:Invent on November 30th at the Mirage Hotel in Las
Vegas.
It's still day one for this new era of machine intelligence; in fact, we probably haven't even woken up and
had our first cup of coffee yet. With tools like MXNet (and the other deep learning frameworks), and
services such as EC2, it's going to be an exciting time.
Spice up your Analytics: Amazon QuickSight Now Generally

Available in N. Virginia, Oregon, and Ireland.
By Werner Vogels on 15 November 2016 02:00 PM PST | Comments (4)
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Previously, I wrote about Amazon QuickSight, a new service targeted at business users that aims to
simplify the process of deriving insights from a wide variety of data sources quickly, easily, and at a low
cost. QuickSight is a very fast, cloud-powered, business intelligence service for the 1/10th the cost of oldguard BI solutions. Today, I am very happy to announce that QuickSight is now generally available in the
N. Virginia, Oregon, and Ireland regions.
When we announced QuickSight last year, we set out to help all customersregardless of their technical
skillsmake sense out of their ever-growing data. As I mentioned, we live in a world where massive
volumes of data are being generated, every day, from connected devices, websites, mobile apps, and
customer applications running on top of AWS infrastructure. This data is collected and streamed using
services like Amazon Kinesis and stored in AWS relational data sources such as Amazon RDS, Amazon
Aurora, and Amazon Redshift; NoSQL data sources such as Amazon DynamoDB; and file-based data
sources such as Amazon S3. Along with data generated in the cloud, customers also have legacy data
sitting in on-premises datacenters, scattered on user desktops, or stored in SAS applications.
Theres an inherent gap between the data that is collected, stored, and processed and the key decisions
that business users make on a daily basis. Put simply, data is not always readily available and accessible
to organizational end users. The data infrastructure to collect, store, and process data is geared primarily
towards developers and IT professionals whereas insights need to be derived by not just technical
professionals but also non-technical business users. Most business users continue to struggle to answer
key business questions such as, Who are my top customers and what are they buying?, How is my
marketing campaign performing?, and Why is my most profitable region not growing? While BI solutions
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have existed for decades, customers have told us that it takes an enormous amount of time, IT effort, and
money to bridge this gap.
The reality is that many traditional BI solutions are built on top of legacy desktop and on-premises
architectures that are decades old. They require companies to provision and maintain complex hardware
infrastructure and invest in expensive software licenses, maintenance fees, and support fees that cost
upwards of thousands of dollars per user per year. They require teams of data engineers to spend months
building complex data models and synthesizing the data before they can generate their first report. To
scale to a larger number of users and support the growth in data volume spurred by social media, web,
mobile, IoT, ad-tech, and ecommerce workloads, these tools require customers to invest in even more
infrastructure to maintain performance. Finally, their complex user experiences are designed for power
users and not suitable for the fast-growing segment of business users. The cost and complexity to
implement, scale, and use BI makes it difficult for most companies to make data analysis ubiquitous
across their organizations.
Enter Amazon QuickSight
QuickSight is a cloud-powered BI service built from the ground up to address the big data challenges
around speed, complexity, and cost. QuickSight puts data at the fingertips of your business users in an
easy-to-use user interface and at one-tenth the cost of traditional BI solutions, even if that data is scattered
across various sources such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, or Salesforce.com; legacy
databases running on-premises; or even user desktops in Microsoft Excel or CSV file formats.
Getting started with QuickSight is simple. Lets walk through some of the core experiences of QuickSight
that make it so easy to set up, connect to your data sources, and build visualizations in minutes.
