AWS re:Invent Recap: 20 Biggest Products And Announcements

Here are 20 of the most important AWS products, partnerships and news announcements from AWS re:Invent 2022 last week that partners and customers need to know about.

From new products and AWS Marketplace offerings to launching new partner competencies and revamped technology partnerships, there was no shortage of news at AWS re:Invent 2022 last week in Las Vegas.

“I’m happy to welcome over 50,000 customers and partners here in Las Vegas and over 300,000 attendees virtually around the world,” said Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky to open up his keynote speech at AWS re:Invent 2022. “We’ve got so much innovation to share.”

AWS launched a slew of new products including AWS Supply Chain, Amazon Security Lake and AWS SimSpace Weaver, to name a few.

The $80 billion Seattle-based worldwide cloud market share leader also doubled down on some of its most strategic technology partnerships such as with Red Hat, IBM and Accenture to offer new solutions to customers.

Finally, partners were front and center for a large portion of the show as AWS built new competencies and specializations targeting the channel around artificial intelligence (AI), AWS Glue and the AWS Marketplace.

AWS CEO: Partners And Customers Should ‘Lean-In Harder’ To The Cloud

At AWS re:Invent 2022, Selipsky urged partners and customers to not slow down their cloud journey due to economic uncertainty ahead in 2023.

“There’s this uncertainty in the air,” said Selipsky on stage during a keynote at AWS re:Invent 2022. “A lot of people are asking, ‘Should we slow down? Should we pause?’ No. Now’s the time to lean in harder.”

“Not in spite of it, but because of the economic uncertainty, our end customers will save money when they dig into cloud versus running those applications on different types of infrastructure,” said the AWS CEO. “Now is the time to continue to accelerate the cloud journey.”

Selipsky is bullish that with the innovation launched at re:Invent this year, organizations can further accelerate their migration and transformation to the cloud with AWS.

CRN breaks down 20 of the biggest product launches, new partner offerings and news announcements from AWS re:Invent 2022 that you need to know.

* AWS Supply Chain

* Amazon OpenSearch Serverless

* Red Hat On AWS Marketplace

* Accenture-AWS Launch Velocity

* AWS Graviton Delivery Specialization

* Amazon EC2 C7gn Instances

* AWS Application Composer

* AWS SimSpace Weaver

* Amazon Security Lake

* AWS Control Tower Governance

* AWS Glue 4.0

* Amazon DataZone

* Aurora Zero-ETL With Amazon Redshift

* AWS-IBM Partnership

* Partner Profitability

* AWS Glue Delivery Specialization

* AWS Data Exchange for Amazon S3, AWS Lake Formation

* Amazon EKS Integration On AWS Marketplace

* AWS Conversational AI Competency

* Vendor Insights

AWS SimSpace Weaver

One significant new product launched at AWS re:Invent 2022 was AWS SimSpace Weaver, a new fully managed compute service that helps customers deploy large-scale spatial simulations in the cloud.

With SimSpace Weaver, customers can create seamless virtual worlds with millions of objects that can interact with one another in real time without managing the backend infrastructure.

Historically, spatial simulations were generally confined to running on a single server which limits the number and complexity of dynamic entities that developers could build in their simulations. With SimSpace Weaver, users can break down the simulation world into smaller, discrete spatial areas and distribute the task of running the simulation code across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.

SimSpace Weaver automatically provisions the requested number of EC2 resources, networks them together, and maintains synchronized simulation time across the distributed cluster.

Users can use their own custom simulation engine or popular third-party tools such as Unity and Unreal Engine 5 with SimSpace Weaver.

Red Hat Expands Solutions On AWS Marketplace

Red Hat expanded the number of its open solutions publicly available in AWS Marketplace.

Additionally, customers can now use committed AWS spend to purchase and run Red Hat offerings directly through AWS Marketplace aimed at providing customers with an easier path to digital transformation and more efficient operations.

New solutions now on the AWS Marketplace include Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, which provides data scientists and developers with a consistent AI and machine-learning platform for building intelligent applications.

In addition, Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka is also publicly available in AWS Marketplace.

Designed to make it easier for developers to create, discover and connect to real-time data streams everywhere, Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka enables developers to focus on building better applications faster without having to worry about the underlying requirements of data collection and processing.

Other new Red Hat offerings that are now available directly in AWS Marketplace include Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations on AWS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions.

Amazon Security Lake

The new Amazon Security Lake automatically centralizes security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in a customers’ account.

