Financial services and cloud computing: spying future trends at AWS Re:Invent 2021

This year’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference, running from 29 November - 3 December in Las Vegas and online, came with high promises. Not only would many attendees finally be able to meet and network in person after last year’s fully virtual event, but the conference has become a highlight on the cloud computing calendar.

AWS re:Invent began in 2012 as a relatively small meeting—6,000 people mostly working at start-ups or for companies partnering with Amazon. But by 2019, when the last pre-pandemic in-person event was held, the conference had grown to more than ten times its original size. It is now largely considered the most influential conference for the cloud computing set, and is the place to be for tech-forward developers and companies looking to be part of the future of this space.

We sent a team of experts to discover the latest product launches, keynote speeches and various learning sessions first hand. Here, they share highlights and the key things you should know about the future of cloud computing.

Thousands of IT professionals from around the world attended AWS re:Invent 2021 online and in-person, to stay up-to-date on the latest innovations and trends according to Amazon. However, while the event is usually known for wow-factor announcements, this year’s attendees found a more subdued ambience, with a focus on incremental product improvements rather than breakthrough innovations. Still, the overall impression was a very well-organised event announcing a host of welcome improvements to AWS’s solutions.

“Overall, I really enjoyed the conference,” says tech lead, Benjamin Houdu. “There was a lot to choose from, so it was a challenge to focus on the presentations and workshops that would be truly interesting, and there was certainly a lot to keep up with. There were several news items of interest to an organisation like ours, including around the AWS Mainframe, new tools for [computer programming language] COBOL, and several announcements regarding OpenSearch, which is Amazon’s elastic search solution and is now becoming very mature.”

“The event was extremely well organised,” seconds security engineer, Guillaume Chambert. “About 20,000 people attended in person, without the slightest hiccup. There were workshops and presentations for all levels, so it was really about prioritising the most interesting ones for us. Personally, I also enjoyed the interactive sessions, such as the ‘Chalk Talks.’” One of the main draws in terms of interactivity at the conference, Chalk Talks welcome about 100 people and include a short lecture by an AWS expert followed by a Q&A session.  

"Personally, I enjoyed the interactive sessions, such as the ‘Chalk Talks.’”

Guillaume Chambert, Security Engineer

Ahead of the conference, our experts had high expectations for announcements on topics including serverless machine learning and cloud security – and they were not disappointed.

"We want more customers to unlock the power of ML," said Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky in his keynote speech on 30 November. The company has vowed to make machine learning (ML) more accessible, and this was addressed with several announcements, including the launch of Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab. A free service, it enables any user to experiment with ML, without the need for an AWS account. “It’s super interesting for us, and for any small groups of data scientists, to be able to access these kinds of resources to try new things,” says data engineer Marwen Taleb.

In addition to keynote speeches, presentations and Chalk Talks, the conference offered several workshops to enable attendees to test best practices in real-world scenarios. For example, they could try out ‘Chaos Engineering’ with a new tool that was presented during the conference. “I’d never tried it before,” Marwen says. “The idea of Chaos Engineering is to create a ‘fail’ in a software system—for example, by turning off a machine that should be functional—and see how the system reacts to an unexpected event.” AWS Software Partner, Gremlin, offers a Chaos Engineering tool, which has 12 attack modes, or ‘Gremlins,’ to enable different Chaos Engineering experiments.

There may have been an absence of ground-breaking announcements, but there was no shortage of interesting improvements to existing infrastructures. For data scientist Hamza Benchekroun, highlights included the addition of SageMaker Canvas, another tool that makes ML more accessible. “The service enables you to create business applications using drag-and-drop, meaning it can be used even by people who don’t have experience in data science, coding or machine learning,” he says. Thousands of IT professionals from around the world attended AWS re:Invent 2021 online and in-person, to stay up-to-date on the latest innovations and trends according to Amazon. However, while the event is usually known for wow-factor announcements, this year’s attendees found a more subdued ambience, with a focus on incremental product improvements rather than breakthrough innovations. Still, the overall impression was a very well-organised event announcing a host of welcome improvements to AWS’s solutions.

The conference uncovered several trends of interest to the data science community and to our experts. Chief amongst them were machine learning, which is not only becoming more sophisticated and mature, but also more accessible. According to AWS, the aim is to enable learning and experimentation amongst wider communities of developers.

A global trend that no business can ignore is sustainability. AWS responded to this by adding to its Well-Architected Framework, which provides cloud architecture best practices. “The framework is based on pillars, and they introduced a fifth one, ‘Sustainability,’ this year,” Marwen explains. The other four pillars are Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability and Performance Efficiency. These pillars are created to drive cloud architecture consistency, and represent a shared responsibility between AWS and its partners.

AWS freely admitted that it was not ready to respond to consumer demand for an untangling of its web of myriad, sometimes confusing, services. However, the company did hint at offering more vertical solutions in the future. In his keynote speech, Adam Selipsky noted that the company has “built abstractions or higher-level services that make it even easier and even more accessible for people to consume the cloud and interact with AWS.” Going forward, AWS has vowed to build more abstractions and collaborate with industry leaders on new offerings. For example, it is set to launch a finance-oriented cloud with a partner in the near future.   

The conference certainly offered many new tools and compelling insights for our data science experts to sink their teeth into. What’s certain is that to offer clients the best possible service, it’s crucial that financial services corporations keep up with the constant evolution in the cloud space, and get ready to embrace innovation.