Technology major Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a slew of updates at its AWS re:Invent 2016.
Amazon Web Services started a serverless query service, Amazon Athena, designed to analyze data directly in Amazon Simple Storage Service using standard SQL.
With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Amazon Athena at their data stored in Amazon S3 and begin using standard SQL to run queries and get results in seconds.
It further announced three Artificial Intelligence (AI) services – Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition.
These services are designed to help developera to build apps that can understand natural language, turn text into lifelike speech, have conversations using voice or text, analyze images, and recognize faces, objects, and scenes.
The company conveyed that these AI services are fully managed services so there are no deep learning algorithms to build, no machine learning models to train, and no up-front commitments or infrastructure investments required.
AWS further announced the next generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Memory Optimized, Compute Optimized, and High input/output (I/O) instances, and added two new hardware acceleration options to its range of compute services.
The new F1 instance is the cloud’s first customer-programmable, hardware-accelerated compute instance with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs allow customers to easily attach low-cost, professional grade graphics acceleration to Amazon EC2 instances.
AWS also announced Amazon Lightsail, a new way to get started with AWS that makes it easy to spin up powerful virtual private servers (VPS) that have bundled storage and networking with simple, monthly pricing.
The company further said it has added full PostgreSQL compatibility to Amazon Aurora, the database engine.
Amazon bets that with new PostgreSQL support, customers can get up to several times better performance than the typical PostgreSQL database.
Further, Amazon announced Greengrass, software which allows customers to run AWS compute, messaging, data caching, and sync capabilities on connected devices.
With Greengrass, devices can run AWS Lambda functions to perform tasks locally, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices while leveraging the full processing, analytics, and storage power of the AWS Cloud.
Amazon also announced a new Snowball data transfer appliance, the AWS Snowball Edge, that can transport two times more data than the original AWS Snowball (up to 100 TB), and includes Greengrass.
It is a purpose-built hybrid edge device that can transfer data to and from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), cluster with other Snowball Edge devices to form an on-premises storage pool, and run Lambda to process and analyze data.
