New Delhi: Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is the Cloud arm of Amazon has announced that by 2026, it will help 29 million people globally grow their technical skills with free cloud computing skills training.

Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon, said that the company will provide training opportunities through existing AWS-designed programmes, as well as develop new courses to meet a wide variety of schedules and learning goals.

“We are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to people from all walks of life and all levels of knowledge, in more than 200 countries and territories,” Carlson said in a statement during the ‘AWS: re:Invent 2020’ annual conference being held in digital mode.

The training ranges from self-paced online courses — designed to help individuals update their technical skills — to intensive upskilling programmes that can lead to new jobs in the technology industry.

“We are building out our library of more than 500 free courses, interactive labs, and virtual day-long training sessions. Individuals looking to learn about cloud technology at their own pace have two robust resources in AWS Training and Certification and AWS Educate,” Carlson informed.

In 2020, AWS Training and Certification has launched 50 new digital courses in addition to the hundreds of free courses already available and will continue adding more content and new ways to learn.

“We will continue to invest in free digital training and exam preparation courses to help people prepare for AWS Certifications, which show technical expertise working with AWS,” she said.

The plan to provide 29 million people around the world with skills training builds on the commitment the company made last year to invest $700 million to train 100,000 Amazon employees.

AWS is enabling teams to address application weaknesses with the introduction of the AWS Fault Injection Simulator at is virtual AWS re:Invent 2020 conference this week. The simulator is a chaos engineering tool expected to be generally available in 2021.

According to the company, the new offering will come packed with pre-built templates for creating the desired disruptions whether that’s for server latency or database errors. It also contains controls and guardrails such as automatically rolling back or stopping the experiment if certain conditions are met. Then teams can quickly roll back to the pre-experiment state.

Teams will also have access to a range of fine-grained controls during the experiments to gradually or simultaneously impair how different resources perform in a production environment as it is scaled up, according to AWS in a post.

“With a few clicks in the console, teams can run complex scenarios with common distributed system failures happening in parallel or building sequentially over time, enabling them to create the real world conditions necessary to find hidden weaknesses,” AWS explained on its website.

AWS explained the new offering will be especially useful for simulating game days by creating the high-traffic conditions, a new launch or for integration right into continuous delivery pipelines so that teams can repeatedly test the impact of faults in the SDLC.

Fault Injection Simulator can be used to generate tests in many AWS services such as AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and Amazon RDS.

Progressive I&O organizations embrace infrastructure-led innovation, according to the keynote for this week’s virtual Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2020.

In this ever-changing, ever-evolving tech world, the enterprise is constantly on the precipice of innovation, or, at the very least, adopting the latest developments. Both this year and into 2021, the most resilient in the enterprise will be helmed by infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders who make infrastructure-led innovation a top priority.

Today (Monday, Dec. 7) was the start of the virtual Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2020. Gartner analyst and vice president of advisory Christopher Mixter delivered the keynote address in which he focused on this “new way” of thinking, the hallmark of progressive I&O organizations.

Infrastructure-led innovation presents a strategy to stakeholders hamstrung by business challenges and important for those who want to expand the scope of their enterprise by employing operational practices that benefit customer experiences and solutions.

Effective I&O leaders aren’t waiting for any kind of new normal to make itself known; they are already innovating,” Mixter said in his address. “Prior to the crisis, enterprises only knew I&O through their help-desk experiences or the annual budget cycle. The pivot to remote work has created newfound visibility for I&O and enough positive sentiment from the broader organization to give I&O leaders the courage to launch a reinvention of their digital foundations.”

The keynote identified the four capabilities that make up infrastructure-led innovation: Cost intelligence, workforce transformation, platform ops, and marketing.

Cost intelligence: Mixter explained, “Cost intelligence is the ability to balance cost management with new investment and show the enterprise how to free up ‘capital’ in the form of time, creativity and cash to re-invest in I&O.” The most effective I&O organizations follow this discipline, because they need to protect financial interests, while defending funding for the needed digital acceleration. Mixter cited Gartner research that found that 65% of CEOs and 69% of boards of directors are eager to step up the pace in the adoption of new digital business.

