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Amazon to Boost UK Economy with £8 Billion Investment, Expanding AWS

Amazon to Boost UK Economy with £8 Billion Investment, Expanding AWS

Amazon to Boost UK Economy with £8 Billion Investment, Expanding AWS

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The cloud computing division of Amazon, known as Amazon Web Services (AWS), has declared a substantial investment of £8 billion ($10.45 billion) will be made in the UK over the next five years. By doing this, it plans to increase its nationwide data centre operations and strengthen the digital infrastructure of the United Kingdom.

“This £8 billion investment marks the start of the economic revival and shows Britain is a place to do business,” UK finance minister Rachel Reeves said in a statement.

“I am determined to go further so we can deliver on our mandate to create jobs, unlock investment and make every part of Britain better off.

“The hard work to fix the foundations of our economy has only just begun.”

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Notable Contribution to the Economy

The investment is anticipated to increase the UK’s GDP by a total of $14 by 2028. It will illustrate the groundbreaking financial effect that AWS is likely to produce. In addition, it will generate about 14,000 full-time equivalent jobs a year in sectors like construction, engineering, and telecommunications.

This statement comes from AWS. It has been steadily expanding around the UK since constructing its first data centre in 2016. Currently, the region is served by two WaveLength Zones, three Availability Zones, and numerous Edge Locations operated by AWS.

“The next few years could be among the most pivotal for the UK’s digital and economic future,” said Tanuja Randery, AWS Vice President and Managing Director, Europe, Middle East & Africa.

She added that AWS’ expansion would help “organisations of all sizes across the country increasingly embrace technologies like cloud computing and AI to help them accelerate innovation, increase productivity, and compete on the global stage”.

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Assisting Regional Companies

The UK’s digital economy has been greatly aided by AWS. Reputable UK businesses like easyJet, NatWest, and AstraZeneca rely on AWS’s cloud services. Their focus is to save costs, increase flexibility, and accelerate innovation. Amazon continues to spend in order to help businesses of all sizes leverage cloud computing as well as artificial intelligence (AI) in order to remain competitive.

AWS has provided £3 billion in investments to support thousands of UK workers every year since 2020. After the publication of this revised data, AWS is expected to invest more than £11 billion between 2020 and 2028.

 
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Amazon Web Services pairs with Hugging Face to target AI developers

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon corporation’s cloud computing wing, announced on Tuesday that it is cooperating with development company Hugging Face which is a software development center, to simplify the process to carry out ai technology (AI) work in Amazon’s cloud.

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Whereas the latest generative AI solutions from Microsoft Corporation as well as Alphabet Corp’s Google have caught the public’s attention, technology companies including AWS are competing behind the sights to provide the services and tools that software engineers will require in order to incorporate nearly the same technology into their own goods.

Microsoft has well announced recently a multi-year collaboration with OpenAI to advance Abilities.

Google’s response to ChatGPT is an AI chatbot called Bard.

Also Read: Google Chrome rolls out long-awaited battery-saving features

At the moment, Bard has reached the final stages of testing and therefore is scheduled for release by the end of the month of February 2023.

AWS, the world’s largest cloud computing provider, already provides tools to assist programmers in developing AI-based applications, ranging from specialized computing chips for raining AI algorithms on enormous quantities of information at a cheaper price than competitors to facilities that decrease the time required to generate a chatbot or even other AI products.

AWS announced on Tuesday it was going to collaborate with Hugging Face which is a company based in New York that has grown into a central internet location for AI developers to exchange open-source code as well as models.

Hugging Face’s CEO, Clem Delangue, stated that although the agreement is not exclusive, the business is collaborating closely with AWS to make it simple for devs to take code from the site & operate it on the AWS cloud.

“For this product collaboration, we’re dedicating significant engineering resources to build our shared products,” Delangue told Reuters in an interview.

Source: dcfx.com

Clem Delangue also stated that the forthcoming generation of Bloom which is an open-source AI prototype that currently operates in terms of size as well as scope with the model used by Microsoft-powered OpenAI to develop ChatGPT will operate on Trainium, an AWS-developed specialized artificial intelligence chip.