“Security Lake automatically collects and aggregates security data for partner solutions like Cisco, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, as well as more than 50 security tools integrated into Security Lake,” said AWS CEO.

“Security Lake is a data lake that makes it easy for security teams to automatically collect, to combine, and to analyze security data at petabyte scale,” said Selipsky. “Security Lake is optimized for security data. You can now automatically build security data lakes with just a few clicks.”

Security Lake automatically gathers and manages all your security data across accounts and Regions.

Users use their preferred analytics tools while retaining control and ownership of your security data. Once enabled, Security Lake automatically creates a security data lake in a Region that users select for rolling up their global data. AWS log and security data sources are automatically collected in Amazon S3 buckets for existing and new accounts.

Security Lake manages the lifecycle of a client’s data with customizable retention settings and storage costs with automated storage tiering.

Partner Can Make $6.40 Per $1 Of AWS Spend; Capture 60 Percent Margins

Amazon unveiled a new study around partner profitability that reviewed dozens of AWS partners to understand profit margins and return on investment (ROIs).

“One dollar of AWS can lead to $6.40 for the partner—that’s a lot of money if you think about how much money is moving into the cloud,” said Julia Chen, vice president of AWS’ Partner Core, in an interview with CRN. “This is quite a substantive multiplier.”

The study found that partners can reach a $6.40 multiplier per dollar if they can offer services and support across the entire cloud lifecycle.

Breaking down the $6.40 multiplier figure, a partner who offers a wide breadth of services can make around one dollar on advising; $1.20 on designing; $1.60 on building; 30 cents on procuring; $1.10 on adoption; and $1.10 on managing the AWS service for the customer.

Additionally, partners who sell business outcome solutions can reap 60 percent margins on their offerings.

“For example, predictive maintenance in a factory or real time in-store retail analytics—when you’re selling a business outcome solution, you can make upwards of 60 percent margin on what you’re selling,” said Chen.

AWS Supply Chain

AWS Supply Chain is a cloud-based application that helps supply chain leaders mitigate risks and lower costs to increase supply chain resilience.

“AWS Supply Chain helps you mitigate risk and lower costs by giving you a unified view of your supply chain, and surfaces the best actionable insights all with pay-as-you-go pricing and no upfront licenses,” said AWS CEO Selipsky.

The new AWS solution unifies supply chain data, provides machine learning (ML)–powered actionable insights, offers built-in contextual collaboration and targeted watchlists to alert you to potential risks.

AWS Supply Chain connects to a customers’ existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management systems, without replatforming, upfront licensing fees, or long-term contracts.

Amazon EC2 C7gn Instances

AWS’ new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C7gn instances are powered by the latest generation AWS Graviton processors.

Featuring the new AWS Nitro Cards, Amazon EC2 C7gn instances deliver the highest network bandwidth, and the best packet-processing performance for Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances, the company said.

C7gn instances offer up to 200-Gbps network bandwidth and up to 50 percent higher packet-processing performance compared to previous generation C6gn instances.

Amazon EC2 C7gn instances are built on the AWS Nitro System.

C7gn instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking, which enables lower latency and improved cluster performance for workloads deployed on tightly coupled clusters.

AWS Graviton Delivery Specialization

Thousands of customers of all shapes and sizes are leveraging the price performance of using AWS Graviton-based instances in Amazon EC2.

To make it easier for customers to accelerate and scale their adoption of AWS Graviton, the company created the new AWS Graviton Delivery specialization.

AWS Graviton processors are designed by AWS to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads in Amazon EC2.

AWS Graviton Delivery Partners help customers plan and implement workloads on AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances—from pilots to production deployments.

Partners assess the customer environment and recommend a transition strategy to Graviton. Partners update the build, test, and deployment processes to ensure customer CI/CD pipelines are optimized for Graviton, then evaluate application performance to ensure customer workloads run optimally on Graviton.

AWS Application Composer

AWS’ new Application Composer helps developers simplify and accelerate architecting, configuring, and building serverless applications.

Customers can drag, drop, and connect AWS services into an application architecture by using AWS Application Composer’s browser-based visual canvas. AWS Application Composer helps clients focus on building by maintaining deployment-ready infrastructure as code definitions, complete with integration configuration for each service.

With AWS Application Composer, users can start a new architecture from scratch, or import an existing AWS CloudFormation or AWS Serverless Application Model template.