Workforce transformation: While the workforce has undergone tremendous changes imposed by COVID-19, including a dramatic shift to working-from-home, new developments bring even more changes. IT departments reliant on building servers and ticking off checklists must adjust to the pursuit of skill in advanced analytics, automation, continuous delivery and cloud. All companies want meaningful and successful growth, and these new competencies will help through visibility and relevance. Mixter said, “To reinvest and redeploy the time and treasure harvested through cost intelligence, I&O teams will need to be staffed with people embodying a more expansive skill set than what infrastructure has historically called for; in the past two years, for instance, over 40% of heads of I&O have been hired from outside of the I&O team. Infrastructure-led innovation demands transformation of the entire workforce.”

Platform ops: Mixter said, “The newest I&O customer is the 41% of the non-IT workforce that now customizes and builds technology for work. Success hinges directly on how these new customers are served, and platform ops helps reach them.” Foundational to the enterprise will be the acknowledgement and execution of the need to shift from a product-centric approach to a digital foundations, customer-centric one. “Customer in, rather than technology-out” may seem counterintuitive, but it’s one of the most vital elements of platform ops. There’s a responsibility and independence to this method of management, and software delivery teams, inside and outside of IT, will develop and operate their own products.

Marketing: It’s mildly surprising that only 54% of organizations look beyond metrics and directly measure customer value. This is what businesses that embrace infrastructure-led innovation are doing: Seeing beyond metrics. “Reliability isn’t marketable because it’s simply table-stakes,” Mixter said. “Metrics such as customer effort or lead-time for change illustrate how I&O enables the business through greater speed and agility. The most effective I&O leaders are making marketing a design principle of the function.”

It’s no longer acceptable to purport to over-focus on exceeding expectations of reliability to impress your CIO. Gartner research revealed that I&O leaders “who over-perform on customer value metrics while merely meeting expectations on reliability are seven times more likely” to be successful.

“This year, I&O teams delivered the most significant IT transformation of our generation. In 2021, infrastructure-led innovation will enable I&O leaders to be known for the business innovation they provide as opposed to the infrastructure they manage,” Mixter concluded

The Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2020 provides analysis on cloud strategies and infrastructure and operations trends.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has ‘extended its strategic relationship’ with videoconferencing provider Zoom, casting doubt on the latter’s dealings with Oracle.

Amid the plethora of announcements which have come out of re:Invent, AWS’ major annual event, this week, the news that Zoom is using AWS as its preferred cloud provider flew somewhat under the radar.

AWS made the point that Zoom had been a customer since 2011, with the companies ‘collaborating to develop new solutions for Zoom’s enterprise users, leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS to integrate Zoom services with Amazon devices and capabilities to make it easier for organisations to run hybrid office and remote work models’, in the words of the press materials.

One of the biggest tech stories around the Covid-19 pandemic was how Zoom had seized the zeitgeist and become the de facto conferencing platform. In June, Synergy Research found that the company had caused a spike in the wider conferencing software as a service (SaaS) market virtually on its own.

To accommodate the anticipated uptake as lockdowns hit, the two companies’ engineers added ‘tens of thousands’ of EC2 instances, according to AWS. Alongside this, the company has used Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops to help with the increased demand for helpdesk support, as well as integrating Zoom video meetings into Amazon Alexa-enabled smart displays to aim for more seamless integration between home and office working.

“Covid-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight,” said Andy Jassy, AWS CEO in a statement.

This news comes as something of a contrast with an announcement made by Oracle Cloud in April. Seen at the time as a major coup, the company said Zoom had selected it for requiring immediate additional cloud capacity with Oracle’s second-generation infrastructure ‘helping Zoom scale to continue to deliver flawless service to its customer base.’

Announced during the online AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon DevOps Guru is a fully managed service that employs machine learning algorithms to automatically detecting operational issues and recommend specific responses that will be delivered via a notification. Through a single console, IT teams will also be able to visualize their operational data by summarizing relevant data from multiple AWS and third-party data sources, including PagerDuty and Atlassian.

AWS also unfurled AWS Proton, a service to automate the development and deployment of microservices-based applications built using containers and the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework. Available also in preview, AWS Proton is an application management service that enables IT teams to define reusable application components as “stacks” that can be combined with a set of curated application stacks for security, architecture and tools defined by AWS. This service then automates the provisioning of infrastructure as code, the setting up of continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines and the setting of monitoring tools.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy told conference attendees that in effect, AWS will be managing DevOps processes on behalf of developers.

