re:Invent 2024 recap for the manufacturing industry

Another re:Invent is behind us, and attendees had a busy week of learning at technical sessions, exploring interactive demos in the expo, networking with peers, and having some fun. We showcased an interactive e-bike machine in the Venetian Expo where attendees got a hands-on experience from a simulated factory and multiple practical use cases. We had some exciting announcements on new services, features, and solutions that will help manufacturing and industrial companies accelerate their digital transformation journey and move past pilot-purgatory to scalable, business changing initiatives in the cloud. The event hosted manufacturing executives and line of business attendees, proving that re:Invent is for both ‘builder’ attendees and business decision makers as well. We launched a new AWS web page that highlights the most important announcements, insights, and stories from the re:Invent CEO Keynote with Matt Garman – listing all the launches from the keynote, key takeaways from customer speakers, along with a recap video of the most exciting moments from the show.

Key Sessions to Watch

If you didn’t catch the livestreams of keynote sessions, I encourage you to check out the keynote from our CEO Matt Garman who shared his perspective on cloud transformation. He highlighted innovations in data, infrastructure, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). These advancements are helping AWS customers achieve their goals faster, take advantage of their valuable data, and create a better future. Andy Jassy even made a surprise appearance to talk about how Amazon takes advantage of AWS innovation.

In his Monday Night Live session, Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing, dove deep into the engineering that powers AWS services. Joined by Dave Brown, VP of AWS Compute and Networking, his session covered a number of innovations across compute, security, storage systems, and AI infrastructure. Hear from customer speaker, Anthropic, and learn about the launch of Latency-optimized inference options for Amazon Bedrock, the announcement of Project Rainier, and the reveal of Trainium2 UltraServers.

On Wednesday, Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and AI at AWS, presented this thought-provoking keynote about how a strong data foundation allows you to create innovative and differentiated solutions for your customers. Hear from customer speakers with real-world examples of how they’ve used data to support a variety of use cases, including generative AI, to create unique customer experiences.

On Thursday, CTO Dr. Werner Vogels once again delivered a signature presentation, this year focused on managing complexity with insights into how to recognize when complexity is creeping into your efforts, and managing it before it stifles progress and innovation.

In the IOT203 breakout session, Optimizing manufacturing operations with AWS IoT, Nicolas Pouyez, Head of Product for Industrial IoT, and Rudyar Cortes, Chapter Lead of Data Engineering at TotalEnergies shared how they are using AWS IoT SiteWise to modernize their infrastructure, build a strong industrial data foundation, and transform their operations.

Check out all the keynotes and innovation session recordings here.

Although manufacturing customers appeared in many sessions, the list below captures some additional topics relevant for manufacturers and industrial companies today:

MFG201 | Empowering the next-generation industrial operator with generative AI, featuring Georgia Pacific

MFG202 | How Gousto reduces food waste and increases workforce productivity, featuring Gousto

MFG205 | Running a complex design environment on AWS, featuring Samsung Electronics

MFG206 | Closing the machine-to-cloud gap to jump-start digital transformation, featuring Rehrig Pacific

MFG207 | Volkswagen’s platform strategy enables production performance & quality, featuring Volkswagen

Service, Feature, and Solution Launches

Just before re:invent, and throughout the event week, AWS launched multiple new services and enhancements that are applicable to manufacturers and industrial companies. Let’s breakdown why they matter.

Partner Activity:

In a very cool new development, Siemens now offers their Industrial Copilot for Engineering on AWS. At the Innovation Talk, Architectural methods & breakthroughs for innovative apps in the cloud, Jelena Mitic, SVP, Global Head of Automation at Siemens presented Siemens Industrial Copilot for Engineering on AWS. It helps to address the scarcity of skilled automation engineers with domain-specific programming language expertise by providing programming assistance for Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) code in the Structured Control Language (SCL) programming language, or structured text. It leverages Amazon Bedrock allowing more than 120,000 Siemens Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) users to build and scale genAI applications with a broad choice of foundation models to best meet different use case needs. Specifically, Anthropic’s Claude models, available in Amazon Bedrock, provide a basis to fine-tune them using Siemens’ deep industrial domain knowledge, to test, and to validate them directly within operational environments, like the TIA Portal.

