Top Manufacturing and Industrial Announcements at re:Invent 2021

re:Invent 2021

Industrial companies across manufacturing, automotive, power and utilities, and energy industries are reinventing how they engineer, collaborate, make data driven decisions, lower costs, and improve quality. AWS for Industrial, a curated offering of purpose-built AWS services and AWS Partner Network solutions designed for industrial customers, provides proven and easily accessible capabilities that help to increase the pace of industrial innovation.

At re:Invent this year, we continued to expand these offerings by announcing new purpose built-services and new capabilities for existing services. CEO Adam Selipsky even spent of good portion of his keynote discussing how AWS is making digital transformation (or Industry 4.0) easier for industrial customers.  Check out his full keynote, or jump right to AWS for Industrial section here. And while there were hundreds of launches and announcements of new services, major features, and partner collaborations across all industries, this blog will cover the ones most relevant for industrial companies.

Top Announcements

1.     Siemens Expands Partnership with AWS to Facilitate Cloud-Based Digital Transformation. Siemens is the world leader in industrial automation, and industrial software. With their expertise in Operation Technology (OT), and AWS leading expertise in the IT space, Siemens and AWS will make it easier for industrial customers to use Siemens’ comprehensive industrial software and AWS’s cloud services to deliver new manufacturing insights, automation, and connected services. Together, we’ll bring OT and IT teams together to implement new cloud-based digital transformation solutions that will help companies of any size address industrial complexity and turn it into competitive advantage.

2.     We announced AWS IoT TwinMaker, which gives developers a much easier way to build and maintain digital twins. It allows you to use your existing IoT, video, and enterprise application data where it already lives—without needing to re-ingest or move the data to another location. Save time with an automatically generated knowledge graph that binds your data sources to virtual replicas of physical systems to accurately model real-world environments. This lets operations teams in hospitals, R&D organizations, and life sciences manufacturing get an immersive 3D view of instruments and equipment, and view operations metrics to optimize efficiency, increase production, and improve performance. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

3.     We launched a preview of AWS IoT RoboRunner for Building Robot Fleet Management Applications. Roborunner is a new robotics service that makes it easier for enterprises to build and deploy applications that help fleets of robots work seamlessly together. AWS IoT RoboRunner lets you connect your robots and work management systems, enabling you to orchestrate work across your operation through a single system view. This new service builds on the same technology used in Amazon fulfillment centers, and now we are excited to make it available to all developers to build advanced robotics applications for their businesses. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

4.     We launched AWS Private 5G, which allows you to build private cellular networks to take advantage of the technology benefits of 5G while maintaining the security and granular application and device controls of a private network. For industrial customers, this means you can connect thousands of Industrial IoT devices with the low latency and high bandwidth of a private 5G network. You can also integrate with existing IT policies, scale your network capacity on demand, add devices with a few clicks, and pay only for the capacity and throughput you use. For industrial customers, AWS Private 5G offers a new way to connect devices, sensors, machines, and legacy equipment to make near real time decisions with reliable data linkage across connected machines. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

5.     New hardware announced, including AWS Graviton3. AWS Graviton3 is the latest generation of AWS-designed Arm-based processors that provide the best price performance for workloads on Amazon EC2. AWS Graviton3 processors deliver up to 25% better compute performance, up to 2x higher floating-point performance, and up to 2x faster cryptographic workload performance compared to AWS Graviton2 processors. Additionally, Graviton3 processors deliver up to 3x better performance compared to Graviton2 processors for ML workloads, including support for bfloat16. Read the launch blog for AWS Graviton3, and watch the session.

6.     Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management solution that is native, easy to deploy, and highly scalable. The new Amazon Inspector takes a unique approach to vulnerability management by offering continual vulnerability monitoring compared to the traditional periodic assessment model. For industrial companies concerned about security, this can enhance your cybersecurity posture. Amazon Inspector automatically discovers all workloads and continually scans them for vulnerabilities, providing vulnerability information to customers in near-real time without any manual overhead. It then correlates up-to-date common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) information with factors like network accessibility to create meaningful risk scores that help you prioritize vulnerable resources to address. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

7.     Amazon EMR Serverless is a serverless option in Amazon EMR that makes it easy for data analysts and engineers to run open source big data analytics frameworks without configuring, managing, and scaling clusters or servers. You get all of the features and benefits of Amazon EMR, without the need for experts to plan and manage clusters. Read the launch blog, and watch the session. Similarly, Amazon Redshift Serverless is a serverless option (preview) to run and scale analytics without having to provision and manage data warehouse clusters. With Amazon Redshift Serverless, all users including data analysts, developers, and data scientists can now use Amazon Redshift to get insights from data in seconds. Now, you can focus on getting to insights from data in and not think about managing your data warehouse infrastructure. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

