re:Invent 2024 Day 2 - Matt Garman’s Keynote, Andy Jassy’s Return to The Stage, and Unveiling Amazon Nova

Day 2 of AWS re:Invent 2024 featured Matt Garman’s keynote, Andy Jassy’s return after three years, a deep dive into generative AI with Amazon Nova, and a day filled with innovation, customer stories, and personal highlights.

Alan Blockley
General, AWS
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Day 2 of AWS re:Invent 2024 turned out to be a rollercoaster of announcements, personal moments, and an undeniable energy that reverberated through the Venetian and beyond. Between keynote reveals, customer stories, and spontaneous connections, it’s a reminder of why re:Invent remains the ultimate learning conference.

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Personal Highlights

I started the day at 6am, looking out at the Sphere through my hotel window. It looked like it needed a coffee as much as I did—I know the feeling, buddy. My morning was filled with final touches on my talk for tomorrow (DEV-324), riding the mix of excitement and nerves that comes with presenting at an event of this scale.

Some highlights from the day:

  • Bumped into Corey Quinn: While waiting for breakfast, I had the chance to chat with Corey. Always a pleasure to meet one of the sharpest minds (and wittiest voices) in the AWS space.
  • Keynote and coffee: There’s something about starting the day with coffee, a pastry, and a keynote packed with announcements.
  • Expo Hall buzz: At 10am, the Expo Hall doors opened, and the crowd surged in. Vendors were in full swing, and swag was flying out the door, Lego prize draws seems to be as popular as ever this year.
  • Community conversations: I met so many new faces eager to join the AWS community, as well as customers eager to dissect the morning’s keynote announcements.
  • Thoughtworks booth visits: I made a couple of trips to the Thoughtworks booth to reconnect with long-distance colleagues and friends—it’s always a highlight to see familiar faces.

Matt Garman’s Keynote: Innovation at the Core

Matt Garman’s keynote was a masterclass in showcasing AWS’s commitment to innovation. He kicked off by emphasizing re:Invent’s role as a learning conference and celebrating the vibrant AWS community, from Heroes and user groups to the developers and startups pushing boundaries every day.

Compute: Expanding the Possibilities

Matt highlighted AWS’s relentless pace of innovation in compute, underpinned by the AWS Nitro System. With 850 EC2 instance types across 126 families, customers can find the right combination of performance, storage, and memory for any workload.

The spotlight was on the Graviton series:

  • Graviton4: The latest in ARM innovation, delivering 30% better performance than Graviton3, with a focus on sustainability. Pinterest shared their story of saving 47% on costs and cutting carbon emissions by 62% using Graviton.
  • P6 Instances: Coming early next year, these NVIDIA Blackwell-powered instances are set to redefine AI training and inference capabilities.
  • ANNOUNCEMENT: EC2 Trn2 Instances: Now generally available, these instances deliver 30-40% better price performance, powered by AWS Trainium2 chips.

The Return of Andy Jassy: Announcing Amazon Nova

In a moment that had the room buzzing, Matt introduced Andy Jassy, Amazon’s President and CEO, back to the stage. Reflecting on his return to re:Invent after three years, Jassy brought his characteristic energy and passion.

Jassy’s segment focused on Amazon Nova, a groundbreaking new family of foundation models designed for high performance and cost-efficiency. Nova comes in four tiers tailored to diverse workloads:

  • Micro: Optimized for text-only use cases with unmatched speed and cost-efficiency.
  • Lite, Pro, and Premier: Multi-modal models capable of handling text, image, and video inputs and outputs.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Nova-Powered Services

  • Amazon Nova Canvas: A generative image tool using natural language prompts for creation and editing, complete with safe AI controls.
  • Amazon Nova Reel: A video generation tool offering high-quality video creation from text inputs.

Jassy emphasized the importance of choice in AI, enabling customers to select the right model for their needs while maintaining cost-efficiency and performance. He handed the stage back to Matt with his signature “Giddy up!”

Building Block: Storage

Matt shifted focus to AWS’s storage innovations, particularly around Amazon S3:

  • ANNOUNCEMENT: Amazon S3 Tables for Apache Iceberg: Offering 3x faster query performance and 10x higher transactions per second, S3 Tables simplify analytics workflows.
  • ANNOUNCEMENT: Amazon S3 Metadata: Near real-time updates make querying and organizing metadata faster and easier.

Customer stories, including Bret Taylor from Sierra, underscored S3’s transformative power and reliability.

Building Block: Databases

AWS continues to innovate in databases with two significant announcements:

  • ANNOUNCEMENT: Aurora DSQL: A fully managed, scalable relational database offering 4x faster performance than Google Spanner.
  • ANNOUNCEMENT: DynamoDB Global Tables with Multi-Region Strong Consistency: Expanding scalability and consistency for modern applications.

Building Block: Generative AI

AWS’s generative AI portfolio took center stage, with updates to Bedrock:

  • ANNOUNCEMENT: Bedrock Model Distillation: Models run 500x faster and 75% cheaper by distilling teacher models into task-specific student models.
  • ANNOUNCEMENT: Bedrock Multi-Agent Collaboration: Simplifies the orchestration of multi-agent workflows, reducing complexity for developers.

Day 2 Announcements

AWS revealed an incredible number of announcements during Matt Garman’s keynote and throughout the day. Here’s a list of all the key updates shared:

This is just a taste of the breadth of innovation AWS brought to the table today.

Final Thoughts

Day 2 of re:Invent 2024 was everything I love about this conference: a mix of big ideas, personal connections, and meaningful insights. Matt Garman’s keynote was packed with innovation, Andy Jassy’s return brought an energy that set the tone, and the announcements throughout the day reminded us why AWS continues to lead the way.

Coming up for the rest of the week, we still have Swarmi and Werner to deliver some amazing Data and AI announcements. You can’t miss it!

Tomorrow, I’ll step on stage for my own session over at the Wynn hotel, DEV-324 - “Beyond Chatbots”, and I’m already looking forward to more learning, more connections, and, of course, more surprises as re:Invent 2024 continues.

Stay tuned!