Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading cloud infrastructure platform on the market today. AWS provides everything from public DNS, directory, and database services, to monitoring and alerting services. Each of these services is designed to reduce costs and complexity for the enterprise.
Last month over 45,000 people from around the world descended on Las Vegas for one week to attend the annual AWS conference, re:Invent. The conference spilled into 7 different hotels across the Las Vegas strip creating a "campus" that stretched from the MGM Grand hotel to the Encore at Wynn. Participants were treated to over 1000 technical content sessions, hand-on learning opportunities, workshops, hackathons, chalk talks, and boot camps.
With the thousands of capabilities already available through AWS, and the new partnerships and capabilities announced at re:Invent, it can be hard to digest all the innovation happening throughout the platform. That's why we've created this short list of the key features and releases we are excited to share with enterprise customers:
Amazon Quicksight
Amazon QuickSight is the first cloud-powered business intelligence (BI) service with pay-per-session pricing, making it easy to deliver insights to everyone in your organization.
Quicksight is designed to give users access to the data they need through powerful self-service analytics without having to install and software, deploy any servers or manage any infrastructure. With Quicksight you can connect directly to your data from a number of cloud and on-premise sources. It also allows you to securely create and distribute interactive dashboards and reports to tens of thousands of users. These dashboards are accessible both on browsers and mobile devices and can be embedded into your applications.
With the pay-per-session model, customers only pay for what they use, allowing them to give all users access to the data they need while avoiding the cost of per-seat licenses. Instead of a fixed license cost, users are billed $0.30 for a 30-minute session up to a maximum charge of $5/reader/month for unlimited use.
Amazon Forecast
Amazon Forecast is a fully managed forecasting tool. Based on the same technology used by Amazon.com, using machine learning it combine time series data and other variables to build out forecasts for your business.
Forecasting is hard for companies to do well due to the amount of inter-relating factors and the complex relationships your data may have. Amazon Forecast is designed to use machine learning to analyze historical data and related casual data to create accurate time-series forecasts for you. The best part of this service is that there are no servers to provision and no machine learning models to deploy. You simply provide the data and Amazon Forecast will automatically examine it, determine what information is meaningful and produce a forecasting model. With Amazon Forecast predictions are up to 50% more accurate than looking at time-series data alone.
Amazon Forecast is great for product demand planning, financial planning, and resource planning. And, just like Quicksight you only pay for what you use!
Amazon Transfer for SFTP
The final service announced at AWS re:Invent this year that we can't wait to share is the AWS Transfer for SFTP. This is a fully managed service that enables customers to directly transfer their files in and out of Amazon S3 using the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). With AWS SFTP you no longer have to purchase or run your own SFTP servers or storage to securely exchange data. AWS SFTP will manage the infrastructure for you.
AWS integrates with existing authentication systems and provides DNS routing (with Amazon Route S3) to help seamlessly migrate your SFTP-based workflows to AWS without having to change any existing authentication systems, domains and hostnames. External can continue exchanging files with you as well without having to change their applications, software, configurations or processes.
With native integrations to AWS management services you can simplify security and monitoring or your data. And, because AWS SFTP stores data in Amazon S3 your files aren't in silos, which allows you to easily use your data with the native AWS API-driven processes.
Hybrid cloud isn't going anywhere and by the looks of the announcements from AWS re:Invent 2018 it is going to continue to get better and better!
Written By: Eden Reid, LookingPoint Marketing Manager