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Amazon QuickSight - Overview
Powered by Innovation
QuickSight is built on a large number of innovative technologies to get a business user their first insights
fast. Here are a few of the key innovations that power QuickSight:
SPICE: One of the key ingredients that makes QuickSight so powerful is the Super-fast, Parallel, Inmemory Calculation Engine (SPICE). SPICE is a new technology built by the same team that created
technologies such as DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Aurora. It is the underlying engine that
allows QuickSight to deliver blazing fast response times on large data sets. SPICE sits between the user
interface and the data source and can rapidly ingest all or part of the data into its fast, in-memory,
columnar-based data store thats optimized for analytical queries. SPICE is cloud-native, which means that
customers dont need to provision, manage, or scale infrastructure manually. Data is automatically
replicated across multiple Availability Zones for redundancy and also backed up to S3 for durability. This
allows us to enable organizations to reliably and securely scale to support thousands of users who can all
perform fast, interactive analysis across a wide variety of AWS data sources.
Auto-discovery: One of the challenges with BI is discovering and accessing the data. As a native offering
from AWS, QuickSight comes deeply integrated with AWS data sources such as Amazon Redshift, RDS,
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and S3. For instance, QuickSight auto-discovers all RDS instances and Amazon Redshift clusters to which
any logged-in user has access. Customers can visualize their data by picking a table and then getting to a
visualization in just a few clicks. In addition to AWS data sources, QuickSight also lets customers connect
to third-party databases running on Amazon EC2 or on-premises and popular business applications like
Excel and Salesforce.
AutoGraph: Picking the right visualization is not easy, and there is lot of science behind it. For instance,
optimal visualization depends on various factors: the type of data field selected (Is it time, number, or
string?), cardinality of the data (Does this field have only 4 unique values or 1 million values?), and
number of data fields that you are trying to visualize. While QuickSight supports multiple graph types (e.g.,
bar charts, line graphs, scatter plots, box plots, pie charts, and so on), one of the things we have tried to
simplify is a capability that automatically picks the right visualization for selected data using AutoGraph.
Users pick the data fields to visualize and QuickSight automatically selects the most optimal visual type.
Collaboration and sharing of live analytics: Users often want to slice and dice their data and share it in
various ways. With QuickSight, you can collaborate on analyses, which are visual explorations of your
data, and allow others to modify the analyses in any way. You can also share your analyses as read-only
dashboards and allow your viewers to interact and filter the visualizations without modification. QuickSight
lets you combine visualizations into guided tours, or stories, that you can share with other users to tell the
story of your data.
What our customers are saying about QuickSight
In the past months, thousands of AWS customers participated in the preview of QuickSight, including
global enterprises and startups from a range of industries. Many worked closely with the team to provide
early feedback and helped us rapidly iterate on the product. I am pleased to share some of the positive
feedback from our preview customers like MLB Advanced Media, Infor, and Hotelbeds.com.
MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) is a digital media and content infrastructure provider that powers an evergrowing number of massively popular media and entertainment properties. Brandon SanGiovanni, who is
a traffic manager at MLBAM, tells us that QuickSight made it easy for them to explore and analyze their
data in a fraction of time expected and provided them with a comprehensive view of their business without
being constrained by pre-built dashboards and metrics.
Infor is a business application provider with more than 90,000 customers and 58 million cloud users. Steve
Stahl, who is a Senior BI Development Manager at Infor, tells us that they found QuickSights SPICE
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engine to be fast and let them easily and quickly process and visualize datasets on RDS and Amazon
Redshift. Theyve been using QuickSight during preview to analyze their customer data and look forward
to continuing to use it after launch.
Miguel Iza is the Head of Data and Analytics at Hotelbeds, a global distributor of accommodations serving
more than 185 destination countries worldwide and more than 25 million room nights annually. He tells us
that QuickSight simplifies the way their users access data to perform self-service analysis and share
insights with other. They plan to adopt QuickSight for their new data solution and looks forward to
QuickSight democratizing business analytics in their company.
How you can get started
Im excited that QuickSight is now generally available in N. Virginia, Oregon, and Ireland, with other
regions coming soon. Get started by signing up for free at Amazon QuickSight, with 1 user and 1 GB of
SPICE capacity. For more details, see Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available: Fast, Easy to Use
Business Analytics for Big Data on the AWS Blog.
