It's a case of Viva Las Vegas for cloud computing this week, as the current king, Amazon Web Services, takes over the casino strip for AWS re:Invent.
Will the Amazon e-commerce division will still be heavily busy with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, its technology arm will be welcoming 40,000 people to Sin City for all things cloud.
As AMS expands its cloud footprint so too does it expand its presence in Vegas taking over the Venetian, Mirage, MGM Grand, Bellagio, and Aria hotels.
Unlike the expo's of its biggest rivals, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, AWS saves a lot of announcements for re:Invent, which is likely to hold many function releases and version updates. We expect keynotes from CEO Andy Jassy and CTO Dr Werner Vogels to discuss some of these.
Hybrid Cloud
One of the areas AWS will need to address this year will be its hybrid cloudservices. The company is the dominant force in public cloud, but hybrid services have always been downplayed beyond its VMware partnership and its Snowball Edge device. But more and more companies are turning to hybrid clouds, looking to keep certain workloads on-premise, as they take staps towards digital transformation.
In this instance, AWS is behind most its rivals, such as Microsoft with its Azure Stack and IBM, which recently brought Red Hat to specifically target Hybrid clouds. AWS will want to remain dominant, but it won't do that with just VMware -- we expect some news on this front.
AI and Machine Learning
Both Microsoft and Google made AI the big theme for 2018 events. Google Cloud had 'AI for everyone' as its tagline, so it makes sense to follow the trend and we can expect that AWS will have some sort of AI announcement or an update at the least.
In the lead up to the event, the company announced an expansion to its machine learning offerings, with new capabilities for text-to-speech service, Amazon Polly, Amazon Translate and its multi-language transcription service, Amazon Transcribe. Some of these offerings were announced last year, at re:Invent 2017, so we expect some more new expansions of capabilities to be announced during the event.