At the same time, AWS is launching Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Anywhere, which allows IT teams to use Amazon ECS to orchestrate containers in their own data centers, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Anywhere, which provides the ability to run EKS on the distribution of Kubernetes that AWS employs in local data centers. There is also now an Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) Public service for sharing container images.

At the same time, AWS previewed Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, which will make it possible to scale instances of MySQL databases instantly using the AWS serverless computing framework. Support for PostgreSQL databases is planned for next year.

AWS also announced it has added a Microsoft SQL Server-compatibility layer to its PostgreSQL database to make it easier to migrate Windows applications to an open source database. The company will also open-source that capability, dubbed Babblefish, as part of an effort to encourage the development of compatibility layers for other databases. PostgreSQL already provides compatibility with Oracle RDBMS applications.

Jassy chided providers of these proprietary database platforms for changing licensing terms when organizations deploy these databases on public clouds other than their own. Those moves have only created additional demand to migrate faster to open source databases, noted Jassy.

Finally, AWS is adding a slew of infrastructure options, including Mac instances (EC2 Mac instances) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Built on Mac mini computers, the service will make it possible for developers to more cost-effectively build MacOS applications.

In addition, AWS is adding 1U and 2U servers to its AWS Outposts portfolio for deploying infrastructure in on-premises IT environments. Those offerings expand AWS Outposts beyond rack-based systems.

The company is adding AWS Graviton2-powered C6gn instances to deliver 100Gbps networking performance for Arm processors it designed. Those instances offer 40% better price performance over comparable current-generation x86-based instances, according to the company. There is also now M5zn instances of Intel Xeon Scalable processors that offer 45% better compute performance per core than current M5 instances, according to the company.

AWS is also adding G4ad Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) instances based on processors from AMD and revealed its intention to build its own GPUs next year. The company also plans to add an Amazon EC2 instance based on up to eight Habana GAUDI accelerators from Intel to deliver up to 40% better price performance than current GPU-based EC2 instances, according to the company.

Overall, Jassy said AWS grew 26% year over year to achieve a $46 billion run rate. As the number of services provided by the company continues to expand, maintaining that growth rate at a time when applications are moving into the cloud faster than ever looks easily achievable.

AWS today closed out its first re:Invent keynote with a focus on edge computing. The company launched two smaller appliances for its Outposts service, which originally brought AWS as a managed service and appliance right into its customers’ existing data centers in the form of a large rack. Now, the company is launching these smaller versions so that its users can also deploy them in their stores or office locations. These appliances are fully managed by AWS and offer 64 cores of compute, 128GB of memory and 4TB of local NVMe storage.

In addition, the company expanded its set of Local Zones, which are basically small extensions of existing AWS regions that are more expensive to use but offer low-latency access in metro areas. This service launched in Los Angeles in 2019; starting today it’s also available in preview in Boston, Houston and Miami. Soon, it’ll expand to Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Seattle. Google, it’s worth noting, is doing something similar with its Mobile Edge Cloud.

The general idea here — and that’s not dissimilar from what Google, Microsoft and others are now doing — is to bring AWS to the edge and to do so in a variety of form factors.

As AWS CEO Andy Jassy rightly noted, AWS always believed that the vast majority of companies, “in the fullness of time” (Jassy’s favorite phrase from this keynote), would move to the cloud. Because of this, AWS focused on cloud services over hybrid capabilities early on. He argues that AWS watched others try and fail in building their hybrid offerings, in large part because what customers really wanted was to use the same control plane on all edge nodes and in the cloud. None of the existing solutions from other vendors, Jassy argues, got any traction (though AWS competitors would surely deny this) because of this.

The first result of that was VMware Cloud on AWS, which allowed customers to use the same VMware software and tools on AWS they were already familiar with. But at the end of the day, that was really about moving on-premises services to the cloud.

With Outposts, AWS launched a fully managed edge solution that can run AWS infrastructure in its customers’ data centers. It’s been an interesting journey for AWS, but the fact that the company closed out its keynote with this focus on hybrid — no matter how it wants to define it — shows that it now understands that there is clearly a need for this kind of service. The AWS way is to extend AWS into the edge — and I think most of its competitors will agree with that. Microsoft tried this early on with Azure Stack and really didn’t get a lot of traction, as far as I’m aware, but it has since retooled its efforts around Azure Arc. Google, meanwhile, is betting big on Anthos.

