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Tag: reinvent
Vodafone UK unveils EVO smartphone plan as part of new 'Reinvent' strategy
2021-06-15 12:00:00| Telecompaper Headlines
(Telecompaper) Vodafone UK has announced the launch of its new EVO smartphone plan, combining device financing, trade-in and early upgrades...
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Meijer Joins Consortium to Reinvent the Retail Bag
2020-12-23 07:00:00| Waste Age
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Meijer announced that it's joined the Beyond the Bag Initiative aimed at identifying, testing and implementing sustainable solutions to move beyond the single-use plastic bag. It's among the retailer's latest efforts to r
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Highlights from AWS re:Invent 2020 - Dr. Werner Vogels Keynote
2020-12-17 17:12:03| The Webmail Blog
Highlights from AWS re:Invent 2020 - Dr. Werner Vogels Keynote nellmarie.colman Thu, 12/17/2020 - 10:12 AWS re:Invent 2020 rolled into the third week of its fully virtual format and highly anticipated keynote speaker Dr. Werner Vogels did not disappoint. The iconic AWS VP & CTO came to us from a defunct sugar factory located in his native country of the Netherlands. The historic SugarCity factory, located in Halfweg, provided both the scenic backdrop for the event, and the underlying backstory that was neatly woven into Dr. Vogels common theme of transformation in the face of unexpected circumstances and the value of operational insight. Dr. Vogels jaunt through the factory was punctuated with profound insights, guest speakers and a sprinkling of product announcements along the way. Here are a few of the highlights from Tuesdays keynote. Setting the stage Standing in front of towering metal structures, in what was once a bustling hive of industrial activity, Dr. Vogels regaled the audience with a story of a thriving manufacturing facility that followed a well-defined process to break down raw sugar beet into refined sugar. While the scenery seemed as far from the world of public cloud as one could possibly be, Dr. Vogels deftly wove ties into IoT, predictive maintenance, process improvement, data aggregation and analysis, and many more cloud-specific topics. He tied it all together by transitioning into the factorys fall from grace and the importance of an organizations ability to transform in response to external events, as seen most recently with the global impacts of COVID19 on modern businesses. To drive home his point around transformation, Dr. Vogels brought in a pair of powerful guest speakers. Guest speakers The first guest speaker was Lea von Bidder, the Co-Founder and CEO of Ava. Ava focuses on womens reproductive health and the organization leverages wearable wristband sensors to gather a wide assortment of health-related data, which is subsequently passed into AWS to leverage AI/ML services. This self-proclaimed data company discusses the value of partnering with AWS to transform and deliver capabilities that would otherwise be impossible for a small organization that is in essence a simple hardware manufacturer. This partnership has also enabled Ava to modify their wristbands to help in monitoring for early detection of COVID. The second speaker was Nicole Yip, the Engineering Manager of Direct Shopper Technology for The LEGO Group. The focus of this guest appearance was to discuss the problematic launch of a highly sought-after Millennium Falcon LEGO set on LEGOs website, which resulted from technical difficulties and tight coupling on LEGOs on-premises, monolithic platform. The fallout from that failed product launch led the organization to transform their entire way of thinking about IT systems and over time resulted in full adoption of serverless technology. This unfortunate experience drove growth from 4 to 56 serverless services in roughly two years. Key announcements / pre-announcements The remainder of Dr. Vogelss time in the SugarCity factory was spent in a recurring pattern of build-up and subsequent product launch, very similar to the motion used by Andy Jassy on the opening day of re:Invent. Listed below is a brief summary of the key product announcements and pre-announcements that were divulged by Dr. Vogels. AWS CloudShell AWS CloudShell provides access to AWS resources from a convenient browser-based command line interface leveraging an Amazon Linux 2 environment. CloudShell comes pre-stocked with a plethora of development tools, SDKs and a shell from which to launch the AWS CLI. CloudShell inherits credentials from the user that is logged into the console, negating the requirement to manage credentials locally. This tool is fully customizable, managed by AWS, cost-free and it even provides 1GB of persistent storage to retain files, scripts and other commonly used resources. AWS Fault Injection Simulator Dr. Vogels often reminds us that Everything fails, all the time. AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) delivers the capability for organizations to conduct chaos engineering in a controlled manner and learn from experiments. These experiments result in detailed reports and findings which can be used to compare and contrast to baseline measurements to help make decisions on how best to optimize various operations. The FIS tool allows organizations to introduce faults such as latency, malformed application code, injection faults, infrastructure degradation and even control plane level failures into an environment. This process of chaos engineering was made popular by Netflix and their use of Chaos Monkey. FIS provides organizations the ability to identify faults in their environment before they are encountered during a production outage. By running these game-day scenarios, personnel are given the opportunity to engineer for resiliency and/or determine optimal responses to a variety of scenarios, as well as determine how to proactively identify issues before they arise. AWS Managed Services for Grafana & Prometheus Awareness of the importance of observability in complex software systems has been increasing rapidly in