AWS re:Invent 2023 – Top 10 Announcements and more for the Energy Industry

Another successful re:Invent is in the books. Attendees from across the globe gathered in Las Vegas November 27-December 1 for re:Invent 2023 where they heard from AWS experts, customers and partners on how cloud technologies are reinventing industries. With over 140 new announcements and services, including 30 spanning generative AI, and more than 30 sessions focused on oil & gas, power & utilities, and renewables, there was a lot to keep track of. Don’t fret, we’re here to help you sift through what’s most important for the energy industry.

Keynotes

CEO Keynote with Adam Selipsky: Amazon Web Services CEO shares his perspective on cloud transformation and highlights innovations in data, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Monday Night Live Keynote with Peter DeSantis: Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing, dives deep into the engineering that powers AWS services.

Keynote with Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian: Vice President of Data and AI at AWS explores the powerful relationship between humans, data, and AI, unfolding right before us.

Keynote with Dr. Werner Vogels: Amazon.com’s VP and CTO, covers best practices for designing resilient and cost-aware architectures, and discusses why artificial intelligence is something every builder must consider when developing systems and the impact this will have in our world.

Top 10 Announcements for Energy

1. Amazon Q (Preview) is a new generative AI–powered assistant that is specifically designed for work and can be tailored to an energy company’s business to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, and take actions using the data and expertise found in the company’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems. Amazon Q is an expert in AWS services, best practices, well-architected patterns, and solutions to help energy companies get started faster, learn unfamiliar technologies, build new solutions, and spend less time on undifferentiated work like maintenance. Energy companies can use Q to improve maintenance procedures, streamline operations workflows, and quickly build interactive bots to boost engineers’ productivity.
2. Cost Optimization Hub is a new AWS Billing and Cost Management feature that helps energy customers consolidate and prioritize cost optimization recommendations across their AWS Organizations member accounts and AWS Regions, so that energy companies can get the most out of their AWS spend. Energy companies can use the Cost Optimization Hub to have a single view that shows their entire AWS billing landscape and to get intelligent, AI-based recommendations for reducing costs and improving operations.
3. Large language models in Amazon Redshift ML (Preview) enables customers to create, train, and deploy machine learning models using familiar SQL commands. Now, energy companies can leverage pretrained publicly available LLMs in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart as part of Redshift ML, allowing energy customers to bring the power of LLMs to analytics. For example, energy customers can make inferences on operations and maintenance data in Amazon Redshift, use LLMs to summarize feedback, perform entity extraction, and feedback classification. Redshift is one of the most common data warehouses used in the energy industry and now energy customers can apply LLMs directly to this cost-efficient and performant database using known tools. This allows developers to use the power of LLMs while still using data tools with which they are familiar.
4. AWS Control Tower announces 65 new controls to help meet digital sovereignty requirements New AWS-managed controls and enhanced Region deny capabilities to help energy customers meet digital sovereignty requirements. With this release, energy customers can discover 245+ controls under a new digital sovereignty group in the AWS Control Tower console. The new controls allow multi-national companies to have fine-grained control over their data to comply with data sovereignty, privacy, and other compliance requirements.
5. AWS Graviton4 is the latest in the Graviton family of processors that are custom designed by AWS to provide the best price performance for workloads in Amazon EC2. They provide up to 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth than current generation Graviton3 processors, delivering the best price performance and energy efficiency for a broad range of workloads running on Amazon EC2. Energy companies can use Graviton 4 to reduce costs without having to refactor their code base.
6. Four Zero-ETL Integrations enable customers to quickly and easily connect and analyze data without building and managing complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) data pipelines. New Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift make it easier to connect and analyze transactional data from multiple relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift. Customers can also now use Amazon OpenSearch Service to perform full-text and vector search on DynamoDB data in near real time. By making it easier to connect to and act on their data, no matter where it lives, these zero-ETL integrations help customers leverage the breadth and depth of AWS’s leading database and analytics services to discover new insights, innovate faster, and make better data-driven decisions. Zero ETL integrations simplifies the database landscape used by most energy customers and makes it easier to build data products using input from multiple data sources.
7. Amazon Monitron launches Ex-rated sensors for hazardous locations. Amazon Monitron is an end-to-end system that uses machine learning to detect abnormal conditions in industrial equipment to enable predictive maintenance. These Ex-rated sensors are intrinsically safe, are certified for use in hazardous locations (gasses, Class 1/Zone 2) in US, Canada, UK and EU. These new sensors can be used in facilities that handle volatile materials such as crude oil and natural gas. Monitron is a simple way to introduce predictive maintenance to brown-field environments that are not integrated into a control center.
8. AWS Security Hub can now filter and customize dashboard views, as well as view a new set of widgets that were carefully chosen to reflect the modern cloud security threat landscape and relate to potential threats and vulnerabilities in the company’s AWS cloud environment. The new filtering functionality allows energy companies to filter the Security Hub dashboard by account name and id, resource tag, product name, such as Amazon GuardDuty or Amazon Inspector, Region, severity, and application. Energy companies can choose which widgets will appear in the dashboard and customize the position and size of the widget to focus attention of the most important issues.
9. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP scale-out file systems creates FSx for ONTAP scale-out file systems that deliver up to 36 GB/s of throughput and 1.2 million IOPS—9x higher performance than before. FSx for ONTAP is the first and only storage service that allows energy companies to launch and run fully managed, fully-featured ONTAP file systems in the cloud. Energy customers can leverage ONTAP’s data management features for an even broader range of high-performance workloads on AWS including seismic data processing with HPC and predictive maintencance for high frequency telemetry data.
10. Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class is designed to deliver up to 10x better performance than the S3 Standard storage class while handling hundreds of thousands of requests per second with consistent single-digit millisecond latency, making it a great fit for a company’s most frequently accessed data and most demanding applications. Objects are stored and replicated on purpose built hardware within a single AWS Availability Zone, allowing energy customers to co-locate storage and compute (Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, and Amazon EKS) resources to further reduce latency.

