AWS held its annual customer conference, re:Invent, this week in Las Vegas. It’s typically been a high-energy customer extravaganza — a circus for tech people — but there were a few unusual things about this year’s model that made the event feel a bit more subdued than in the past.
For starters, it was the first time back in Vegas after the pandemic forced the event into virtual mode last year. There were fewer people onsite than in a normal year (whatever normal is now), and it was also the first re:Invent with new CEO Adam Selipsky delivering the main keynote on Tuesday.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pointed out that much of the innovation was going on behind the scenes as the company worked to simplify operations for its customers.
There was some thinking that he would want to put his stamp on things and perhaps chart a course for the future of the lucrative division, but what the audience got was more incremental than innovative, more bland than exciting. It was a nice, well-organized affair without a lot of fanfare.
Selipsky’s delivery was smooth and professional but lacked a major announcement to really turn heads, as Andy Jassy had in the past. While there were newsworthy announcements — we certainly covered a bunch of them — nothing came out of the 2021 re:Invent that felt really cool. It felt more like Amazon was checking boxes and filling in holes in the product road map.
Maybe that’s what we all needed this year. Maybe it’s the best that Amazon could do in a year of turbulence, when Jassy moved on to become CEO of the entire company and the world fought its way through a pandemic. But whatever the reason, it just didn’t seem like anything major happened.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky on stage at AWS re:Invent 2021. Image Credits: Amazon
Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research who has attended the conference for nine straight years, called it “one of the tamest re:Invents” he could remember.
“Overall re:Invent did not have the usual big announcements. For example, this is the first re:Invent in a long time where AWS did not announce a new database. Instead, it moved a number of services to serverless and added [minor] capabilities across the board,” he said.
For one thing, it wasn’t the Andy Jassy show, with most of the news delivered on the first day at the main keynote, as it has been the past several years. That changed for the better this year, with announcements spread over multiple keynotes with other executives having more of a chance to announce the tools that are relevant to their groups. But that format could also have led to the overall impact of the event feeling smaller.
We got news from Selipsky on Day 1, while VP of AI Swami Sivasubramanian had more from his department on Day 2, and, finally, we got even more news from Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels on Day 3.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels brought some much-needed humor to the event. Image Credits: Amazon
Vogels didn’t just make announcements, though. He lectured like a college professor about API management, identity and access management, and operating in a way that’s more friendly to the environment. He has a deep understanding of how all the technology pieces fit together, and that was on full display at his keynote address on Thursday.
Sivasubramanian also gave a long and detailed overview of the length and breadth of Amazon’s vast AI and ML tooling — and it has a lot — sprinkling in some news like a new no-code offering for SageMaker and data migration tooling along the way.
Perhaps Amazon is becoming a bit more like Apple: We don’t necessarily feel like our phones, tablets and computers look or feel all that different, but there is certainly work going on in the innards of the devices improving the experience that we don’t really see. Apple has new M1 chips. Amazon has silicon of its own, like Graviton 3 and Trn1. The custom silicon isn’t where it ends, though, and Amazon is hoping those kinds of technical upgrades will continue to drive customer growth.
Vogels pointed out that much of the innovation was going on behind the scenes as the company worked to simplify operations for its customers, adding different products that customers had demanded. At one point, Vogels joked that they kept creating new EC2 instance flavors because “you kept asking us for them.”
AWS VP of AI Swami Sivasubramanian on stage at re:Invent 2021. Image Credits: Amazon
“We needed to do massive investments and innovations in our data centers to make sure that we could get sort of next-generation compute platforms into your hands as well,” he said. He talked about a new online game the company has created, which was about more than the game itself. It was about creating massive amounts of compute and intelligence in the cloud, as almost a proof of concept for AWS.
AWS is facing massive competition in the years ahead. It has managed to maintain its sizable market share lead because it was there first, and it took the competition years to even show up. Now we have Microsoft, Google and even Alibaba competing hard with Amazon for a piece of that cloud business.
And there is plenty of business left out there to conquer. What we didn’t hear is how Selipsky plans to continue to keep the company ahead of that competition, what his vision is for the division. We still don’t know whether that would involve moving up the stack to compete with Salesforce, Microsoft and Adobe in SaaS, either through building or even buying.
In some ways, it may be unfair to have expected that kind of boldness this year. As Mueller told me, it might have been too soon, that even though Selipsky had been at AWS in the past, he needs time to understand the division as it operates today before he puts his mark on it.
So maybe the best way to go was the safe route, and that’s what they delivered: Nothing fancy. Nothing flashy, but a well-organized, low-key affair designed to match the times.
