re:Invent 2019: AWS bets on 5G with launch of Wavelength

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is betting on 5G with Verizon, launched AWS Wavelength at re:Invent 2019 to enable developers to build applications that serve end users with single-digit millisecond latencies. Wavelength will be deployed in the US with Verizon.

The Amazon's cloud service provider’s conference, which is underway at Las Vegas, will see participation of around 65,000 people. The company calls the event a “learning and education conference” with 3,000 sessions over five days.

"With 5G, you get speed, 10 giga bits, and better throughput. Then there is latency of 10 milliseconds; with 5G you can connect over 100,000 devices per square kilometre. We were the first ones to launch 5G broadband and 5G mobility. 5G will change the way services are delivered," Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon Communications, said.

He expanded on 5G , calling it far superior to anything else out there. Everything from smart cars to smart cities will have 5G powering the future. Edge computing becomes very important in 5G in zones with low last-mile connectivity.

At the conference, Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, noted how startups and large companies alike are reinventing themselves using AWS.

"It is incredible how the small and large companies were reinventing customer experience at speed in 2012. That's the reason why we called this conference re:Invent," he added.

Well-known organisations that use AWS include Lyft, Uber, Ola, Grab, Airbnb, and Careem; companies that revolutionised how one orders things, be it food, cabs, exercise, or stays.

So, disruption is the order of the day. And cloud helps power it all.

ALSO READ

AWS CEO Andy Jassy takes a dig at Oracle’s Larry Ellison; launches 22 new services

How cloud can power fintech

David M Solomon, CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs, expounded the power of the cloud. GS has 9,000 engineers in a team of 38,000. "Everything we are building with technology makes our financial products better. The cloud makes it simple, safe, secure and responsible," said David.

Goldman Sachs has used the AWS cloud to enable operations of the Apple-Goldman Sachs credit card business. Apple customers have received $10 billion credit from Goldman.

Goldman is also launching the transaction banking service on a digital platform for corporations to manage finance in 2020. "It will help us track cash flows faster and help customers manage their business better," David explained.

He added that financial tech has lagged consumer tech in elegance and simplicity. He believes that developers can learn to make real-world impact with fintech by using AI and ML.

GS has its own cloud platform, called ‘Marquee’, where corporate clients get access to its content on trading and risk pricing, which will now be scaled by moving onto AWS to attract more fintech developers.

AWS has a 47.80 percent market share of public cloud services market, while Microsoft has 15.50 percent. AWS is building its own chips with chip designers from Israel for faster compute.

"We had to innovate ourselves to make our chips increase performance. We started on ARM chip, called Graviton, to scale out workloads," Andy added. Wipro, RedHat, and DataDog are some of its partners that work on these chips.

Cloud in healthcare

Brent Shaffer, CEO and Chairman, Cerner Corporation, believes in the power of speed of crunching data to transform healthcare with AI and machine learning. Today, the world wastes $1 trillion of healthcare costs on repetitive and recurring patient visits. This can be solved with data.

Healthtech corporation Cerner manages 259 million people around the world and has the largest personal info of patients in the world.

Cerner Corporation is betting on software-as-a-service (SaaS) and ML and is using 33 services from AWS to predict health issues faster.

"Readmission costs a lot; two out of three patients pay more on their second round in a hospital. Today, readmissions should not happen for any common diagnosis because we can use data to predict if the patient wants to revisit the hospital for the same problem. Cerner predicts patients being at risk of readmission by using ML services to build, train, and deploy the model. This year we have the lowest readmission rate in more than a decade and all this was made possible because of infrastructure and ML services offered by AWS," Brent said.

At re:Invent 2019, AWS made more than 40 announcements on services for engineers, such as ones for analytics, compute, database, ML, governance, security, etc.

Some highlights include Graviton2—launch of more powerful processors promising low cost services for data analytics and performance monitoring; Fraud Detector—targeting the fintech sector; Contact Lens—to recognise emotions of callers for its Connect contact centre; and Managed Apache Cassandra Service—a service using open-source database Cassandra, etc.

(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)

ALSO READ

How AWS is helping cloud-based customer engagement company Capillary Technologies connect retailers with customers on a personal level