Cloud experts share predictions for AWS re:Invent 2024
It's that time of year again: AWS re:Invent! Read on to learn what our cloud experts predict will be announced at this year's conference.
AWS is gearing up to host its re:Invent 2024 conference to share advancing technologies, products and services. Now in its 13th year, the event will be held from Dec. 2 to Dec. 6 in Las Vegas. It will include over 2,000 learning sessions, including keynotes, interactive sessions and networking opportunities with AWS partners.
Emerging trends, such as generative AI (GenAI) and enhanced security tools, will likely take center stage. Last year, AWS announced various AI enhancements, such as Amazon Bedrock and the release of Amazon Q. This year will be no different; our contributors, a set of expert cloud analysts, expect AI to be another focus area this year.
Read on to see what else they expect from AWS re:Invent 2024.
Editor's note: The following predictions have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Ernesto Marquez, IT architect
It's been five years since Savings Plans were announced back in 2019. At the time, these plans covered EC2 instances, Lambda functions, Fargate containers and SageMaker. I've been expecting an expansion of Savings Plans to other services, such as Relational Database Service or ElastiCache, which would be very useful.
Ernesto Marquez
I expect announcements in SageMaker and Amazon Q as well. These could be the addition of new compute instances for SageMaker or availability of existing ones in a wider range of component types. For Amazon Q, there could be an expansion of supported regions for existing features. I expect announcements related to new Amazon Q features to help optimize operational configurations and to troubleshoot application failures.
Aaron Tan
Aaron Tan, regional director of analyst services, TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group
This year, I expect AWS to make significant announcements related to agentic AI. Agentic AI is generating a lot of interest in the market as the next evolution of AI capabilities. These could be new features in Amazon Bedrock that simplify the development and deployment of agentic AI applications, potentially including prebuilt agents for common tasks. AWS might also announce tighter integration of agentic AI capabilities with services such as Lambda and EventBridge to support complex, event-driven workflows.
I also expect AWS to showcase agentic AI capabilities tailored for specific industries. These could be customer service, finance or even research industries. To address the risks and security concerns of AI agents, AWS could roll out tools that make it easier to understand the reasoning and actions of AI agents, along with new SDKs and APIs that make it easier for developers to build and integrate AI agents into their applications.
Chris Tozzi
Chris Tozzi, analyst
First, I suspect we'll hear a lot about GenAI once again this year. In the past, much of the focus from cloud providers in the GenAI space centered on tools and services to help businesses train or deploy AI. I think that this year we'll see AWS unveil more turnkey GenAI solutions. These could be ready-made AI services that businesses can deploy with minimal effort. This reflects what I see as a growing realization among technology providers: Most businesses don't want to build complex AI solutions themselves; they want off-the-shelf solutions that they can deploy immediately. AWS already has some offerings in this vein, and I suspect we'll see it announce more.
Compliance might be another area of focus. The compliance landscape is changing rapidly. In addition to various proposed AI regulations, some new compliance frameworks, like Network and Information Security 2 Directive and Digital Operational Resilience Act, have recently come online. Businesses will be looking for help in meeting any new rules. While cloud services can only provide part of the solution, I think we'll see AWS working harder to ensure that customers can use its various products, while remaining compliant with newer, more complex mandates.
Everett Bishop is assistant site editor for Cloud Computing at TechTarget. He graduated from the University of New Haven in 2019.