Compute:

AWS continues to offer the broadest and deepest compute platform built for running complex engineering workloads at scale. At re:Invent, we announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) storage optimized I8g instances, which offer the best performance in Amazon EC2 for storage-intensive workloads. Including up to 60% better compute performance compared to previous generation I4g instances. We also launched Amazon EC2 next generation high density Storage Optimized I7ie instances designed for large storage I/O intensive workloads. I7ie instances are powered by 5th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.2 GHz, offering up to 40% better compute performance and 20% better price performance over existing I3en instances. I7ie instances deliver up to 100Gbps of network bandwidth and 60Gbps of bandwidth for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).

VMware:

VMware is often used in industrial environments as fundamental building blocks of enterprise IT infrastructures and even on the OT side for industrial PCs and machine builders, providing a flexible and scalable foundation for organizations to deploy and manage applications efficiently. At re:invent, we announced the preview of Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS). Amazon EVS is a new, native AWS service to run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to automate and simplify deployments and provide a ready-to-use VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment on AWS. This allows you to quickly migrate VMware-based virtual machines to AWS using the same VCF software and tools you already use in your on-premises environment. We also announced the preview of Amazon Q Developer agents for migrating and modernizing VMware workloads. This unlocks the power of generative AI to migrate and modernize VMware based workloads to Amazon EC2 in a more simple, automated, and secure fashion. Check out this blog to learn more.

Generative AI:

In a previous blog, I talked about how Generative AI can help industrial companies create new product designs, drive unprecedented levels of manufacturing productivity, and optimize supply chain applications. We launched several new generative AI related services and features, but the most notable is Amazon Nova. Amazon Nova foundation models deliver state-of-the-art visual and multimodal intelligence, with native support for images, documents, and videos to help manufacturers enhance their customers experience from search to purchase. For example, Amazon Nova can cost-effectively and efficiently create accurate, localized product descriptions, modify and personalize new product imagery, develop engaging product videos, and offer natural, conversational virtual assistance. Manufacturers can also use Amazon Nova to detect supply chain disruptions and quickly reallocate inventory to ensure they have access to the components they need. Amazon Nova’s multimodal capabilities can generate accurate, localized content more efficiently in over 200 languages, accelerating time-to-market and improving searchability. Manufacturers can cost-effectively modify standard product images or customize product imagery to appeal to specific customer demographics in minutes instead of weeks using text or natural language prompts. Manufacturers could even use Amazon Nova Reel to develop high-quality product overview videos from existing images using text, natural language, or storyboards that meet security, safety, and intellectual property requirements.

Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports custom connector and ingestion of streaming data, allowing developers to add, update, or delete data in their knowledge base through direct API calls. Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases offers fully-managed, end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows to create highly accurate, low latency, secure, and custom GenAI applications by incorporating contextual information from your company’s data sources. This enhancement enables customers to ingest specific documents from any custom data source and reduce latency and operational costs for intermediary storage while ingesting streaming data. it eliminates time-consuming full syncs and storage steps, so customers gain faster access to data, reducing latency, and improving application performance. We also announced the multi-agent collaboration capability for Amazon Bedrock (preview). With multi-agent collaboration, you can build, deploy, and manage multiple AI agents working together on complex multi-step tasks that require specialized skills. Finally, we announced that we’re adding Automated Reasoning checks (preview) as a new safeguard in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to help you mathematically validate the accuracy of responses generated by large language models (LLMs) and prevent factual errors from hallucinations. Check out this blog for more information.

Many legacy manufacturers rely on mainframes for internal systems, and even home-grown MES applications. With Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for mainframe modernization (Preview), customers and partners can accelerate large-scale assessment and modernization of mainframe applications. Amazon Q Developer agents analyze and document your code base, identify missing assets, decompose monolithic applications into business domains, plan modernization waves, and refactor code. Amazon Q Developer agents autonomously classify and organize application assets and create comprehensive code documentation to understand and expand the knowledge base of your organization. The agents combine goal-driven reasoning using generative AI and modernization expertise to develop modernization plans customized for your code base and transformation objectives. You can then collaboratively review, adjust, and approve the plans through iterative engagement with the agents. Once you approve the proposed plan, Amazon Q Developer agents autonomously refactor the COBOL code into cloud-optimized Java code while preserving business logic.

Data & Storage:

AWS Transfer Family web apps are a new resource that you can use to create a simple interface for accessing your data in Amazon S3 through a web browser. With Transfer Family web apps, you can provide your workforce with a fully managed, branded, and secure portal for your end users to browse, upload, and download data in S3. Transfer Family offers fully managed file transfers over SFTP, FTPS, FTP, and AS2, enabling seamless workload migrations with no need to change your third-party clients or their configurations. Now, you can also enable browser-based transfers for non-technical users in your organization through a user-friendly interface. Transfer Family web apps are integrated with AWS IAM Identity Centerand S3 Access Grants, enabling fine-grained access controls that map corporate identities in your existing directories directly to S3 datasets. With a few clicks in the Transfer Family console, you can generate a shareable URL for your web app. Then, your authenticated users can start accessing data you authorize them to access through their web browsers. To learn more, read the AWS News Blogor visit the Transfer Family User Guide.

