At its first re:Invent conference exclusively for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon announced a brand new cloud product called AWS Redshift, which it said offered a new and cost-effective way of doing data warehousing for large companies that have huge amounts of data.
The re:Invent conference appears to be Amazon’s attempt at a yearly conference along the lines of Apple’s WWDC and Google’s I/O, both technically heavy conferences where technology heavyweights announce new products. This is Amazon’s first such conference for its AWS cloud computing product and will likely not be its last, given the growth of its platform.
Redshift, which appears to be aimed at Oracle and other large data warehousing vendors, looks positioned to disrupt the data warehousing business, which allows companies with large amounts of data to archive their older data while maintaining the ability to query them. This is typically required for companies that have a huge amount of digital data records and need to store them and be able to query on them.
[related-left] Amazon also announced over 24% in cost-cuttings for its popular S3 storage service, reducing the price of its flagship storage service from $0.125 per gigabyte to $0.093 per gigabyte. Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings, who joined AWS’s senior VP Andy Jassy on stage, joked that the announcement “just saved us a fortune.”
Senior technical staff from companies such as NASA, NASDAQ, SAP and Netflix joined Amazon on stage to showcase their products built on AWS. NASA showcased how they built their live streaming of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars using Amazon’s AWS infrastructure. NASDAQ detailed FinQloud, a cloud-based, regulations-compliant solution for financial services that other companies in the financial industry can use as a backend. SAP detailed their new HANA analytics and other offerings on the cloud platform.
ReInvent continues for two more days, and it is expected that Amazon will use tomorrow’s keynote to announce even more AWS features.
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