Three Key AWS Developments to Know This Week
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made several noteworthy developments this week, extending its capabilities and furthering its lead in the cloud market once again.
AWS announced Amazon Redshift Spectrum, a new feature that allows Amazon Redshift customers to run SQL queries against data within their Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). What this means is that AWS users will be able to extend their analytics capabilities (provided via Amazon Redshift) beyond data stored on local disks in their data warehouse and query exabytes of unstructured data potentially - without having to load or transform any of it themselves.
But that's just the beginning.
Amazon also announced that Amazon Lex, an artificial intelligence (AI) service for building applications that can have conversations using voice and text, is now available to all of its customers.
Very few developers have been able to build, deploy and broadly scale apps with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities because doing so required training sophisticated deep-learning algorithms on massive amounts of data and infrastructure, but Amazon Lex should eliminate a lot of this complexity. With consumer interest in offerings like Amazon Alexa rising, now may be a perfect time to explore the development of apps that enable users to participate in conversations using voice or text.
Finally, AWS also released Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), a fully managed in-memory cache that can be used to further reduce Amazon DynamoDB response times.
