The time is upon us for one of the year’s most anticipated technology conferences. Amazon’s re:Invent 2018 has kicked off in Las Vegas and is full of new products and innovations, with more to be announced throughout the week.

Now, let’s take a look at what kicks off re:Invent 2018

AWS RoboMaker Makes Robotics Accessible to Everyone

Let’s face it, almost every technology fan has dreamed of building a robot at some time or another. AWS’ RoboMaker makes this dream accessible by allowing for the full lifecycle of robotics development, including development and simulation.

Simulation can be one of the most difficult and time consuming aspects of Robotics. Sure, it looks like the code may work, but do you really want to risk your expensive robot on untested code? Often the answer is no, but robotics engineers have no choice but to take the risk. RoboMaker makes this technology easy to use, and illustrated in the RoboMaker announcement blog.

Besides being just plain cool, this particular innovation illustrates that AWS is more than just your data center in the cloud, AWS is all about enabling innovation on all fronts.

Expanded Amazon S3 Options

As we all know, storage tends to be the pillar of almost any AWS deployment. When it comes to S3 storage, there have not been many options before now. AWS has announced additional tiers of storage in their environment, providing additional cost savings. These new tiers fall between S3 and Glacier.

The first tier, Standard-IA is designed for data you are going to keep around for a long time, but will not access frequently. On a similar vein, One Zone-IA is designed for the same type of data, with a lower criticality.

While this is great, it sounds like it has the potential to make an Amazon S3 environment more complicated. The good news is AWS already though of that, and has also introduced an intelligent tiering feature. This feature seeks to make the new storage tiers easier to adopt, without having to guess about how your data is accessed.

When uploading objects to S3 users will know be able to select the Intelligent Tiering storage class to let AWS seamlessly transition their data between tiers. You can read more about the feature in this blog from AWS.

Additionally on the storage front, AWS’ EBS is receiving additional performance capacity which you can read more about here.

AWS Snowball Edge Enhanced for CPU and GPU Performance

One of the reasons AWS has become a leader in the cloud space is because they constantly listen to what their customers need, and rapidly innovate to meet these needs.  AWS Snowball Edge is the answer for customers who need to do a bit more to their data before sending it to AWS.  Customers can load up their data and perform processing on their Snowball Edge device before sending it to AWS.

The first Snowball Edge device boasted 100 TB of capacity and 24 vCPUs and has been optimized for storage, and also recently enhanced.  The new device is optimized for compute and provides 52 vCPUs with an option for GPU inclusion as well.  You can read about the enhancements to the Snowball Edge device here.

Keeping Up with re:Invent 2018

You can read about the rest of the first line announcements here on the AWS blog.  The AWS blog is your ultimate source of data if you are not attending re:Invent 2018 this year.

You can browse the re:Invent 2018 category here to learn about all the announcements made so far .

For more information on the event, be sure to check out the official re:Invent 2018 site.