AWS CEO re:Invent Keynote: 7 Bold Google, Windows, VMware And ‘Game-Changing’ Innovation Remarks

From a new Amazon Q offering to help customers get off Microsoft Windows to new Amazon Aurora database service that bests Google Spanner, here are AWS CEO Matt Garman’s boldest statements during his keynote at AWS re:Invent 2024 today.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman took the stage at AWS re:Invent 2024 today to tout a slew of new innovations as the cloud giant seeks to win more market share against the competition, such as an “easy button” to get off Microsoft Windows, its new Amazon Q Developer offering to modernize and move VMware workloads to AWS cloud, as well as Amazon’s new Trainium3 chips and EC2 UltraServers.

“We have more instances, more capabilities, and more compute than any other cloud,” said Garman during his keynote onstage in front of thousands of AWS re:Invent attendees.

Garman also announced that its new Amazon Aurora DSQL tops Google Spanner in the database service market.

“It turns out that Aurora [DSQL] delivers 4X faster reads and writes than Spanner,” the AWS CEO said. “We’re really excited to see how you’re going to leverage this in your application.”

Additionally, Garman touted Amazon’s new S3 Tables storage offering as a “game changer” for the object storage industry.

“S3 [Tables] is completely reinventing object storage specifically for the data lake world to deliver better performance, better cost and better scale. I think this is a game changer for data lake performance,” he said.

AWS re:Invent 2024 marked Garman’s first conference as the CEO of AWS since he took over the reins earlier this year.

“This is my first event as CEO, but it’s not my first re:Invent. I've actually had the privilege to be at every re:Invent since 2012. Now 13 years into this event, a lot has changed, but what hasn’t is what makes re:Invent so special—bringing together the passionate, energetic AWS community to learn from each other,” he said.

Here are the seven boldest remarks from AWS CEO Matt Garman during his keynote at AWS re:Invent 2024 today in Las Vegas.

Amazon Q Developer Gives Customers The ‘Easy Button Get Off Windows’

I love asking customers how we can help them and what their biggest pain points are. One of the things that will quickly bubble to the top is Windows.

Customers would love an easy button to get off Windows. They’re tired of constant security issues and constant patching, all the scalability challenges that they have to deal with, and they definitely hate the onerous licensing costs.

We do recognize today that this is hard. So actually modernizing away from Windows is not easy today. So I'm happy to announce Amazon Q Developer Transformation for Windows .NET applications.

Now with Q Developer, modernizing Windows just got a lot easier. Q Developer helps you transform .NET applications that are running on Windows to Linux in a fraction at a time.

What happens is Q Developer launches agents that can automatically discover incompatibilities, generate a transformation plan and refactor your source code. And it can do this across hundreds or even thousands of applications in parallel. Turns out Q Developer can help you modernize .NET applications 4X faster than doing it manually. Once you're done, the good news is you save 40 percent by saving all your licensing costs.

Click through to read what the other six boldest statements Garman made on stage during his keynote at AWS re:Invent 2024 that you should know about.

New Amazon Auroa DSQL Vs. Google Spanner

I am really excited to announce Amazon Aurora DSQL. This is the next era in Aurora.

Aurora DSQL is the fastest distributed SQL database anywhere. Aurora DSQL delivers virtually unlimited scale all across regions, with zero infrastructure management for you and a fully surplus design that scales down to zero. Aurora DSQL delivers five-nines of availability. It's strongly consistent. You get low latency reads and writes, and Auroa DSQL is PostgresSQL compatible, so it's really easy to start using today.

So we want to see how this offering will compare against Google's Spanner, which is probably the closest offering out there today.

So we did a multi-region setup and we did benchmarking. It turns out that Aurora delivers 4X faster reads and writes than Spanner. That’s pretty awesome. We're really excited to see how you're going to leverage this in your application.

This type of core innovation in these fundamental building blocks is why some of the biggest enterprises in the world trust AWS with their workloads.

New Amazon Q Developer Transformation for VMware Workloads

There’s customers running workloads on VMware, but they don't want them to stay running in their data centers. They'd like to migrate those to the cloud.

