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AWS re:Invent 2023 Sparks a New Era

After the 12th edition of re:invent, the world's largest AWS event, it is now time to explore, reflect and test with all the technological advances at our disposal.

Right now, the social networks, technology websites and blogs are filled with summaries, recaps and lists of everything that has been revealed during this intense week. With this post I'm going to try to do my bit by sharing how I think they will land in the industry.

A "framework" to analyze the announcements:

I like to try to classify innovations to sift through them based on how they will affect my day-to-day work with AWS. A while back I read an article on innovation that posited a taxonomy based on the impact of the innovation itself. This classification divides innovation into three broad groups: incremental, revolutionary and disruptive innovation. I have applied it on several occasions to re:invent innovations and it really allows me to pick and choose which innovations to focus on.

Sustained or incremental innovation:

This occurs when both the problem and the domain in which it exists are well defined. An example would be services that move from managed to serverless, or are updated implementations of established services.

Breakthrough innovation:

This is a type of radical innovation that occurs when the problem it is trying to solve is well defined, but the domain in which it exists is still only operating at a fraction of its potential. The most immediate example that comes to mind would be the Zero-ETL philosophy, which optimises the way we operate with data between its different data storage systems.

Disruptive innovation:

This is when a new product or service offering transforms the market it enters. We enter the realm of the game-changer, services or products that totally alter the way things were being done at the time. This edition brings us many improvements around generative AI, but above all a new actor: Amazon Q our new travelling companion.

In a practical way, what I do is to frequently check the official blog "Top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2023" (and I refer to it by its proper name because it really is the compass I use to follow) and filter by the categories: announcements and reinvent. From there, I look for the recordings of the sessions or specific content of the new services.

Other interesting ideas:

In addition to my proposed classification, I would like to take this opportunity to mention some other ideas.

  1. The public reinforcement of the alliance with Nvidia, publicly reinforces the image of both corporations and leaves us with two really interesting announcements: AWS will have privileged access to new generations of NVIDIA chips, with the consequent competitive advantage for its customers, and the Ceiba project, an initiative to jointly build the fastest AI supercomputer. I find this second announcement particularly interesting.

  2. Wernel Vogels' talk and the laws of frugal architecture: in itself I find this an interesting exercise, often in my work I find myself in the situation of accompanying clients on their way to cost optimisation without losing sight of technical excellence. This proposal aligns the design in an elegant way, if cost is from the beginning a non-functional requirement, it will be taken into account in design time and this will allow to put focus on it. Also, emphasising that it is not a single process, but a parallel journey helps to be continuous in this practice. It is also very much in line with the FinOps philosophy to spend time understanding, observing and monitoring systems in all their aspects.


In conclusion, the new landscape after AWS Re:Invent leaves a lot of room for discussion and creativity, including the proposed innovation classification and how it's applied to the announcements.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this
what do you think? Drop a comment and let's start a conversation!

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