Amazon goes all-in on AI and big data at AWS re:Invent 2016

Invent 2016 AWS

On Wednesday, at the first keynote of the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy took the stage to explain a host of new updates to the cloud provider's portfolio of services. And, it seems Amazon is making a big bet on next -generation technology.

Some of the biggest announcements were the first three services of the Amazon AI portfolio. For starters, Amazon Rekognition provides image recognition, categorization, and facial analysis in batch analysis or real time. The facial analysis can detect sentiment, and tell whether or not the subject is wearing glasses, for example.

Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech (TTS) service that is powered by deep learning. It takes a text input and returns an MP3 stream that is altered to sound more like actual conversation. For example, if the text contains "WA" the output might say Washington instead. Jassy also announced that a new service called Amazon Lex, which powers Alexa, is coming as well. Lex provides natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition.


The new AI tools announced by Jassy could make it much easier for enterprise customers to tap into, and leverage, technologies such as machine learning to build their next generation of applications.


In his address, Jassy also noted that Amazon would be launching a new analytics product called Amazon Athena. As a companion to the existing EMR and Redshift, Athena is an interactive query service that allows users to analyze data in S3 using SQL. This significantly lowers the bar for everyday IT to utilize big data analytics to glean insights.

To go along with these new services, Jassy also announced a slew of new compute instances and features as well. Here are the following compute types that were announced:
T2.xlarge - 16 GiB, 2 vCPU
T2.2xlarge - 32 GiB,. 2 vCPU
R4 - 48 GiB, DDR4, L3 cache, 64 vCPUs
I3 - 3.3 million IOPS, 488 GiB, 15.2 TB NVMe SSD, 64 vCPUS
C5 - 72 vCPUs, Intel Skylake, 12 Gbps to EBS, 144 GiB


The C5 instance shows just how much hardcore GPU processing is being done on AWS. However, to give a broader group of users access to GPU power, Jassy announced a new service called Elastic GPUs for EC2, which allows users to attach a GPU to any of the existing compute instances in AWS.


Continuing in the vein of simplifying some of the features available in AWS, Amazon Lightsail was revealed as a way to make virtual private servers (VPS) easier to launch. Users choose from five bundles, name their server, and create it. Additionally, packages start at only $5 a month.

AWS users will also get access to a preview of F1 instances, Amazon's new FPGA instance family. This will allow users to run custom logic on EC2.

Additionally, to touch on IoT deployments, Jassy also announced AWS Greengrass. This service embeds AWS Lambda compute and other AWS services in connected devices, and allows users to manage them from the AWS console.

Last year, AWS launched Snowball, a secure appliance that makes it easier to move data to the cloud. At the 2016 re:invent, Jassy unveiled the general availability of Snowball Edge, which has on-board compute, and more storage than the previous version.
The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers


Amazon announced three new AI products for image recognition, text-to-speech, and the natural language understanding that powers Amazon Alexa.
Amazon also announced Amazon Athena, an analytics products that allows users to query S3 with simple SQL.
The majority of the compute instance lineup in AWS got an update, with new products as well.

Azure SQL Database Now Supports Backup Retention for 10 Years

 By Luke Jones - 

October 31, 2016 9:27 pm CET 

Microsoft announced that the backup retention of Azure SQL Database has been significantly increased. The service will also make automatic weekly backups of all databases.

Azure SQL Database now support up to 10 years of Backup Retention, says Microsoft. The announcement was made on the company’s official Azure blog. Principal Program Manager of Azure SQL Database, Alexander Noscov, said the change makes it easier for customers.

This ease of use means customers can enable long-term retention in a few clicks. With this new feature you can extend the retention period from 35 days to as much as 10 year. That’s quite a difference for sure. Azure SQL Database now also supports backups that are stored within the Azure Backup Service Vault.


To support data retention requirements, Azure SQL Database now backs up more often. Indeed, Microsoft says the service will create a full backup every week for each database.

In the blog post, Noscov explains how the backups work:

“Once you add the LTR policy to a database using Azure Portal or API, these weekly backups will be automatically copied to your own Azure Backup Service Vault. If your databases are encrypted with TDE, that’s no problem — the backups are automatically encrypted at rest.


The Services Vault will automatically delete your expired backups based on their timestamp, so there’s no need to manage the backup schedule or worry about the cleanup of the old files. The following diagram shows how to add LTR policy in the Portal.”
Azure SQL Database Temporal Tables

At the start of this month, Microsoft introduced Temporal Tables to Azure SQL Database. The service allows customers to track their data history easily. Some of the uses for these tables include:
Supporting data auditing in your applications
Analyzing trends or detect anomalies over time
Easily implementing slowly changing dimension pattern
Performing fine-grained row repairs in case of accidental data errors made by humans or applications