recent years, as development teams are building interdependent microservice architectures, often with complex failure modes. These services offer the ability to analyze, monitor, produce alarms based on metrics, trace data across multiple sources and visualize interactive data. These services require no change to application code and are optimal for monitoring containerized applications. Dr. Vogels spent a good deal of time discussing the importance of being able to truly understand what is occurring within an application or system and developing tools that help in monitoring the unobservable actions that occur where we cannot see. And with AWS Managed Services for Grafana and AWS Managed Services for Prometheus, that now is possible. AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry is an AWS-supported, production-grade, secure distribution of the OpenTelemetry project. This project provides open-source APIs, agents and libraries to collect metrics and traces for the monitoring of applications. This tool will allow organizations to leverage metadata from tagged AWS resources and cloud-native services enabling the ability to correlate application performance data with its underlying infrastructure. This level of observability will provide operators a greater level of insight into application operation, which will expedite troubleshooting and reduce the time it takes to resolve an issue. Make the most of re:Invent 2020 This years re:Invent wraps up Friday, but the content will be available through the end of January. To view the recordings, register here and dont forget to visit the Rackspace Technology virtual booth to learn more about our new AWS solutions and enjoy an immersive interactive experience. Highlights from AWS re:Invent 2020 - Dr. Werner Vogels KeynoteCheck out the highlights from Dr. Werner Vogels' re:Invent 2020 keynot
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Highlights from AWS Re:Invent 2020 - Infrastructure Keynote with Peter DeSantis
2020-12-11 22:17:25| The Webmail Blog
Highlights from AWS Re:Invent 2020 - Infrastructure Keynote with Peter DeSantis heat3337 Fri, 12/11/2020 - 15:17 With insights into data center redundancy, a deep dive into the new AWS Graviton 2 processor and a view into AWS commitment to renewable energy, the AWS re:Invent Infrastructure Keynote had it all. Delivered by Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, this keynote provided a deeper look into how AWS is leading the way with their infrastructure services. How AWS creates redundancy in their data centers Lets start with what we learned about how AWS creates resiliency in their availability zones. Most are already familiar with a typical data center electrical layout where utility power and one or more backup generators front-ended by switching gear route into an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) with backup batteries. This supplies power to the hardware that runs the critical workloads, in order to meet customer demand. But AWS takes this a step further, reducing potential downtime in a couple of different ways. First, AWS developed custom switching gear control system software which has been deployed into their availability zones. This software is stripped to the bare minimum of whats needed to ensure perfection of the switching process. This also creates uniformity around their switching gear systems across all of their availability zones for ease of operation. The second thing to note is how AWS reduces the limitations of their UPSs by adding two independent power line ups including their own generators, utilities, switches and UPSs all the way down to their racks. On top of all that, AWS also developed their own custom-made small UPSs including battery packs and power supplies, placing them directly in each rack. Similar to the switching gear software, the customized rack installed UPS allows AWS to remediate failures quickly and without customer disruption. In-depth analysis of Graviton 2 Another incredible deep dive Peter went into was their custom-made AWS Graviton 2 processor purpose-made for running applications at scale. Most conventional processors use simultaneous multithreading (SMT) to improve the overall efficiency of CPUs with hardware multithreading. This is incredibly useful when creating a chip that can work with traditional and modern application workloads. However, the downside is that the chip loses its efficiency in scaled environments, even when SMT is turned off. Where Graviton 2 differs is each core is designed to deliver real-world workloads with as many fully independent cores as possible. This means there are no overlapping threads caused by SMT, no power state transition and no expected throttling just consistent and reliable performance. The processors have large L1 cache which are twice as large as current x86 processors which again are not shared by competing threads. Graviton 2 processors are also the most power-efficient processors AWS provides, achieving 2-3.5 times better performance per watt than any other processor in AWSs portfolio. Combined with its impressive cost, the Graviton 2 processor is a fantastic new addition to running your applications at scale. AWS commitment to renewable energy Today, a customer moving from an enterprise data center to an AWS data center can reduce their carbon footprint by 88%. And thats just the beginning, as AWS continues to move toward meeting The Climate Pledge of 0-net carbon production by 2040. Some key highlights include: Reducing DC/AC loss by 35% by optimizing power supplies and moving UPSs into racks 6,500 megawatts of renewable energy utilized across the world Working on using alternative materials in construction, including CO2 injection into concrete Using cooling water from us-west-2 to serve local farmers in Oregon Delivering the future with AWS Peter certainly had quite a few great quotes but one that stuck out to me was: There is no compression algorithm for experience. Andy Jassy Its important to consider experience when choosing a cloud partner. With 15 AWS competencies and over 2,700 AWS certifications, Rackspace