AWS RE:INVENT 2023: The chairman gives his verdict…

So long, Las Vegas! It’s been quite a few days… We’ve had a great time meeting everyone who popped over to our home for the week at booth #264 and seen a fair few budding racing drivers on our F1 simulator. Overall, our team met with over 2,000 partners and potential customers at AWS re:Invent 2023. It was a ‘massive success’, our chairman and co-founder Alexander Dick told us.‘It’s our first big year in business with AWS and re:Invent for us was a chance for us to go and announce ourselves to our partners and potential customers.’

And the future looks bright for VeUP customers. So many new features, chips, updates and more were announced throughout the week you’d be forgiven for struggling to keep up. If so, have a read through our in-depth look at each keynote to find out what they all might mean for you. But, for the sake of efficiency – nb. we’re fully signed up to Amazon-speak now – we asked the big boss for his three big takeaways. So, in no particular order, here they are…

Generative AI was the talk of the town – but it shouldn’t take away from all the other great announcements. The technology is revolutionising cloud computing and you couldn’t move for talk of chatbots and the like at re:Invent. Head honcho Adam Selipsky used his keynote to boast how AWS offered the safest and widest-choice of genAI tools, while also unveiling a new AI assistant for employees called Q and taking several potshots at rival Microsoft. But Alexander said that while it may have grabbed the headlines, and justifiably so, there was also ‘a whole load of innovation outside of it that we should be celebrating too’.

Cost-optimisation underpins everything at AWS – and that’s a very good thing. This is a key message for VeUP and Alexander told us he was ‘really pleased’ it got major billing this year. Amazon’s maverick chief technology officer, Dr Werner Vogels, whose keynote often sets the tone for the year ahead, chose to remind everyone at re:Invent why we were all there – to make and save money. Yes, AWS announced dozens of great new features, including a whole host of genAI tools, but what does your business actually need? Dr Vogels said the first thing you must do to design successful architecture is make sure it is cost-optimal. This is an issue ‘close to our hearts’, Mr Dick said, because it’s crucial for ISVs and Saas providers to ‘get that done as early as you can – from day one’.

Sustainability is at the heart of everything AWS does now. Alexander said it was ‘important’ this was constantly flagged as a key issue throughout the four-day event. Innovation will be key to solving our climate challenges, Mr Dick said, highlighting how global leaders were convening at COP 28 in the same week over in the United Arab Emirates. Amazon itself has committed to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, and being water positive by 2030, meaning it will return more than it uses at its sites across the world. The buzzword was mentioned in every keynote, from Peter DeSantis kicking off the week discussing how AWS’ constant drive for serverless systems would mean more energy efficiency, to Dr Vogels final talk in which he repeated several times that ‘cost is a close proxy for sustainability’ and urged every developer to put that a the forefront of their mind.

What happens in Vegas, hopefully this time doesn’t stay in Vegas… It feels only right to end our coverage in the home of neon signs and cheap elvis memorabilia with a suitably cheesy sign off. So, from us all here at VeUP, while it might spell the end of our time in Sin City, we hope it’s just the start of something new with all the people we met this week.