AWS Re:Invent Roundup – Meta collab, new chips and Outpost evolution

AWS re:Invent LAS VEGAS: A wave of news came spilling out of Amazon’s annual re:Invent conference this week, as the company unveiled an array of new partnerships, products and services.

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) introduction of Private 5G and purpose-built vertical offerings this week grabbed headlines, but Fierce also wanted to highlight other notable news that may have flown under the radar. Here’s what you need to know.

Partnerships

AWS inked a long-term collaboration deal with Facebook parent company Meta. As part of the agreement, Meta will broaden its use of AWS compute, storage, databases and security services. The pair will also team up to accelerate adoption of PyTorch, an open-source machine learning framework.  

Kathrin Renz, VP of Business Development and Industries at AWS, said in a statement “With this agreement, AWS will continue to help Meta support research and development, drive innovation and collaborate with third parties and the open-source community at scale. Customers can rely on Meta and AWS to collaborate on PyTorch, making it easier for them to build, train, and deploy deep learning models on AWS.”

Separately, Nasdaq tapped AWS to launch the first-ever Private AWS Local Zone for capital markets as it works to shift its operations to the cloud. Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman said during a keynote the edge computing solution has been custom built to meet the needs of the financial services industry. Nasdaq will begin by transitioning its U.S. options market to AWS in 2022, following with other North American and global markets in a multi-phase migration.

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“We only wanted to take this journey when we were confident that we could do it while maintaining or even improving the latency and resiliency of our markets,” Friedman said. “Our ambition at Nasdaq is to become the first financial marketplace and solutions provider that is 100% cloud enabled.”

Chip

AWS unveiled its third generation processor, Graviton3, the company’s answer to chips from rivals like Intel. Graviton3 is set to perform 25% faster overall than its predecessor the Graviton2, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said during a keynote. It will also offer two-times faster floating point performance for scientific workloads and deliver the same uplift for cryptographic workloads. Selipsky said Graviton3 will also offer three-times faster performance for machine learning workloads and use up to 60% less energy.

Rahul Subramaniam, creator of a cost optimization platform for AWS called CloudFix, told Fierce “the biggest benefit is the price performance, but in addition to that, Amazon is adding quite a few new security features to the new processors that are going to create more security for customers.”

He added “We believe that Amazon is just getting started creating a whole new set of instances around the Graviton3 architecture, therefore they have a lot of runway to develop further performance improvements going well beyond the 25% that was announced.”

Outposts

Finally, AWS took the wraps off new, smaller form factors for its Outpost compute and storage product for on-premises deployments.

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Introduced in 2018, AWS’ Outpost hardware has hitherto been comprised of servers which occupy a full refrigerator-sized 42U rack. The three new form factors unveiled this week scale that down significantly, down to the size of a pizza box or two. The company said these new options are suitable for deployments in space-constrained locations including branch offices, retail stores, restaurants, health clinics and wireless cell sites.

The new Outpost servers are currently available for order in 49 countries across 23 AWS regions, with broader availability due in 2022.