Meet the Teams Competing for the Alexa Prize

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On September 29, 2016, Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a $2.5 million university competition to
advance conversational AI through voice. We received applications from leading universities across 22
countries. Each application was carefully reviewed by senior Amazon personnel against a rigorous set of
criteria covering scientific contribution, technical merit, novelty, and ability to execute. Teams of scientists,
engineers, user experience designers, and product managers read, evaluated, discussed, argued, and
finally selected the twelve teams who would be invited to participate in the competition.
Today, were excited to announce the 12 teams selected to compete with an Amazon sponsorship. In
alphabetical order, they are:
Carnegie-Mellon University: CMU Magnus
Carnegie-Mellon University: TBD
Czech Technical University, Prague: eClub Prague
Heriot-Watt University, UK: WattSocialBot
Princeton University: Princeton Alexa
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: BAKAbot
University of California, Berkeley: Machine Learning @ Berkeley
University of California, Santa Cruz: SlugBots
University of Edinburgh, UK: Edina
University of Montreal, Canada: MILA Team
University of Trento, Italy: Roving Minds
University of Washington, Seattle: HuskyBot
These teams will each receive a $100,000 research grant as a stipend, Alexa-enabled devices, free
Amazon Web Services (AWS) services to support their development efforts, access to new Alexa Skills Kit
(ASK) APIs, and support from the Alexa team. Teams invited to participate without sponsorship will be
announced on December 12, 2016.
We have challenged these teams to create a socialbot, a conversational AI skill for Alexa that converses
engagingly and coherently with humans for 20 minutes on popular topics and news events such as
Entertainment, Fashion, Politics, Sports, and Technology. This seemingly intuitive task continues to be one
of the ultimate challenges for AI.
Teams will need to advance several areas of conversational AI including knowledge acquisition, natural
language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, common sense reasoning, and
dialog planning. We will provide students with data and technical support to help them tackle these
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problems at scale, and live interactions and feedback from Alexas large user base to help them test ideas
and iterate their algorithms much faster than previously possible.
As teams gear up for the challenge, we invite all of you to think about what youd like to chat with Alexa
about. In April, you and millions of other Alexa customers will be able to test the socialbots and provide
feedback to the teams to help them create a socialbot youll want to chat with every day. Your feedback will
also help select the finalists. In the meantime, follow the #AlexaPrize hashtag and bookmark the Alexa
Prize site for updates.
Welcoming Adrian Cockcroft to the AWS Team.

By Werner Vogels on 24 October 2016 09:00 AM PDT | Comments (13)
I am excited that Adrian Cockcroft will be joining AWS as VP of Cloud Architecture. Adrian has played a
crucial role in developing the cloud ecosystem as Cloud Architect at Netflix and later as a Technology
Fellow at Battery Ventures. Prior to this, he held positions as Distinguished Engineer at eBay and Sun
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Microsystems. One theme that has been consistent throughout his career is that Adrian has a gift for
seeing the bigger engineering picture.
At Netflix, Adrian played a key role in the company's much-discussed migration to a "cloud native"
architecture, and the open sourcing of the widely used (and award-winning) NetflixOSS platform. AWS
customers around the world are building more scalable, reliable, efficient and well-performing systems
thanks to Adrian and the Netflix OSS effort.
Combine Adrian's big thinking with his excellent educational skills, and you understand why Adrian
deserves the respect he receives around the world for helping others be successful on AWS. I'd like to
share a few Adrian's own words about his decision to join us....
"After working closely with many folks at AWS over the last seven years, I am thrilled to be joining the
clear leader in cloud computing.The state of the art in infrastructure, software packages, and services is
nowadays a combination of AWS and open source tools. -- and they are available to everyone. This
democratization of access to technology levels the playing field, and means anyone can learn and
compete to be the best there is."