New Amazon S3 Tables give you storage that is optimized for tabular data such as daily purchase transactions, streaming sensor data, and ad impressions in Apache Iceberg format, for easy queries using popular query engines like Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Apache Spark. When compared to self-managed table storage, you can expect up to 3x faster query performance and up to 10x more transactions per second, along with the operational efficiency that is part-and-parcel when you use a fully managed service.

Simplifying storage is also now a reality with the general availability of Storage Browser for S3, an open source component that you can add to your web applications to provide your end users with a simple interface for data stored in S3. With Storage Browser for S3, you can provide authorized end users, such as customers, partners, and employees, with access to easily browse, download, and upload data in S3 directly from your own applications. Storage Browser for S3 is available in the AWS Amplify React and JavaScript client libraries.

Of particular interest to industrial machine builders is AWS Clean Rooms. In the past, end users of machines often did not want to share data on how their machines are being used with their machine builders to protect production information. AWS Clean Rooms helps machine builders and their manufacturing customers and partners more easily and securely match, analyze, and collaborate on their combined datasets—without sharing or revealing the underlying data. This can be very useful for machine builders who need access to datasets at end-user manufacturers using their equipment to better understand how equipment is used, trigger maintenance alarms, and even develop better next gen products. End users can share the datasets without revealing the data itself, protecting what they see as confidential. Both parties benefit from this “secret” data exchange. This year, we announced that AWS Clean Rooms supports collaboration with datasets from multiple clouds and data sources. This launch allows companies and their partners to easily collaborate with data stored in Snowflake and Amazon Athena, without having to move or share their underlying data among collaborators.

For data extraction, many industrial companies use AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes it simple to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. AWS Glue takes data from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance—and transforms it for analysis in Amazon Redshift. We also announced the general availability of AWS Glue 5.0. With AWS Glue 5.0, offering improved performance, enhanced security, support for Amazon Sagemaker Unified Studio and Sagemaker Lakehouse, and more. AWS Glue 5.0 enables you to develop, run, and scale your data integration workloads and get insights faster.

We also launched Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse which simplifies analytics and AI with a unified, open, and secure data lakehouse. Together with Amazon Redshift, we now support zero-ETL integrations from applications, automating the extraction and loading of data from eight applications, including Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. As an open, unified, and secure lakehouse for your analytics and AI initiatives, Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse enhances these integrations to streamline your data management processes.

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to customer premises. By providing local access to AWS managed infrastructure, Outposts allows you to build and run applications on premises using the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as in AWS Regions. Moreover, this is done while using local compute and storage resources to meet lower latency requirement in manufacturing and local data processing needs. We announced a deeper collaboration with industry-leading storage solutions to streamline the use of third-party storage with AWS Outposts. You can now attach and use external block data volumes from NetApp® on-premises enterprise storage arrays and Pure Storage® FlashArray™ directly from the AWS Management Console. For more information, check out this blog post.

Industrial IoT Launches:

Just before reInvent, we announced some significant enhancements to AWS IoT SiteWise. AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to help you make better, data-driven decisions. We announced the general availability of extended industrial protocol support through a new integration with AWS Partners Belden and Litmus, to make it even easier to ingest data from over 100 protocols, and thousands of sensors.

We also announced the general availability of a generative AI-powered assistant in AWS IoT SiteWise. The AWS IoT SiteWise Assistant enables industrial users like plant managers, quality engineers, and maintenance technicians to gain insights, solve problems, and take actions directly from their operational data and provided knowledge base contexts using natural language. This allows for faster, more informed decisions to optimize processes, reduce mean time to repair, and reduce downtime.

AWS launched a number of IoT enhancements in the last year, check out this page to see them all!

Conclusion

This was my 6th re:Invent, and this year’s event once again demonstrated how AWS innovation can help accelerate digital transformation and optimize manufacturing businesses. Although the event continues to be developer focused, this year also showed the shift from a developer-centric conference to an event with offerings for the entire manufacturing value chain. If you didn’t make the event this year, I hope you can make it next year, scheduled for December 1-6, 2025 in Las Vegas, NV!