Amazon DataZone

AWS launched a new data management service that makes it faster and easier for customers to catalog, discover, share, and govern data stored across AWS, on-premises, and third-party sources with Amazon DataZone.

“DataZone enables you to set your data free throughout the organization safely by making it easy for admins and data stewards to manage govern access to data,” said Selipsky. “It makes it easy for data engineers, data scientists, product managers, analysts and other business users to discover, use and collaborate around that data to drive insights for your businesses.”

Data producers use Amazon DataZone’s web portal to set up their own business data catalog by defining their data taxonomy, configuring governance policies, and connecting to a range of AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, partner solutions like Salesforce and ServiceNow, and on-premises systems.

Amazon DataZone removes the heavy lifting of maintaining a catalog by using machine learning to collect and suggest metadata for each dataset and by training

on a customer’s taxonomy and preferences to improve over time.

AWS-IBM

AWS and IBM doubled down on their strategic partnership during re:Invent by launching a new set of capabilities and SaaS offerings on AWS and the AWS Marketplace for their hundreds-of-thousands of AWS and IBM partners.

IBM added IBM Envizi ESG Suite, IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, IBM Content Services and IBM App Connect Enterprise running as-a-service on AWS that both IBM and AWS partners can sell on the AWS Marketplace.

These new additions offer AWS and IBM partners enhanced data, planning and analytics for use across industries to address customer challenges—from sustainability to financial planning.

IBM and AWS also expanded these offering to independent software vendors (ISVs).

Earlier this year, IBM and AWS formed a strategic collaboration agreement to eventually make available dozens of IBM’s bestselling software products on AWS, including IBM API Connect, IBM Db2, IBM Maximo Application Suite, IBM Security Verify, and IBM Watson Orchestrate.

AWS Control Tower Governance Capabilities

AWS launched a set of new features for controls management and governance capabilities in AWS Control Tower.

Users can now programmatically implement controls at scale across their multi-account AWS environments within minutes. This allows customers to more quickly vet, allow-list, and begin using AWS services.

With comprehensive controls management in AWS Control Tower, users can reduce the time it takes to define, map, and manage the controls required to meet their most common control objectives such as enforcing least privilege, restricting network access, and enforcing data encryption.

AWS Control Tower’s new proactive control capabilities leverages AWS CloudFormation Hooks to proactively identify and block noncompliant resources before they are provisioned by CloudFormation.

AWS Glue 4.0

At re:Invent 2022, AWS launched a new version of Glue that accelerates data integration workloads in AWS.

AWS Glue version 4.0 upgrades the Spark engines to Apache Spark 3.3.0 and Python 3.10.

The new Glue 4.0 gives customers the latest Spark and Python releases so they can develop, run, and scale their data integration workloads and get insights faster.

AWS Glue is a serverless, scalable data integration service that makes it simple to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources.

AWS Glue 4.0 adds support for built-in Pandas APIs as well as support for Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg, and Delta Lake formats, giving users more options for analyzing and storing your data.

Additionally, AWS Glue 4.0 improves the developer experience by adding more context to error messages.

AWS Conversational AI Competency

AWS unveiled its new AWS Conversational AI competency for its channel partners.

The new competency is aimed at helping enterprises implement high-quality, highly effective chatbot, virtual assistant, and IVR solutions via AWS partners.

AWS said Conversational AI competency partners support customers in selecting use cases and defining Natural Language Understanding (NLU) intents and training phrases; designing effective conversational flows; integrating backend services; and testing, monitoring, and measuring in an iterative approach.

The competency will become generally available in the first quarter of 2023.

Accenture, AWS Launch Velocity

Accenture and AWS co-developed a new platform that optimizes business outcomes up to 50 percent faster by removing the complexity associated with building and operating enterprise-scale applications and estates in the cloud.
Velocity allows clients to adopt Accenture and AWS innovations more quickly based on the learnings from thousands of Accenture and AWS projects.

Together, these repeatable solutions help clients adopt new AWS services without recreating time-consuming, labor-intensive work and recurring costs at the start of every project.

By assimilating learnings from nearly 40 solutions for 16 industries with proven use-case relevance, Velocity also serves as a foundation for an expanded set of new, co-developed industry solutions.

Available on a subscription basis, Velocity provides clients with cost-effective access to innovative features including a pre-built and self-renewing technology fabric, accelerators and activators that

ease technology and talent hurdles with a comprehensive set of assets, methodologies and processes.