I am excited about welcoming Adrian to the AWS team where he will work closely with AWS executives
and product groups and consult with customers on their cloud architectures -- from start-ups that were
born in the cloud to large web-scale companies and enterprises that have an all-in migration strategy.
Adrian will also spend time engaging with developers in the Amazon-sponsored and supported open
source communities. I am looking really looking forward to working with Adrian again and seeing the
positive impact he will have on AWS customers around the world.
Expanding the AWS Cloud: Introducing the AWS US East

(Ohio) Region
By Werner Vogels on 17 October 2016 09:00 AM PDT | Comments (1)
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Today I am very happy to announce the opening of the new US East (Ohio) Region. The Ohio Region is
the fifth AWS region in the US. It brings the worldwide total of AWS Availability Zones (AZs) to 38, and the
number of regions globally to 14. The pace of expansion at AWS is accelerating, and Ohio is our third
region launch this year. In the remainder of 2016 and in 2017, we will launch another four AWS regions in
Canada, China, the United Kingdom, and France, adding another nine AZs to our global infrastructure
footprint.
We strive to place customer feedback first in our considerations for where to open new regions. The Ohio
Region is no different. Now customers who have been requesting a second US East region have more
infrastructure options for running workloads, storing files, running analytics, and managing databases. The
Ohio Region launches with three AZs so that customers can create high-availability environments and
architect for fault tolerance and scalability. As with all AWS AZs, the AZs in Ohio each have redundant
power, networking, and connectivity, which are designed to be resilient to issues in another AZ.
We are also glad to offer low transfer rates between both US East Regions. Data transfer between the
Ohio Region and the Northern Virginia Region is priced the same as data transfer between AZs within
either of these regions. We hope this will be helpful for customers who want to implement backup or
disaster recovery architectures and need to transfer large amounts of data between these regions. It will
also be useful for developers who simply want to use services in both regions and move resources back
and forth between them. The Ohio Region also has a broad set of services comparable to our Northern
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Virginia Region, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage
Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Marketplace.
Check out the Regional Products and Services page for the full list.
Well continue to add new infrastructure to grow our footprint and make AWS as useful as possible for all
of our customers around the world. You can learn more about our growing global infrastructure footprint at
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/.
Accelerating Data: Faster and More Scalable ElastiCache for

Redis
By Werner Vogels on 12 October 2016 10:00 PM PDT | Comments (1)
Fast Data is an emerging industry term for information that is arriving at high volume and incredible rates,
faster than traditional databases can manage. Three years ago, as part of our AWS Fast Data journey we
introduced Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, a fully managed in-memory data store that operates at submillisecond latency. Since then weve introduced Amazon Kinesis for real-time streaming data, AWS
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Lambda for serverless processing, Apache Spark analytics on EMR, and Amazon QuickSight for high
performance Business Intelligence.
While caching continues to be a dominant use of ElastiCache for Redis, we see customers increasingly
use it as an in-memory NoSQL database. Developers love the blazing fast performance and in-memory
capabilities provided by Redis, making it among the most popular NoSQL key-value stores. However, until
now ElastiCache for Redis customers could only run single-shard Redis. This limited the workload size
and write throughput to that of a single VM, or required application level sharding. Today, as a next step in
our Fast Data journey, we have extended the ElastiCache for Redis service to support Redis Cluster, the
sharding capability of Redis. Customers can now scale a single deployment to include up to 15 shards,
making each Redis-compatible data store up to 3.5 terabytes in size, that operate on microsecond time
scales. We also do this at very high rates: up to 4.5 million writes per second and 20 million reads per
second. Each shard can include up to five read replicas to ensure high availability so that both planned
and unforeseen outages of the infrastructure do not cause application outages.