For these workloads, we announced our new Elastic VMware Service that makes it easy to move VMware subscriptions to AWS and easily run the full VCF [VMware Cloud Foundatoin] stack of VMware natively on top of Amazon EC2.

However, there's a lot of workloads that are currently running on VMware that customers would really love to modernize to cloud native services.

We know VMware is deeply intrenched in your data centers and has been for a really long time. But what happens is in this VMware environment, because it's been there for a long time, there ends up being this spaghetti mess of interconnected applications. So the hardest part of modernizing is finding out what are those dependencies of those applications? And it's hard to understand that if you move something, is it going to break something else? And again, of course, licensing is expensive.

We're pleased to announce today Amazon Q Developer Transformation for VMware workloads.

Amazon Q Developer is able to help you easily modernize workloads that are running on VMware and move them to a cloud native solution.

The biggest value here is Q automatically identifies all your application dependencies, and it generates this migration plan for you, which really reduces a ton of the migration time and significantly reduces your risk. It then also launches agents that can convert your on-premise VMware network configurations into modern AWS equivalents. This takes what used to be months and months of work into weeks.

New Trainium3 Chips

By announcing the general availability of Trainium2 today, it turns out that the generative AI space is moving at lightning speed. So we're not slowing down either.

We're committed to delivering on the vision of Trainium long term. We know that we have to keep up with the evolving needs of generative AI and the entire landscape that you all need from us in your instances, which is why today I'm excited to also announce the next leap forward: Trainium3 coming later next year.

Trainium3 will be our first chip that AWS makes on the three nanometer process, and it'll give you 2X more compute than you get from Trainium2. It'll also be 40 percent more efficient, which is great as well.

So it'll allow you all to build bigger, faster, more exciting GenAI applications. We have more instances, more capabilities, and more compute than any other cloud.

New Amazon S3 Tables

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of new Amazon S3 Tables buckets. It's a new bucket-type specifically for [Apache] Iceberg tables.

What this does is, we basically improve the performance and scalability of all of your Iceberg tables. If you store all your [Apache] Parquet files into one of these S3 Tables Buckets, you get 3X better query performance. You get 10 times higher transactions per second compared to storing these Iceberg tables in a general purpose S3 bucket. It has massive performance for really doing no additional work.

S3 Tables does this work for you. You put it here. It will automatically handle all the table maintenance events—things like compaction, things like snapshot management—all of that undifferentiated things will remove unreferenced files to help manage the size. All of those things are going to be continually optimized. We're continually optimized that query performance for you and the cost as your data lake scales.

This is a fantastic thing, where S3 is completely reinventing object storage specifically for the data lake world to deliver better performance, better cost and better scale. I think this is a game changer for data lake performance.

Amazon EC2 UltraServers

Some models today are actually getting really, really large, with hundreds of millions, billions, sometimes trillions of parameters. And those models are often too large to fit on a single server. So I'm excited to announce EC2 Trainium UltraServers.

Effectively, an UltraServer connects four Trainium2 instances—so 64 Trainium2 chips—all interconnected by the high speed, low latency neural link connectivity.

What this does is it gives you a single Ultra node with over 83 petaflops of compute just from this single compute node. This has a massive impact on latency.

So now you can load one of these really large models all into a single node and deliver much better latency and much better performance for customers without having to break it up without multiple nodes. In addition, this has really material impacts on training clusters. By having these really large customers, we can actually build much, much larger training clusters for customers.

AWS Giving $1 Billion Worth Of Cloud Credits To Startups In 2025

I first started AWS in 2006 when we launched the business, and our very first customers were startups. So startups have a really special place in my heart.

One of the things that I love about startups is they're anxious to use new technologies. They will jump in and they give us great feedback. They push us to innovate. They innovate on top of us, and they move really fast, and we learn a ton from startups. Now with generative AI, there is never a more exciting time out there in the world to be a startup.

Generative AI has the potential to disrupt every single industry out there. And when you look at disruptors, disruption comes from startups. So it's a fantastic time for your startup to really be thinking about how you disrupt industries.

In fact, we support startups so much that I'm excited to announce that in 2025 AWS will provide $1 billion in credits to startups globally as we continue to invest in your success.