Feed: MemSQL Blog.
Author: Mike Boyarski.
AWS re:Invent, which ended yesterday, was a very busy and energetic trade show, with an estimated 50,000-plus people in attendance. There were a few highlights and some new news that I can share from spending the week at the show.
AWS spent a lot of time on AI and machine learning. The main focus was on tooling for delivering advanced analytics easily. While most of the tooling is software, Amazon also announced hardware: a new processor, Inferentia, that is promised to run AI applications with high performance and at low cost. This follows a similar move into AI processors by Google.
AWS also announced Amazon Elastic Inference, a service that adds GPU acceleration to an EC2 instance for faster inference, at what AWS described as a reduced cost (by a factor of 75%).
AWS usually supports trends fairly early in Gartner’s famous Hype Cycle, and blockchain is no exception. The Amazon Quantum Ledger Database is a new, managed blockchain database for distributed hyperledger applications.
AWS had a lot to say about databases. (And we had something to say about their database announcements, too – see our separate opinion piece.)
The topic that got the most attention was about Amazon’s own infrastructure. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has made much of the fact that Amazon has made heavy use of Oracle databases, and Amazon, in return, keeps promising to get completely off of any Oracle licenses. They are promising to be mostly Oracle-free by year-end 2018 and completely so before 2020.
AWS also announced new databases and new database capabilities. Amazon Timestream is a timeseries database. (It’s possible to structure data flows so both time-stamped changes and updated records come out of it, but Timestream is about splitting those processes.) The new offering is serverless, which means that customers have little visibility into the operational basis for their costs.
There’s a new feature for Amazon’s premier relational database, Amazon Aurora Global Database, which promises replication across regions, in support of high availability and disaster recovery. And Amazon DynamoDB has transactional support and read/write capacity provisioning, meaning that customers pay only for what they use, as they use it.
There were also many sessions focused on the practicalities of using data on AWS, such as moving to AWS databases from Oracle, using new capabilities, and optimizing performance.
Announcements at AWS culminated in near-earth orbit. AWS Ground Station provides data download and processing support for any of the many thousands of satellites currently circling the planet.
The MemSQL booth was very busy – and Oracle is not the only database vendor that organizations are wary of. We heard concerns expressed about cost, confusion, and lock-in, all working to the benefit of Amazon and to the detriment of customers.
New MemSQL offerings, such as the new MemSQL 6.7 release and the new free tier for MemSQL, attracted interest. For more on both, view our recent webinar on MemSQL 6.7.