Also Read: Meta Launches Subscription Service for Facebook and Instagram

Swami Sivasubramanian who is the AWS vice president of database, analytics, as well as machine learning, affirms Trainium could indeed assist devs to focus on saving money as AI consumes so much computing power, as well as AWS desires to make it easier for devs to embrace them.

“We want to make sure they have access to our silicon and networking innovations,” Sivasubramanian told Reuters.

Source: dcfx.com

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Amazon Honeycode launched by AWS is free up to 20 users

AWS announced the launch of Amazon Honeycode yesterday. This will allow the customers to build quick apps and customize them according to their convenience. Anyone can build an application using Amazon Honeycode without any prior coding knowledge. So, it is time to stop waiting for the developers to make you a customized application and do it on your own. The beta version of the service is available currently to the users.

Demand for Amazon Honeycode

For a long time now, the customers have demanded a viable solution for developing customized web and mobile applications. Because according to them the need for making the average number of such customized applications outruns the number of developers. So, it causes a big inconvenience for the users. But, now with the launch of Honeycode, they can build apps easily with no or minimal coding.

For applications of most common purposes such as surveying, customer tracking, schedule, creating a to-do list, customer relationship management, etc, Amazon Honeycode is providing templates. Using the tools and templates of Honeycode, customers can build simple tracking applications to complex applications using a deep complex network. But, whatever might be the degree of complexity it is claimed to be better than using spreadsheets.

Honeycode
Image Souce: techcrunch.com

Amazon Honeycode over spreadsheets

The company also mentioned that it is better to build applications on your own than using spreadsheets and emailing them back and forth. It is because emailing documents or spreadsheets consumes a lot of extra time and accumulation of inefficiency takes place. Moreover, it also gives rise to data syncing and other forms of error slowing down the entire workflow.

This is the main reason customers would want service so that they can create applications on their own. They just need to get used to the user interface and don’t need to worry much about the AWS database or the infrastructural backbone. This way they can also stop hiring expensive developers to build the applications.

How Amazon Honeycode works?

Every user who wants to develop their applications is used to the way how spreadsheets work. This is the most important reason why Amazon Honeycode is also using spreadsheets as a part of its data interface. They can use the spreadsheet-style formulas to build the application and at the same time not worry about the AWS backend database.

The main reason AWS launched Amazon Honeycode service to keep things easier and simpler for the users or the “builders”. And, to maintain the smooth working of the service AWS is not allowing users to add any external data sources as it can complicate matters. But, the company’s plan for Honeycode is still uncertain. So, maybe if everything goes well, it might change the decision and allow outside data sources afterward.

Currently, Amazon Honeycode is only available in the US West region in Oregon. But eventually, AWS will expand its Honeycode services to other regions as well. You can create your application and it is free for twenty users, and then you have to pay for users as the application becomes larger.

The motivation behind building Amazon Honeycode

In an interview, Larry Augustin, AWS VP, and Meera Vaidyanathan, General Manager at AWS elaborately discussed the reason behind building Amazon Honeycode. They said that the services and products of AWS mainly concerned the developers around the world. But, this time they are shifting the audience base and focusing on non-coders. AWS is expanding its services and extending its helping hand to solve the shortcoming of non-coders as well. They said that they often received feedback from customers that they want the IT teams to better solve a problem by creating applications. But they lacked the number of developers needed to reach every customer and solve their problem. Hence, AWS came up with Amazon Honeycode to help build applications easily that concerns the basic line of business.

The no-code strategy of Amazon Honeycode will attract a lot of new users around the world. AWS is mainly targeting audiences like project managers, data analysts, etc who can easily create an application on their own and solve some of their problems. On top of that, the spreadsheet-like interface is the most common one so the users won’t face problems getting used to it.

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Amazon Bids Adieu to Oracle; Completes its Consumer Business Data Migration to AWS

Amazon has got its hands in almost everything. From grocery to space, it wants to take over every field. But it has also been using the services from other companies as a consumer. For the past few years, the company has been keeping its data in the Oracle database. But as it has already developed its cloud web services, AWS, the company had started to migrate its database from Oracle to AWS. Today the company announced that it has migrated the last set of data from the Oracle database to AWS, finally terminating Oracle’s services.