Aurora Zero-ETL With Amazon Redshift

Amazon Aurora will now support zero-ETL (extract, transform and load) integration with Amazon Redshift, to enable near real-time analytics and machine learning using Amazon Redshift on petabytes of transactional data from Aurora.

Within seconds of transactional data being written into Aurora, the data is available in Amazon Redshift, so you don’t have to build and maintain complex data pipelines to perform ETL operations.

AWS CEO said users don’t have to build and maintain complex data pipelines to perform ETL operations.

“The entire system is serverless and dynamically scales up and down based on the data volume. So there’s no infrastructure to manage. Now, you really have the best of both worlds—fast, scalable transactions in Aurora, together with scalable analytics in Redshift, all in one seamless system,” said Selipsky.

The zero-ETL integration also enables users to analyze data from multiple Aurora database clusters in the same new or existing Amazon Redshift instance to derive insights across many applications or partitions.

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless

The Amazon OpenSearch Service is now offering a new serverless option: Amazon OpenSearch Serverless.

“Many of you have been asking us, ‘When can we get a serverless option for OpenSearch? Well, that time is now,” said Adam Selipsky on stage during re:Invent. “You can use this OpenSearch Serverless platform to perform interactive analytics, real time application monitoring, website search, and more without having to worry about provisioning, configuring and scaling infrastructure.”

“Now we have serverless options for all of our analytics services, and no one else can say that,” said AWS CEO.

The solution simplifies the process of running petabyte-scale search and analytics workloads without having to configure, manage, or scale OpenSearch clusters. OpenSearch Serverless automatically provisions and scales the underlying resources to deliver fast data ingestion and query responses for the most demanding and unpredictable workloads.

AWS Glue Delivery Specialization

AWS launched a new specialization for partners for AWS Glue Delivery.

The AWS Glue Delivery specialization will help customers find validated AWS Partners with expertise and proven success delivering AWS Glue for data integration, data pipeline, and data catalog use cases.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. With the ability to scale on demand, AWS Glue helps customers focus on high-value activities that maximize the value of their data.

Features of AWS Glue include serverless, data integration for every user, no code development for data analysts and can connect to over 30 data sources, process petabytes of data in real-time.

AWS Glue Delivery Partners will have the hands-on experience and proven expertise to help customers modernize their use of data and accelerate digital transformation.

AWS Data Exchange for Amazon S3, AWS Lake Formation

AWS launched Data Exchange for both AWS Lake Formation and Amazon S3.

AWS Data Exchange for Amazon S3 is a new feature that enables data subscribers to access third-party data files directly from data providers’ Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets.

This feature is intended for subscribers who want to easily use third-party data files for their data analysis with AWS services without needing to create or manage data copies, as well as data providers who want to offer in-place access to data hosted in their Amazon S3 buckets.

The new AWS Data Exchange for AWS Lake Formation enables data subscribers to find and subscribe to third-party data sets that are managed directly through AWS Lake Formation.

The new AWS feature is targeting data subscribers who want to easily integrate third-party data directly into their data lake as well as data providers who want to use AWS Lake Formation and AWS Data Exchange to help streamline their data licensing operations.

Amazon EKS Integration On AWS Marketplace

AWS is doubling down on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) integration on the AWS Marketplace.

Unveiled at re:Invent 2022, customers can now easily discover, subscribe to and deploy third-party Kubernetes software from the AWS Marketplace on their Amazon EKS clusters.

“It provides customers the ability to manage their EKS cluster and deploy third party containerized software from the AWS Marketplace—all in one single pane of glass, and doing that all within the EKS console,” Mona Chadha, director of category management across the AWS Marketplace, told CRN. “So they don’t have to leave and they can procure and get billed via AWS Marketplace.”

The Amazon EKS integration on the AWS Marketplace is also aimed at helping developers. The move will simplify and streamline the procurement experience for customers and partners all within EKS.

Vendor Insights

AWS made generally available its new AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights that simplifies third-party software risk assessments by compiling security and compliance information in a single unified dashboard.

The unified web-based Vendor Insights dashboard streamlines the procurement process by granting customers and partners access to evidence made available by sellers related to data privacy and residency, application security, and access control.

Vendor Insights provides evidence backed by AWS Config and AWS Audit Manager assessments, external audit reports, and software vendor self-assessments.

It helps buyers reduce assessment lead time to just a few hours by allowing buyers to access the vendor’s validated security profile and removes the need for periodic reassessments.