Amazon ports Alexa to cloud computing

“The cloud and AWS made developers feel like they were equipped with superpowers”, Jassy said in a keynote speech at the company’s re:Invent conference, which has gathered 32,000 developers and cloud advocates in this gambling and entertainment mecca.

“When you start talking about tens of thousands of servers, that is a mid-sized data centre that is worth around $150 million to $250 million”, he says. Their work has resulted in Amazon’s recommendation engines for products.

It’s a service that will be useful for a variety of applications, like gaming, graphical rendering and machine learning.

At the conference, Amazon also debuted new services meant to help coders build web-based applications that tap into the retail giant’s artificial-intelligence capabilities.

AWS customers can call to set up a meeting to discuss how the data can be moved to Amazon’s cloud using a Snowmobile.

“In the old days, because it was so expensive to test and experiment for any period of time, you used to be able to get these old guard leaders who would stand up and make all these wild claims and manipulate benchmarks for their own purposes, or take out full-page ads or billboards claiming whatever they claim”.

To that end, he announced Amazon Rekognition, a new service where software detects and categorizes objects in an image. “Based on these feedback, we unbundled Botmetric, took a modular approach, and built Botmetric 2.0 with user-centric applications, essentially to simplify their lives”. It’s available in 47 different voices in 24 languages.

Amazon Lex can bring natural language controls to any application, from booking flights, ordering food, or asking questions.

During a press conference, Mr. Jassy declined to disclose the cost of each Snowmobile unit but noted that the company has “several” of them.

“Today an exabyte of data is a lot more commonplace”. Finally, the company also unveiled upgrades to its burstable, memory intensive, high I/O, and compute intensive instances.

Expanding on its I2 instances, AWS announced that in 2017 it will roll out I3 instances created to meet the needs of the most demanding I/O workloads.

The F1 family includes two new instances that are the first in the industry to offer hardware-acceleration capabilities by making it possible for customers to program Field Programmable Gate Arrays that can dramatically increase performance over general-purpose CPUs. Once we completed our application modernization, we were ready to culminate this transformation by migrating onto a single cloud platform, which we view as the optimal strategy to sustain world-class customer service and operational reliability.

The problem, Jassy says, is that many of these devices tend to be relatively limited in their capabilities with a very small amount of CPU and disk.