There were several sessions showcasing how energy companies are building solutions on AWS. Some of these are noted below.

• NextEra Energy & AWS: Renewable energy innovation & grid modernization (ENU203): In collaboration with AWS, NextEra Energy is spearheading the decarbonization journey for commercial and industrial customers across the United States. As the demand for green electrons continues to grow, NextEra is combining their portfolio of clean energy solutions, a central data platform, and the power of AWS capabilities and analytics to develop and implement roadmaps for customers to reduce their emissions. In this session, hear about NextEra’s journey with AWS, as they work to derive valuable business insights, reduce emissions, and pave the way for a sustainable energy landscape.
• From hydrocarbons to green molecules: Cepsa’s transformation using AWS(ENU309) Cepsa began their AWS journey in 2014, commencing with migration and modernization of their data warehouse, moving their entire SAP footprint to AWS, and implementing advanced AI/ML use cases using Amazon SageMaker. In this session, learn about Cepsa’s decarbonization journey which helped them transition from being a leader in hydrocarbons to a leader across energy transition and sustainability, pioneering H2 and its derivative products in the EU.
• Eni works with AWS to develop its collaborative geoscience platform (ENU202) GECO, co-developed by Eni and AWS, is a cutting-edge geoscience platform designed to optimize geologists’ workflow. Prioritizing user-centric design, GECO allows geologists to focus on creativity and geo-modeling, minimizing data management tasks. In this session, learn how the platform integrates AI/ML capabilities and dynamic map and volume visualizations, simplifying traditional processes.
• Reinventing energy and unlocking innovation through inclusion (ENU101): We are facing the challenge of our generation: how to secure energy for a rapidly growing global population while combating climate change. It is becoming increasingly evident that to address this challenge, we need to diversify our solutions and the minds behind them. By embracing diversity, we stand to benefit from a wealth of untapped potential and creative solutions. This lightning talk delves into how inclusion accelerates innovation across the energy sector, highlighting the transformative power of inclusivity in shaping a secure, sustainable, and profitable energy landscape.
• Digitizing energy management for a sustainable future with Iberdrola (BIZ107): Iberdrola launched an Advanced Smart Assistant in May 2023, a connected energy solution that allows customers to take an active role in the energy transition. This session explores the solution, which runs on AWS with Deloitte as service provider, and how it helps reduce smart device energy consumption by 10% to 30%. Using AI/ML services, the application offers simple experiences to understand usage, consumption patterns, and areas of savings. For example, the solution makes it possible to reduce air conditioning consumption by considering the thermal inertia of the building. Learn how this development is just one of the growing strategic business lines of Iberdrola. This presentation is brought to you by Deloitte, an AWS Partner.
• AWS Supply Chain: Helping Woodside Energy optimize their supply chain (BIZ105): Learn how Woodside Energy deployed AWS Supply Chain to more easily and efficiently track materials required for maintenance activities, from planning the work to delivering the materials when work commences. Join this session to hear Woodside’s story and why they selected AWS Supply Chain.

These are just a few of the announcements and sessions that happened at re:Invent 2023. From accelerating the energy transition to making oil production cleaner and more efficient with innovative platforms, AWS is helping energy companies across the value chain reinvent the industry.

Want a deeper dive on all things re:Invent 2023?

Be on the lookout for the official re:Invent recap for energy & utilities webinar happening in late January 2024. We’ll feature many of the energy sessions on demand and provide additional content from AWS Energy experts who will dive deeper into the key announcements and what it ultimately means for our energy customers.