Now that the dust has settled, the team has had the chance to Re:flect on the events and announcements of AWS re:Invent 2023. Dominating the conversation was the advancement and capabilities of Generative AI across several AWS Services, while not losing sight on the importance of application modernization and cloud migration. Perficient walked away with 3 key takeaways: 1) Amazon Q 2) Serverless Innovation 3) The Zero ETL Future

Amazon Q

Generative AI was the talk of the conference, and no topic was discussed more than Amazon Q. The powerful, new generative AI assistant can be tailored to your business and can be used to generate content and solve problems, or if leveraged with Amazon Connect, now with generative AI capabilities that are powered through Amazon Bedrock, it can allow your agents to respond faster by assisting with suggesting actions or links to relevant articles. AI is here and it isn’t going anywhere, but what might be most important is to ensure it is being used responsibly. “What’s exciting here is that the path to responsibly enabling AI for enterprise is starting to light up…” Steve Holstad, Principal of Cloud said, “We know it’s going to be an ongoing journey for years to come, but the time for a private pilot leveraging your data, based on your unique use cases, is here.” At Perficient, we are at the forefront of the next generation of AI and ML. We’re excited about the progress we’ve made and are looking forward to creating innovative solutions with AWS Q.

Read Zachary Fischer’s, Senior Solutions Architect, blog about exploring the potential of Amazon Q and Perficient Handshake.

Serverless Innovation

Serverless computing isn’t new to AWS, as their wide variety of serverless data offerings have been helping customers take advantage of automated methods of setting up infrastructure, real time scaling, and dynamic pricing. Three new AWS serverless innovations for Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon ElastiCache build on the work AWS has already been doing for some time.

Amazon Aurora Limitless Database: A new feature supporting automated horizontal scaling to process millions of transactions at a speed unlike any before and manage an excessive amount of data in a single Aurora database.
Amazon Redshift Serverless: Gather insights in seconds without having to manage data warehouse infrastructure. Leverage its self-service analytics and autoscaling capabilities to better make sense of your data.
Amazon ElastiCache Serverless: An innovative serverless solution enabling users to create a cache within a minute and dynamically adjust capacity in real-time according to application traffic trends.

Learn more by reading Shishir Meshram’s, Senior Technical Consultant, blog about Perficient’s ability to help achieve a serverless infrastructure.

The Zero ETL Future

Historically, to connect all your data sources to find new insights, you’d need to “extract, transform, and load” (ETL) information in a tedious manual effort. AWS announced several new integrations as part of their continued commitment to a, “zero ETL future,” so users can access data when and where they need it. In his keynote presentation, Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and AI at AWS, said, ““In addition to having the right tool for the job, customers need to be able to integrate the data that is spread across their organizations to unlock more value for their business and innovate faster. That is why we are investing in a zero-ETL future, where data integration is no longer a tedious, manual effort, and customers can easily get their data where they need it.”

Learn more about these integrations, and find out how like AWS, you can work your way toward a “zero ETL future.”

This was just the tip of the iceberg of what was discussed at AWS re:Invent and Perficient is excited to be in the thick of it! Join us on this journey of discovery. Let’s see what we can build together.