AWS Messaging & Targeting Blog

Unlocking innovation: three key themes from AWS re:Invent 2024

Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent drew nearly 60,000 attendees from across the globe to Las Vegas, Nevada, December 2–6, 2024. The conference featured 5 keynotes, 18 innovation talks, and 2,300 sessions and hands-on labs offering immersive learning and networking opportunities.

With dozens of service and feature announcements, and innumerable best practices shared by AWS executives, customers, and partners—summarizing highlights isn’t easy. Three themes caught my attention: generative artificial intelligence (AI), digital sovereignty, and security. 

Generative AI

The impact of generative AI was a central focus, as emphasized by Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and AI at AWS, during his keynote. The convergence of massive data sets and specialized compute made available through the cloud have created the perfect conditions for AI to flourish. New tools and interfaces are enabling widespread adoption at an unprecedented pace, driving efficiency and unlocking creativity for all of us.

People’s expectations for applications are changing with generative AI. Organizations need more than just a chatbot or a single, powerful large language model (LLM) as they look to innovate and enhance customer experiences.

In their innovation talk, Architectural methods and breakthroughs in innovative apps in the cloud, Shaown Nandi, Director of Technology, and Ben Cabanas, Asia Pacific Director of Technology at AWS, showcased generative AI and advancements in developer tools. These advancements are transforming application design and removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting, empowering you to modernize systems and develop robust data strategies.

Nandi and Cabanas, along with leaders at Intuit, ANZ Bank, and Siemens, explored three areas of cloud architecture (shown in Figure 1). These areas can give you the leverage you need to amplify the impact of your developers and data with cutting-edge techniques and breakthrough technologies like generative AI.

Watch Nandi and Cabanas’ session for more details.

Areas of cloud architecture that can give you leverage to accelerate your business include: Whitespace in the development lifecycle, New generative AI tools, and Modernization.

Figure 1: Three focus areas to gain leverage and accelerate solutions

Many of the announcements made during re:Invent are designed to help you meet real-world challenges, and gain the leverage you need to be successful as you build and scale transformative generative AI applications. The next generation of Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Nova foundation models (FMs), new Amazon Q capabilities, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails Automated Reasoning checks, and the task governance capability in Amazon SageMaker HyperPod are just a few of the new products and features you can use to increase agility, build trust, and control costs as you accelerate AI initiatives.

Visit the AWS News Blog for more top announcements.

Digital sovereignty

Digital sovereignty challenges and the technical measures, operational controls, and contract protections AWS offers to address them also featured prominently during the conference.

Customers are increasingly focused on maintaining control of their data and being able to meet regulatory requirements anywhere they operate. Digital sovereignty is emerging as a top priority, especially in the European Union.

In his breakout session, Digital sovereignty: overcome complexity and enable future-readiness, Max Peterson, Vice President of Sovereign Cloud at AWS, noted that digital sovereignty can mean different things to different organizations. Countries and regions around the world have their own requirements, and there is no uniform guidance around the types of workloads, industries, or sectors that need to meet them. Key challenges (depicted in Figure 2) include data residency, operator access restrictions, resilience and survivability, and independence and transparency—all of which are rooted in trust.

Digital sovereignty requirements can be broken down into two areas: Data sovereignty and Operational sovereignty. Data sovereignty includes data residency and operator access restrictions. Operational sovereignty includes resilience and survivability, and independence and transparency.

Figure 2: Digital sovereignty challenges

End users entrust organizations with sensitive information, and they need to feel confident that it’s handled safely and ethically. They expect the services they rely on to be secure, simple-to-use, and available. Likewise, the organizations that are building those services to store data need to trust the infrastructure they’re building on. They have to be able to provide assured proof that data and privacy are protected, and that control over data remains in the hands of those with the proper authority.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to driving innovation while meeting digital sovereignty requirements. However, with AWS you can achieve the full benefits of the cloud while maintaining control over where you locate your data, who can access it, and how it’s used.

Peterson highlighted the AWS Nitro System that powers AWS Regions for trusted and confidential computing, and generative AI and machine learning (ML) innovations such as Amazon Bedrock. AWS sovereign cloud offerings range from encryption services to the new AWS European Sovereign Cloud (planned for Q4 2025). These offerings facilitate the control and choice you need to overcome digital sovereignty challenges. They also balance the benefits of emerging technologies with the need to keep up with the evolving requirements of citizens and customers.