8.      Amazon SageMaker Canvas expands access to machine learning (ML) by providing business analysts with a visual point-and-click interface that allows you to generate accurate ML predictions on your own — without requiring any machine learning experience or having to write a single line of code. With SageMaker Canvas, you can quickly connect and access data from cloud and on-premises data sources, combine datasets, and create unified datasets for training ML models. SageMaker Canvas automatically detects and corrects data errors and analyzes data readiness for ML. Read the launch blog, and watch the session. With this, we also announced Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference to easily deploy ML models for inference without configuring or managing any of the underlying infrastructure. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

9.     AWS Mainframe Modernization is a unique platform that allows you to migrate your on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed runtime environment on AWS. AWS Mainframe Modernization enables two popular migration patterns: re-platforming and automated refactoring. You can assess and analyze migration readiness and plan projects. Once implemented and tested, you can deploy your mainframe workloads to AWS into the AWS Mainframe Modernization managed runtime environment. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

10.   AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. A data lake is a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis. Lake Formation introduces three new capabilities that simplify building, securing, and managing data lakes, including Lake Formation Governed Tables, which simplifies building resilient data pipelines with multi-table transaction support. Governed Tables monitor and automatically optimize how data is stored so query times are consistent and fast. AWS Lake Formation also now supports row- and cell-level permissions, making it easier to restrict access to sensitive information by granting users access to only the portions of the data they have permissions to see. For biopharma organizations that manage data across R&D, manufacturing, and commercial, these tools provide flexibility, performance, and control when implementing an enterprise data strategy. Watch the session.

11.  Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class is an archive storage class that delivers the lowest cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires retrieval in milliseconds. Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers the fastest access to archive storage, with the same throughput and milliseconds access as the S3 Standard storage class. It is designed for rarely accessed data that still needs immediate access in performance-sensitive use cases like scientific and research data. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

12.  AWS Local Zones International Expansion — New AWS Local Zones are now available in over 26 metros in over 21 countries worldwide. These new AWS Local Zones will be available starting in 2022 and join the Local Zones in 16 metros across the US, allowing customers to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users or for on-premises installations. Customers can deliver ultra-low latency applications to end users in cities across the US with generally available AWS Local Zones in 13 metro areas – Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Philadelphia, and Portland. Read more about AWS Local Zones.

13.  We announced a new AWS Well-Architected Framework Sustainability Pillar to help organizations learn, measure, and improve their workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing. The AWS Well-Architected Framework has been helping AWS customers improve their cloud architectures since 2015. This framework consists of design principles, questions, and best practices across multiple pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and now Sustainability. Similar to the other pillars, the Sustainability Pillar contains questions aimed at evaluating the design, architecture, and implementation of your workloads to reduce their energy consumption and improve their efficiency. The pillar allows you to track your progress toward policies and best practices that support a more sustainable future, not just a simple checklist.

14. New AWS Outposts servers, all powered by AWS Nitro System and with your choice of x86 or Arm/Graviton2 servers. The 2U and 1U form factors respectively are suitable for manufacturing and industrial customers that require an industrial edge platform or are space-constrained and need access to low-latency compute capacity. Read the launch blog.

15. AWS Amplify announces AWS Amplify Studio, a visual development environment that offers frontend developers new features (public preview) to accelerate UI development with minimal coding, while integrating Amplify’s powerful backend configuration and management capabilities. Amplify Studio automatically translates designs made in Figma to human-readable React UI component code. Within Amplify Studio, developers can visually connect the UI components to application backend data. For configuring and managing backends, Amplify Admin UI’s existing capabilities will be part of Amplify Studio providing a unified interface to enable developers to build full-stack apps faster. Learn more.

Breakout Sessions

In addition to these announcements, we hosted presentations from various industrial customers.  See below for a sample list of just some of these sessions. You can access these breakout sessions (and many others applicable to industrial companies) by logging into the re:Invent Virtual Event platform on-demand:

AWS innovation within Amazon (On-demand)

Industry 4.0 transformation with AWS for industrial (On-demand)

Transforming engineering and design (On-demand)

Spirit AeroSystems’ manufacturing digital thread driven by AWS GovCloud, Deloitte sponsored) (On-demand)

As always, re:Invent was an event to remember with AWS showing its continued commitment to innovation across all industries, including industrial. The addition of even more purpose built industrial services like AWS IoT TwinMaker, and AWS IoT RoboRunner, and cross-industry applicable services like AWS Private 5G and Amazon Inspector make it clear that AWS is working hard to help solve the most pressing needs of a challenging industry. We look forward to continuing to innovate with and on behalf of our industrial customers and partners in 2022!

To learn more about AWS for Industrial services and solutions, visit https://aws.amazon.com/industrial.