Technology has the experience to elevate, operate and innovate your key business drivers. Take a moment to visit the Rackspace Technology virtual booth to learn more about our new AWS solutions and enjoy an immersive interactive experience. Or take a look at Rackspace Technologys new Teams offering in the AWS Marketplace. Rackspace Technology is proud to be an AWS launch partner, and one of the first to offer professional services on the AWS Marketplace. Highlights from AWS Re:Invent 2020 Infrastructure Keynote The AWS re:Invent Infrastructure Keynote had it all. Delivered by Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, this keynote provided a deeper look into how AWS is leading the way with their infrastructure services. Read more on the Rackspace blog.Explore AWS for Your Cloud, Apps, Data and Securityhttps://www.rackspace.com/cloud/awsLearn MoreProductsKris KrugerHighlights from AWS Re:Invent 2020 - Infrastructure Keynote with Peter DeSantisDecember 11, 2020Teaser FlagBlog
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AWS re:Invent 2020 Recap: Machine Learning Keynote
2020-12-10 19:13:50| The Webmail Blog
AWS re:Invent 2020 Recap: Machine Learning Keynote nellmarie.colman Thu, 12/10/2020 - 12:13 While this years AWS re:Invent may be entirely virtual, AWS has not disappointed this Data Scientist in the slightest. The long list of new releases in AWS machine learning stack will undoubtedly benefit all users ranging from novices to experts in the field. During Tuesdays Machine Learning Keynote, Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon Machine Learning, structured his message around three tenets which, together, give builders the freedom to invent. Under each tenet, he announced the new releases for machine learning, while also explaining how they fit together with the events other announcements helping the audience weave together the bigger picture. Provide firm foundations The first tenet, Provide firm foundations, was the basis for the first announcement: faster distributed training with Amazon SageMaker. Using Habana Gaudi processors from Intel, AWS will soon offer EC2 instances built for machine learning (ML) training yielding a performance increase of up to 40% over current GPU-based EC2 ML training instances for training deep learning workloads. This helps provide a firm foundation upon which developers can build and deploy machine learning, faster, while also reducing costs. Create the shortest path to success The second tenet, Create the shortest path to success, got the audience (particularly football fans like me) excited, as Sivasubramanian shared how AWS and the NFL are collaborating to achieve game and player simulation that can predict, treat and ultimately prevent player injury. In the spirit of creating the shortest path to success for critical projects like this, AWS announced Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. This is a tool that Im particularly eager to experiment with, as AWS suggests its a huge time saver for data transformation and discovery. Im also pleased to see that Data Wrangler will soon integrate with Snowflake, MongoDB and Databricks historically, AWS required AWS databases to seamlessly leverage their tools. Another time saver is Amazon SageMaker Clarify, Amazons bias detection tool across the entire ML workflow. Not only does bias detection save time, if done well it improves overall model quality, flagging any drift that may occur as models age. The next SageMaker release that I plan to utilize as an education tool is model profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debugger. This capability maximizes resources for training, GPU, CPU, network and I/O memory, by analyzing resource utilization and then making recommendations on how to adjust. (Wow!) We also learned about Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager, a new feature that manages and monitors machine learning models across fleets of smart devices up to 25 times faster when compared to hand-tuning said models. Expand machine learning to more builders The third tenet, Expand machine learning to more builders, is a principle Im particularly passionate about. AWS has attempted to achieve this by releasing Amazon Redshift ML which Im enthusiastic to test out. Its crucial to be able to more-easily experiment and deploy machine learning models however, Im wary of the suggestion that certain experts are no longer required in the process. Selecting, refining and deeply understanding a model is fundamental to extracting the most value possible from the output. As a launch partner for Redshift ML, Rackspace Technology can help you make the most of this new feature: At Rackspace Technology we help companies elevate their AI/ML operations. Were excited about the new Amazon Redshift ML feature because it will make it easier for our mutual Redshift customers to use ML on their Redshift with a familiar SQL interface. The seamless integration with Amazon SageMaker will empower data analysts to use data in new ways, and provide even more insight back to the wider organization. Nihar Gupta General Manager for Data Solutions, Rackspace Technology AWS continues to pave the way for streamlined development and deployment. Im thrilled to see the increasing number of capabilities across platforms. As a Data Science consultant, I am constantly interacting with different frameworks and infrastructure. AWS is my go-to solution for model development and as systems are increasingly compatible, the more I can focus on model refinement. This years re:Invent is a three-week event, all virtual, and free. To watch the event live or view recordings, register here and dont forget to visit the Rackspace Technology virtual booth to learn more about our new AWS solutions and enjoy an immersive interactive experience. AWS re:Invent 2020 Recap: Machine Learning KeynoteGet up-to-speed on the latest AWS machine learning announcements from AWS re:Invent 2020. Explore re:Invent announcements and updates.https://events.rackspace.com/reinventFind out more
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