PARIS, Nov. 17, 2020 — Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, announces that it has further extended its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as AWS is named as one of the strategic partners of Atos OneCloud, an initiative which brings together Atos’ comprehensive cloud capabilities into one powerful unique offering. This increased collaboration is a next step in the strategic alliance between Atos and AWS which started in 2012.

Atos is recognized as an AWS Well-Architected Partner and has, over the years invested in achieving several AWS competencies including Migration Delivery Partner. Earlier this year Atos entered into exclusive negotiations with the shareholders of Edifixio, a French cloud consulting and integration company, to acquire it, which would further strengthen its position to become a AWS Premier Tier Consulting partner.

“We are extremely pleased to also be able to announce AWS as one of the strategic partners of the Atos OneCloud initiative,” said Elie Girard, CEO of Atos. “AWS is actively joining forces with Atos to help our enterprise customers move from traditional legacy IT infrastructure to modern cloud platforms. We see a tremendous opportunity specifically in the mainframe space to partner with AWS to Migrate, Modernize and Manage customer application landscapes which will unlock huge potential for digital business.”

Matt Garman, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, AWS commented “Atos is a fantastic partner and a truly unique global system integrator with many patented technologies and tool sets that enable customers to move legacy environments to the cloud. The Atos OneCloud initiative is a great example of the unique cloud transformation capabilities of Atos. We are delighted to be able to participate in Atos OneCloud as a strategic technology partner”.

Atos has a strong history of working together with AWS services in over fifty large customer environments worldwide. Atos and AWS worked closely together to successfully build a cloud-native SaaS solution on AWS Cloud for Miller Heiman, the global leader in sales training, consulting, research and technology solutions.

“Atos has been a trusted partner for many years and continually demonstrated their ability to bring the right, highly skilled and motivated people to the table. We worked closely together to successfully design, develop and support one of our most strategic platform offerings leveraging the scale and technologies provided by AWS cloud services,” said Byron Matthews, Miller Heiman Group.

Other successful projects include:

Global Electronics Company – one of the largest AWS SAP on HANA migrations outside of North America. Atos and AWS worked closely together to achieve this successful large-scale upgrade and migration to AWS Cloud delivering the customer’s outcome of an SAP upgrade, Oracle to HANA migration, on premise to AWS migration and AWS management services, within a short downtime window.
A large US Bank –the first to move 100% of its data to the Cloud. Atos and AWS worked closely together to modernize its legacy systems and identify a data transformation strategy to move data securely reinforcing its privacy standards.
A Global Healthcare Technology Company – Atos consolidated and migrated this leading healthcare technology company to AWS and private cloud from 139 data centres in 50 countries, with over 4000 servers.
Atos has demonstrated extensive experience in providing consulting, professional and managed services at scale to a large number of AWS customers. Atos has over 3,700 AWS accreditations, held by almost 3,000 specialists. Its 600 certified cloud experts hold a total of 1,200 formal AWS certifications. Atos will also participate as sponsor in this year’s digital AWS summit re:Invent, which will take place from November 30 – December 18.

Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 110,000 employees in 73 countries and annual revenue of € 12 billion. European number one in Cloud, Cybersecurity and High-Performance Computing, the Group provides end-to-end Orchestrated Hybrid Cloud, Big Data, Business Applications and Digital Workplace solutions. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos|Syntel, and Unify. Atos is a SE (Societas Europaea), listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index.

The purpose of Atos is to help design the future of the information space. Its expertise and services support the development of knowledge, education and research in a multicultural approach and contribute to the development of scientific and technological excellence. Across the world, the Group enables its customers and employees, and members of societies at large to live, work and develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space.

Almost two years after unveiling its Inferentia high-performance machine learning inference chips, Amazon has almost completed a migration of the bulk of its Alexa text-to-speech ML inference workloads to Inf1 instances on its AWS EC2 platform. The dramatic move to infrastructure powered by the newer chips was made to gain significant cost savings and performance gains over the GPU-based instances on EC2 that were formerly being used, according to the company.

By migrating the workloads to Inf1 instances, the Alexa text-to-speech workloads experience 25% lower end-to-end latency, while cutting operating costs by 30% compared to the previously used GPU-based instances, Amazon announced on Thursday (Nov. 12). By reducing the latency, Alexa engineers are also able to use more complex algorithms to improve the Alexa experience for users.