Watch Peterson’s session to learn more about AWS sovereignty controls and features.

Security

Raising the bar on security was an overarching theme. Chris Betz, CISO at AWS, set the tone during his innovation talk, Security insights and innovation from AWS, noting that security is the single most important expectation AWS customers have. We continuously invest in our security culture—working hard to help you do the same. Betz underscored the effectiveness of our Security Guardians program, which provides the tools, resources, and guidance developers need to address security considerations at each stage of development, and launch products that are Secure by Design. The program, Betz pointed out, has accelerated secure development and improved overall security at scale at AWS.

Watch Betz’s innovation talk to hear how Commonwealth Bank of Australia used a similar approach to support its DevSecOps transformation, and visit the AWS Security Blog to find out how you can build your own Security Guardians program.

For more about security culture, watch re:Invent breakout sessions Building a resilient and effective culture of security, Emotionally intelligent security leadership to drive business impact, and Better together: Protecting data through culture and technology.

Best practices for securing generative AI, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and threat detection and response were also spotlighted. In the breakout session How Amazon threat intelligence helps protect your infrastructure, Will Bowditch, Security Engineer, and Saleem Muhammad, Principal Product Manager at AWS, described how AWS generates threat intelligence. Internal tools that include Madpot, Sonaris, and Mithra (described in Figure 3) allow us to proactively detect and act on millions of potential threats every day, before they become real security issues for customers.

Watch the session to learn more.

Internal AWS threat intelligence tools include MadPot, a globally distributed network of honeypot threat sensors with automated response capabilities that can react to threat actors’ evolving tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs); Sonaris, an active defense tool that analyzes potentially harmful network traffic and denies attempts to find unintentionally public S3 buckets and vulnerable services; and Mithra, an internal neural network graph model that uses algorithms for threat intelligence. Mithra ranks domain trustworthiness to help protect customers from threats.

Figure 3: Internal Amazon threat intelligence tools

Noteworthy announcements included AWS Security Incident Response, a new service that provides automated triage, coordinated communication, and expert guidance to help you streamline security event responses and recover from cybersecurity threats.

Not surprisingly, the subject of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) also drew attention in the wake of the ongoing breach of telecommunication networks by a state-sponsored threat actor known as Salt Typhoon. Because unauthorized parties may have access to unencrypted texts and phone calls, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are advising Americans to start using encrypted messaging apps to protect text and voice communications.

In the breakout session How the U.S. Army uses AWS Wickr to secure mission-critical comms, Gabe Chiulli, Cloud CTO, and Christopher Watts, Cloud Services Division Chief at U.S. Army, highlighted how the U.S. Army Enterprise Cloud Management Agency uses AWS Wickr to allow users to chat freely while protecting sensitive communications.

Wickr helps organizations in all industries secure one-to-one and group messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, screen sharing, and location sharing with 256-bit E2EE. Data residency controls allow you to host conversations in the region of your choice, and your technical teams can build and deploy Wickr Bot integrations to bring AWS ML and generative AI services to edge devices in a simple chatbot interface.

Wickr is among the services that will be featured in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Additionally, unlike consumer messaging apps, Wickr offers the data retention and administrative controls needed to help meet recordkeeping requirements, and manage user and device data remotely.

Visit Federal News Network, and read The Forrester Wave for Secure Communications Solutions, Q3 2024 report for more information.

Additional areas of interest

Engaging sessions covering additional topics such as quantum computingmulticloud environments, and lessons for dealing with complexity from Amazon CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels, also captured my interest during the conference.

The learning continues

It’s clear that generative AI will continue to expand technology horizons, and reshape customer experiences. Digital sovereignty needs will evolve with regulations, increasing efforts to maintain control over data. And security, as always, remains top-of-mind.

AWS re:Invent 2024 introduced new capabilities, best practices, and strategic partnerships to help you innovate and address challenges in these areas. It was an awe-inspiring experience, and I can’t wait to see what re:Invent 2025 will bring!

For more information about product announcements during AWS re:Invent, visit the AWS News Blog and AWS Blog hub.

To watch keynotes, innovation talks, and breakout sessions on demand, visit the conference website.

Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

Anne is a Senior Worldwide Security GTM Specialist at AWS based in Chicago. She has more than a decade of experience in the security industry, and focuses on effectively communicating cybersecurity risk. She maintains a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.