Building upon Redis
There are some great examples and use cases for Redis, which you can see at companies like Hudl,
which offers mobile and desktop video analytics solutions to sports teams and athletes. Hudl is using
ElastiCache for Redis to provide millions of coaches and sports analysts with near real-time data feeds
that they need to help drive their teams to victory. Another example is Trimble, a global leader in location
services who is using ElastiCache for Redis as their primary database for workforce location, helping
customers like DirecTV get the right technician to the right location as quickly and inexpensively as
possible, enabling both reduced costs and increased satisfaction for their own subscribers.
Increasingly, ElastiCache for Redis has become a mission critical in-memory database for our customers
whose availability, durability, performance and scale matter to their business. We have therefore been
enhancing the Redis engine running on ElastiCache for the last few years using our own expertise in
making enterprise infrastructure scalable and reliable. Amazons enhancements address many day-to-day
challenges with running Redis. By utilizing techniques such as granular memory management, dynamic
I/O throttling and fine grained replica synchronization, ElastiCache for Redis delivers a more robust Redis
experience. It enables customers to run their Redis nodes at higher memory utilization without risking
swap usage during events such as snapshotting and replica synchronization. It also offers improved
synchronization of replicas under load. In addition, ElastiCache for Redis provides smoother Redis
failovers by combining our Multi-AZ automated failover with streamlined synchronization of read replicas.
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Replicas now recover faster as they no longer need to flush their data to do a full resynchronization with
the primary. All these capabilities are available to customers at no additional charge, and maintain opensource Redis compatibility.
With this launch, we augmented the client-based failover logic of Redis 3.2 with ElastiCache for Redis
Multi-AZ. If a customer is running a self-managed Redis environment on EC2 instead of using ElastiCache
for Redis and the primary node fails, the cluster relies on a majority of primaries to determine and execute
a failover. If such a majority doesnt exist, the cluster will go into failed state, rejecting any further reads
and writes. This could lead to a major availability impact on the application, requiring human intervention to
manually salvage the cluster. This does not happen with ElastiCache for Redis. ElastiCache for Redis
Multi-AZ capability is built to handle any failover case for Redis Cluster with robustness and efficiency. The
combination of ElastiCache for Redis with the intelligent Redis 3 clients leads to maximum performance
and availability of your Redis environment. The client keeps a map of Redis nodes, which is updated in
case of failover. This allows for faster failover times while minimizing latency. Alternative solutions
frequently use proxy layers to achieve failover and sharding, which slow down your application by
requiring requests to do double the network hops.
Redis and Fast Data
Fast data can have a transformational impact on data-driven development that is underlying a lot of the
interesting things happening in the Cloud today. This enables here-and-now real-time processing and
dashboards as well as predictions that enable smart applications. As data sizes grow and expectations
move from analytics on a daily basis to analytics on a real-time basis, the need to process data quickly
increases. With the latest enhancement we have made to ElastiCache for Redis, we are excited to help
these customers with a more robust, high performance, highly scalable in-memory database solution.
Many of our customers share my excitement:
Interactive Intelligence, Inc. is a software company providing unified business communications solutions
for call centers, including real-time reporting and analytics. We have been eagerly awaiting ElastiCache
for Redis support for Redis Cluster, and are excited to take advantage of it for easy to setup redundancy,
fast failure recovery, and ultra-high scalability said Anthony Roach, Chief Architect. We are heavy users
of ElastiCache for Redis for both caching and fast data structure storage due to its ease of management
and reliability, and the addition of Redis Cluster makes it even more compelling.
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Team Internet AG is an ad tech company with a focus on domain monetization and real-time bidding. In
the last years we have moved quite a significant workload over to ElastiCache for Redis for caching and
ephemeral data, said Markus Ostertag, Head of Development. Now with the support for Redis Cluster,
were very happy to be able to scale out much more easily, get higher performance and better reliability for
our whole Redis infrastructure.
This is a great time to be watching the rapid development of AWS Cloud capabilities for Fast Data
management and I urge you to take a few minutes to take a look at the new ElastiCache for Redis and see
how you might be able to use it for your own projects.
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