The Amazon Inferentia chip design was unveiled at the AWS re:Invent conference in November 2018, while Inf1 inferences followed a year later with an announcement at re:Invent in 2019.

The Inferentia chips allow Inf1 instances to provide up to 30% higher throughput and up to 45% lower cost per inference compared to GPU-based G4 instances, which previously were the most economical AWS cloud instances for ML inference, according to Amazon.

“While training rightfully receives a lot of attention, inference actually accounts for the majority of complexity and the cost – for every dollar spent on training, up to nine are spent on inference – of running machine learning in production, which can limit much broader usage and stall innovation,” an AWS spokesperson told EnterpriseAI. “EC2 instances – virtual servers running in the AWS cloud – offer a broad range of instance types powered by a variety of processors to meet specific workload requirements. AWS offers EC2 instances based on the fastest processors from Intel, cost optimized instances with AMD processors, the most powerful GPU instances from Nvidia, as well as instances based on AWS Inferentia chips, a high performance machine learning inference chip designed by AWS.”

While the lower latency benefits Alexa engineers in their text-to-speech work, customers across a diverse set of industries are seeing similar benefits as they turn to machine learning to address common use cases such as personalized shopping recommendations, fraud detection in financial transactions, increasing customer engagement with chat bots and more, the AWS spokesperson said. “Many of these customers are evolving their use of machine learning from running experiments to scaling up production machine learning workloads where performance and efficiency really matter. Customers want high performance for their machine learning applications in order to deliver the best possible end user experience.”

That’s where the Inf1 instances provide answers, the spokesperson added. “With Inf1 instances, customers can run large scale machine learning inference to perform tasks like image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing, personalization, and fraud detection at the lowest cost in the cloud.”

Inferencing is the science and practice of making predictions using a trained ML model. The Inferentia chips were developed by Israel-based Annapurna Labs, which was acquired by Amazon in 2015. Each Inferentia chip provides hundreds of TOPS (tera operations per second) of inference throughput. Hundreds of TOPS can be included in each chip and the chips can be banded together to harness thousands of TOPS.

The Inferentia chips are designed for larger workloads that consume entire GPUs or require lower latency. The chips provide hundreds of teraflops each and thousands of teraflops per Amazon EC2 instance for multiple frameworks, including TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and PyTorch. They also are built for multiple data types, including INT-8 and mixed precision FP-16 and bfloat16. The Inferentia chips complement AWS’s Amazon Elastic Inference, which allows customers to avoid running workloads on whole Amazon EC2 P2 or P3 instances where there is relatively low utilization. Instead, developers can run on a smaller, general-purpose Amazon EC2 instance and use Elastic Inference to provision the right amount of GPU performance, resulting in up to 75% cost savings.

It’s hard to carve out time to add to our professional skills and earn credentials. We hear this sentiment from our customers, and, of course, we feel it ourselves. One thing we hear consistently from AWS Certified customers is that setting a specific, time-bound goal—like getting certified by AWS re:Invent—enables you to work backwards, stay motivated, and feel accountable.

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Beginning the week of October 12, 2020, join us for AWS Power Hour: Cloud Practitioner, the newest Twitch series from AWS Training and Certification. The series is designed for anyone looking to build their AWS Cloud knowledge, and is free, fun, and an informal way to learn with a community of individuals who have similar goals.

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AWS Power Hour: Cloud Practitioner is a twice-weekly livestream that will cover the essential information to build your future in the AWS Cloud. Over the course of six weeks, our AWS experts will serve as hosts and guide you through the content with demonstrations and real world examples. You’ll start with cloud basics and key AWS services, and then explore topics like the AWS Well-Architected Framework, building and securing applications in the cloud, pricing and support, and how to innovate. You’ll receive tips, resources, and exercises to help you strengthen your knowledge and prepare you to get AWS Cloud certified.

Is AWS Certification your goal?
The Get AWS Certified Global Challenge is another free way to help you stay accountable and become AWS Certified by AWS re:Invent 2020. The challenge provides a three-step, recommended preparation path that includes free training, resources, and a learner community to help you along the way. All participants will also receive a voucher for a free practice exam.

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How can I get started?
Both the Twitch series and the certification challenge are free and available to anyone, globally. You don’t have to attend AWS re:Invent 2020 to participate, but we hope you do!