Five notable launches from AWS re:Invent 2024

Welcome to Runtime! Today: A look at some of re:Invent 2024's most important new products and services that cloud buyers will be tracking over the next year, and the quote of the week.

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Champagne supernova: AWS spent the last two years telling anyone who would listen that enabling access to a wide variety of large-language models was more important than having a killer one of its own, which befitted a company caught flat-footed by the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. It introduced Titan in 2023, but a link to the Amazon Titan page has already been memory-holed and replaced with details about Amazon Nova, the new series of models introduced this week.

AWS even hauled Amazon CEO Andy Jassy out of the closet to retake the re:Invent stage and introduce six versions of Nova at various price and performance levels. Those models are already available, and "with this release I think Amazon may have earned a spot among the top tier of model providers," said AI model expert Simon Willison.

SageMaker 2.0: SageMaker was first released at re:Invent 2017 as a development platform for training AI models a year before the original version of ChatGPT made its debut. Fast forward seven years and the AI world looks very different, and after this week, so does SageMaker.

It's now called SageMaker AI, and it is a "a unified platform for data, analytics, and AI" that "includes virtually all of the components you need for data exploration, preparation and integration, big data processing, fast SQL analytics, machine learning (ML) model development and training, and generative AI application development," AWS said in a blog post. "What we realized more and more is that the data sets [customers] are using to do analytics, and then also to build deep learning models and what they want to enable with GenAI applications, are starting to overlap," said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of AI and data, in an interview with Runtime that we'll have more from next week.

Easy button: Marketplaces are an extremely important part of the enterprise cloud market, as we examined back at Protocol Enterprise in 2022. They allow third-party SaaS vendors to get in front of the huge number of users on an infrastructure service like AWS, and this week the company unveiled a new way to help those partners make it easier for potential customers to pull the trigger.

Partners will be able to put a "Buy with AWS" button on their websites that will allow customers to pay for those services using their AWS account. Databricks and Wiz are already using the button, which was designed to "increase customer loyalty and partner loyalty and, ultimately, win rates,” Matt Yanchyshyn, AWS’ vice president of marketplace and partner services, told CNBC.

Let's roll: Large enterprises are used to dealing with security threats, but even small and medium-sized businesses must deal with a constant barrage of alerts and incidents caused by ransomware trolling. Responding quickly and effectively to those threats helps mitigate their impact, and AWS launched a new service this week called AWS Security Incident Response that it believes can help (and make money).

“We’ve received feedback from customers that implementing effective security incident response programs is challenging due to a reliance on various tools, services, and people that are difficult to scale as organizations and business needs evolve,” AWS's Hart Rossman, vice president of global services security, told TechCrunch. AWS Security Incident Response pulls together information from other AWS security products to make it easier to triage incidents as they happen, and also provides access to human security experts who are on-call 24/7.

Not the beer: AWS and Anthropic grow closer together by the month in hopes of providing an alternative to the OpenAI/Microsoft alliance, which has been going through some things this year. Anthropic received $4 billion in new funding the week before re:Invent 2024, and at the show the two companies announced Rainier, a new computing cluster with "hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips reserved exclusively for Anthropic.

The cluster will be built across several different sites modeled on the AWS Local Zones strategy, rather than in existing AWS data centers, said Dave Brown, vice president for compute and networking services, in an interview at re:Invent. Rainier could play a big role in convincing other customers to use the Trainium2 chips, which are significantly more powerful than the previous generation.

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Stat of the week

AWS introduced its custom Graviton server processor at re:Invent in 2018, fulfilling years of speculation about which company would be the first to bring the Arm architecture into the mainstream server market. Six years later, AWS has more Graviton instances running than all of AWS did in 2019, and 50% of all capacity AWS added in the last two years was based on Graviton, the company said Monday during Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing Peter DeSantis' keynote.

Quote of the week

“The people who work at Intel have to be really panicked." — Veteran chip analyst Dan Hutcheson, as told to The Oregonian, summing up a week of turmoil at an American technology and business icon following the sudden dismissal retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger.

The Runtime roundup

Cohere and CoreWeave plan to build a GPU data center in Toronto, according to Bloomberg, which will train Cohere's models in its home country.

Hubspot acquired Frame AI, which develops software that turns unstructured data like conversations and emails into "actionable intelligence," for an undisclosed amount.

Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!