The company shared the news through a blog post. Jeff Barr from AWS wrote on the behalf of Amazon, “I am happy to report that this database migration effort is now complete. Amazon’s Consumer business just turned off its final Oracle database (some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated).”

He further wrote, “Over the years we realized that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases. Instead of focusing on high-value differentiated work, our database administrators (DBAs) spent a lot of time simply keeping the lights on while transaction rates climbed and the overall amount of stored data mounted.”

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Image Source: techcrunch.com

According to the blog post, the last set of data involved 75 petabytes of data that was stored in 7500 Oracle databases. Since Amazon is a huge company, it took years for it to transfer the enormous data from different databases to its home-grown database. The company had constituted around 100 teams to carry out the task.

As the migration has come to an end, over 100 consumer businesses, including Amazon Prime, Alexa, and Kindle, have been moved to AWS. This has not made Amazon walk a step forward to become an independent company, but also it will now be saving up to 60% on its data maintenance. This will now also reduce the latency rate for consumer applications by 40%. This way, the company will be able to provide better services to its consumers such that the experts will not be spending too much time on maintaining the data.

Dell Wants to Bring Automated and Efficient Cloud Infrastructure

Hybrid-cloud
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Dell, one of the biggest computer maker company, which started its journey 35 years ago by selling PCs directly to the consumer is now planning to expand its cloud infrastructure to make it more intelligent, automated and efficient.

At the Dell Technologies World 2019 held in Las Vegas, Michael Dell the founder, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, revealed about the new Dell Technologies Cloud offering, that will be a combined project of Dell, Azure, Microsoft and VMWare. All those companies have partnered with each other to accelerate the digital transformation for their customers and bring a hybrid cloud solution to them. All the three will be combining their data centres, workplace solutions and cloud technologies to attain the very objective.

“Every business, every organisation, every government, and every healthcare organisation needs to re-imagine itself in this digital age. There are an explosion and tsunami of data that is sweeping us into the digital age. Data is our greatest asset and most important resource. Turning that data into action and progress and outcomes and success is the heart of digital transformation,” said Dell.

According to the company, other companies own their separate clouds, and it becomes tough for them to set up a multi-cloud strategy. So to simplify such complex tasks Dell is planning to bring a hybrid cloud solution, that will also render easy to handle interface. Dell’s cloud approach revolves around VMWare and targets to connect with public cloud service providers like AWS.

“For many organisations, the increasingly diverse cloud landscape is resulting in an enormous amount of IT complexity, and no one is more qualified or capable to help customers solve this challenge than Dell Technologies,” said Jeff Clarke, the vice chairman of products and operations at Dell.

Amazon Opens its Blockchain Standard as a Service

aws blockchain
Image Source: cryptoglobe.com

Amazon, through its cloud computing arm, AWS, had launched two new Blockchain products last November, and now, it has launched its Managed Blockchain Service for general availability. The new Blockchain Service will allow the users to create and manage blockchain networks, without the need for a centralized authority.

Noticeably, the company had launched the service in November, which was available only in ‘preview’, for which the users needed to sign up to get the approval to use the service. But now, it is open for general use. With the help of Managed Blockchain Service, the users will be able to set up their blockchain networks within their organisations, easily, quickly and economically.

The Managed Blockchain Service is a fully-managed service and will let the users ditch the arduous task of software installation, creating and managing the certificates for access control, and configure network settings, which they had to do in order to set up a separate blockchain network.

“Amazon Managed Blockchain takes care of provisioning nodes, setting up the network, managing certificates and security, and scaling the network. Customers can now get a functioning blockchain network set up quickly and easily, so they can focus on application development instead of keeping a blockchain network up and running,” said Rahul Pathak, General Manager, Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS.

The company made the service first open to using in northern Virginia and is slowly expanding its availability to other locations. The companies like AT&T Business, Nestlé and the Singaporean investment market, the Singapore Exchange, are already up to use the company’s latest services.

For now, the service will make use of Hyperledger Fabric, whereas the company is working on the Ethereum network, which will be available as general by the end of this year.