Cloud experts and their AWS re:Invent 2022 predictions
As AWS prepares for its biggest event of the year, our contributors predict what the cloud vendor will unveil at re:Invent 2022.
AWS re:Invent returns to Las Vegas, Nevada for its eleventh year as one of the world's largest IT conferences. From November 28th to December 2nd, attendees can expect a plethora of keynotes, announcements, trainings and more. The conference returns with both in-person and virtual options for those who are remote.
Every year, AWS rolls out new technologies, practices and services at re:Invent and this year will surely be no different. Last year, notable reveals included Amazon Redshift Serverless, a platform to run analytics of any scale without having to manage data warehouse infrastructure, and support for VMware and VMware Cloud on AWS.
We asked our TechTarget expert contributors for their predictions on the announcements and news to come out of AWS re:Invent 2022.
Editor's note: The following predictions have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Chris Tozzi, analyst
Here are some of the developments I expect at re:Invent 2022.
Expansion of desktop as a service (DaaS) offerings. Like other public clouds, AWS has been expanding its selection of cloud desktop/DaaS offerings and features. I expect that we'll see more new features, if not totally new DaaS services or offerings. For example, I can envision features designed to make it easier to integrate AWS-hosted cloud desktops with on-premises hardware, or to enhance manageability of cloud desktops. I also wouldn't be surprised if they announce price cuts for their DaaS offerings because there is a lot of competition in the DaaS market right now.
Chris Tozzi
Offerings to compete with OpenAI. So far, AWS hasn't done much related to next-generation AI technologies like OpenAI/GPT-3, even though other companies have, such as GitHub Copilot. I suspect AWS will use re:Invent to announce some kind of flashy new product or service that leverages GPT-3 or a similar technology to bring AWS-based AI services to the next level. I don't have strong opinions about what exactly that service will entail -- and it probably doesn't matter, because what's really important for AWS is just to show that it's keeping up to speed as AI technologies evolve.
More sustainability initiatives. Like other clouds, AWS has been investing in clean or renewable energy sourcing for some time, but there is room to grow in this area and I won't be surprised if we hear at re:Invent about new energy sourcing initiatives, or possibly also new hardware investments designed to reduce energy consumption and waste.
George Lawton
George Lawton, IT writer
Amazon has a wide range of AI and machine learning tools for novices to expert data scientists. I expect Amazon to expand these with new generative capabilities to keep pace with the growing popularity of generative AI tools. These new tools take advantage of transformer neural networks to generate speech, imagery, code, designs and synthetic data.
At the very least, Amazon will add new generative AI capabilities to its SageMaker line of tools. It may also introduce more experimental offerings that build on services like DeepComposer. Other potential offerings may help personalize marketing content, generate images and automate video dubbing that synchronizes lips and an actor's voice in different languages. In addition, Amazon will also improve integration with various third-party generative AI tools and services for data science and cloud workflows.
Ernesto Marquez
Ernesto Marquez, IT architect
I think there will be improvements on some of the AI-powered services that help developers with monitoring, operations and cloud infrastructure optimizations -- for example, DevOps Guru, Compute Optimizer and CloudWatch Anomaly Detection. There could be an expansion of services supported by these tools. For example, Compute Optimizer only supports EC2 instances, EBS volumes and Lambda functions. This tool could support additional services, such as RDS, Elasticache, DAX, DocumentDB, OpenSearch or Redshift.
There could be announcements related to DevOps Guru's new features for Proactive Insights as well as Reactive Insights. In general, the range of AI-powered services and features in AWS has seen significant improvements recently and I expect this trend to continue.
Paul Nashawaty
Paul Nashawaty, ESG senior analyst
My predictions focus on multi-cloud and distributed cloud adoption, the focus on why data and data sovereignty matter and how to build a future infrastructure that supports the ever-changing growth of business, including AIOps and how AI will impact retail, financial services and healthcare. AWS may also provide a path to modernizing infrastructure for business to scale and grow faster to achieve their business objectives.
