AWS re:Invent 2017 has drawn to close and what a whirlwind week it was! We hardly had time to draw breath between the announcements, sessions and people to meet and greet. For us, it was the best yet. As our fourth re:invent participation, we like to think that we can say that with a good level of insight.

The pace of innovation continues to grow at AWS. The AWS Cloud platform now has over a 100 distinct services. This year alone, they released over 1300 new services or enhancements to existing services. That’s 30% more than last year!

We went to re:Invent to get an understanding of where the AWS platform is heading and in particular to understand the emerging technologies. It turns out we were right on the money as human interfaces, machine learning and interesting new opportunities with blockchain were very much at the forefront. We certainly came away spinning with a heap of ideas in these areas that we will be sharing with our clients.

Key message from re:Invent

The message of the conference was very much about stepping away from the undifferentiated heavy lifting, to borrow an oft quoted phrase. AWS have been concentrating on building solutions that allow your organisation to concentrate on applications and business value. Will your business really gain a market advantage in how they operate a container platform? Or will an enhanced user experience and better customer services by your key differentiator?

AWS are very much assisting companies to innovate faster by giving them the tools – and all the tools! – to access these new frontiers. Machine learning in particular is huge and will have applications everywhere,  as will the changes in how we interact with digital systems – for too long, we have been restricted by the technology but now that is changing. When was the last time you had a more engaging email exchange vs. a face to face predominately voiced based interaction? Alexa for business is going to be a game changer for the office environment.

If you weren’t able to make it to re:Invent, you can find both Andy’s and Werner’s keynotes on youtube. I particularly love the fact that a majority of the clients and engineers on stage with Werner are women, a fabulous demonstration of AWS diversity principles.  Who says there aren’t rock star female engineers out there?

If you missed our highlights from the announcements, check out our two previous blogs from Day 1 and Day 2. There were a couple of other sneaker announcements that may well turn out to be huge and we will cover them in a forthcoming blog. Stay tuned!

We are super excited. There’s never been a better time to be a digital builder and the AWS platform is by the far the best place to be to make it happen.

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