re:Invent 2022: Impressions of AWS CEO Adam Selipsky's keynote

Day two of AWS re:Invent brought the CEO of Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky to the stage. With a theme of simplicity and optimization, Selipsky talked about the past, present and future of AWS. And, to nobody's surprise, he made some announcements about upcoming releases!

We caught up with some of our on-site experts for their first impressions:

Mattias Andersson

Adam Selipsky opened with a point that because cloud is more efficient, economic uncertainty is a reason to invest more in cloud, because it’s a great place to help you tighten your belt. He shared AWS’s aspirations for a Zero-ETL future, with some RedShift integrations to make that happen, as well as a bunch of new instance types to add to the 600 or so they already have!

It seemed to me that many of the new services address specific industries and their pain points. They didn’t repeat this phrase as much as they usually do, but it seems to be about taking on that undifferentiated heavy lifting. Another theme I noticed is they’re continuing their trend of rolling the dice for deciding between AWS and Amazon for service naming prefixes. I really want to take a look at their newly announced serverless offering for Open Search.

David Blocher

If there’s an emerging theme I’m seeing from this keynote address, it’s that AWS seems to be working really hard to reduce organizational complexity around problems with security and identity management. They have Clean Rooms for processing data collaboratively and securely. They also announced Amazon Security Lake and Amazon DataZone, which both simplify existing, complex services. 

They’re also introducing more SaaS focused on specific verticals. They just announced Cloud Supply Chain, and I’m really interested to see the impacts that will have on the Supply Chain industry.

Andru Estes

Two of the positive takeaways from me were the renewable energy and water positive commitments in the upcoming year. If I had to pick one service thing that really amazed me, it would be the Amazon OpenSource Serverless announcement. Because who doesn’t love serverless!