AWS re:Invent Takeaways – Compute is Changing, IGEL Helps Move It Faster

Like just about everything in 2020, AWS re:Invent had to be – pardon the obvious word play – re-invented. Not only was the annual event held virtually, but it also delivered robust content over three action-packed weeks. That’s a lot of material to cover, so to help I wanted to summarize the highlights I found to be most compelling as an EUC professional.

The key takeaway across the entire event was that compute is fundamentally changing. With the onset of the first pandemic of the technology age, we’ve seen a rapid acceleration in cloud adoption, and this means for businesses to remain competitive they must also reinvent themselves. They need to dive deep to reconsider how to move faster in this time of tectonic change.

The event keynote underscored how everyone needs to take a moment for internal reflection – to ask deeply about you and your company’s, commitment to innovation. And AWS is showing it’s there to help with a number of new technology and customer support enhancement announcements. Each show their innovation promise.

Key Announcements

Amazon made impressive announcements across many of their AWS technology pillars during the event. Consider the following:

• MacOS on AWS – For the first time ever, Amazon is bringing macOS to AWS cloud. They announced availability of new Mac mini powered instances on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allowing developers to create apps for iPhones, iPads, Macs and more on AWS.
• Amazon WSP Protocol now generally available – The cloud-native streaming protocol enables consistent user experience when accessing your WorkSpaces across global distances and unreliable networks.
• Six New Container Technologies:

1. 1. Amazon EKS Anywhere (coming in 2021): Create and operate Kubernetes clusters on your own infrastructure with EKS Anywhere.
   2. Amazon ECS Anywhere (coming in 2021): Deploy native Amazon ECS tasks in the traditional AWS managed infrastructure, and now on your infrastructure as well. Learn more about Amazon ECS Anywhere here.
   3. Introducing Amazon EKS Distro: Amazon EKS Distro is an open-source Kubernetes distribution used by Amazon EKS to help create reliable and secure clusters.
   4. AWS Proton: Automate container and serverless application development and deployment with AWS Proton.
   5. Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR): Provides developers an easy and highly available way to share and deploy container software publicly. You can learn more about Amazon ECR here.
   6. AWS Lambda Container Support: AWS Lambda customers can now provision Lambda functions with a maximum of 10,240 MB (10 GB) of memory, which is a more than 3x increase compared to the previous limit of 3,008 MB. Learn more about Lambda Container Support here.

• Five New Amazon Connect Products:

1. 1. Amazon Connect Wisdom – this agent assistance capability gives agents the information they need to solve issues in real time.
   2. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles – this customer profile capability ensures agents have a more unified profile of each customer so they can provide more personalized service during a call.
   3. Real-Time Contact Lens for Amazon Connect – this provides real-time analytics to further impact customer interactions during a call.
   4. Amazon Connect Tasks – this task automation and management capability automates, tracks and manages tasks for contact center agents, improving agent productivity by up to 30%.
   5. Amazon Connect Voice ID – a caller authentication capability this provides real-time caller authentication using machine learning-powered voice analysis.

• AWS ISV Partner Path (available in 2021): New partner experience designed to accelerate the engagement that independent software vendors (ISVs) have with AWS, through prescriptive guidance, curated programs, funding benefits, and co-selling support.

Yes that’s a lot of news, capabilities and technology. You can get more great content from the event on demand here.

 What’s It All Mean for IGEL?

How does this benefit IGEL and IGEL customers? As compute changes, IGEL is changing too. We are laser focused on accelerating the closeness of users to their data and applications. As COVID-19 and the pandemic have changed the face of our world, remote work has also been hyper-accelerated to ensure a safe work-life-balance with more businesses adopting working from anywhere. IGEL ensures a safe, secure, and productive means of doing this on virtually any device.

You’ll also find that IGEL is committed to the public cloud with new and supported methods to build your IGEL ecosystem within AWS, like supported Amazon Linux, and prioritizing key partnerships to strengthen your public cloud deployments.

You likely already know that IGEL continues to innovate around making IGEL OS the leader in a purpose-built operating system for cloud workspaces, but IGEL is also wholly committed to the AWS platform and will continue to innovate and grow. Look for announcements from IGEL in the coming weeks around new ways to connect using IGEL OS and AWS.