The Scale Factory

AWS Summit After Party - Register your place Sign up and join us for an evening filled with free-flowing drinks, snacks, games and an opportunity to network with 200 peers from across the UK Cloud Leaders ecosystem; it's set to be the ideal post...

And we're done - Dave wraps up by wishing everyone a great Summit, as do I!

If you want to find me, I'll be in the Community Lounge on the User Group booth from 3 until 5 today.

After that, I'll be over at the Fremantle hosting our afterparty. Join us! info.scalefactory.com/aws-afterpar...

Whilst this conversation goes on, there's an exodus from the audience, because it's now 11am, which means the keynote is running over, and they're keen to get to their next sessions.

Up now, another financial services customer: Daniel Maguire from LSEG, to talk positively about Outposts. In FX trading, speed and latency is important. Outposts lets them move AWS grade compute into their exchanges, closer to the data.

Dave's back now, to shill Amazon Q which is a product name AWS now use to talk about a bunch of things that used to not be called that. The main thing he's talking about today is Q's ability to help with migration work. I'll believe that when I see it.

Nat West have also implemented Amazon Connect, migrating 9,000 call centre agents who support 19 million customers - which makes 19,009,000 people who aren't looking forward to the day they decide to replace most of that with AI agents.

95% of Nat West customers bank online, with 10M+ customers using their mobile app, backed by a cloud native, microservices based solution across AWS multiple regions.

As predicted, a customer from the finance sector takes the stage. Scott Marcar from Nat West takes to the stage.

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? A humorous exploration of the uncanny resemblance between AI company logos and human anatomy. Discover why circular, gradient-based designs dominate the AI industry, and what this design convergence t...

Also, crucially, Bedrock doesn't have an... anatomical logo. velvetshark.com/ai-company-l...

As well as model choice and trust/safety guardrails, Bedrock offers a fully managed RAG service, and a number of features for prompt optimisation, prompt caching, and cost optimisation. If you're building on AWS, and you're working on AI features, you should be trying those out with Bedrock.

I presented at a conf in March, and covered Bedrock. Some (AWS-using) CTOs afterwards told me that they didn't know about most of its features. I think the market just tuned out AWS' breathless banging on about GenAI in the days when they didn't have anything of note to offer in that space.

Anyway, time for another Bedrock sales pitch. Honestly, I've given AWS a lot of shit about their GenAI marketing, but Bedrock is shaping up to be a pretty capable service, with a large choice of models (including Amazon's own, inexpensive, Nova models), and smart security features.

Bold to bring someone from the creative industry out to advocate for GenAI, because most of the creatives in my Bluesky feed are pretty cross about most of it.

Untold Studios, I should say. They run 1,475 render nodes, and 244 workstations on EC2, cool. "I'd like to conclude by talking about GenAI", Palmer says, deeply aware of the exploding collar that AWS Marketing will push the button on if she doesn't.

Invited to the stage now, AWS customer Rochelle Palmer from the world's first cloud based studio, Untold Stories, who look to have been responsible for that horrifying Mountain Dew ad in which singer Seal has his face digitally grafted onto an actual seal. Thanks AWS, I guess.

Today, Amazon S3 contains 400,000,000,000,000+ objects. But only because you lot never clean up after yourselves.

Over the last two years, over 50% of new CPUs provisoined in AWS data centres are Graviton, their custom CPU, giving price/performance benefits over other processors (the manufacturers of which are sponsoring the event today in spite of this fact).

Brown reminds us of the existance of Amazon EC2 Capacity Blocks, which allow you to reserve GPU accelerated instances to run your machine learning workloads.

He announces that yesterday, AWS launched the second generation of AWS Outposts racks. These new racks have enhanced networking capability for low latency and high throughput, and soon will support GPU instances. aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/an...

Dave's giving an overview of the AWS technology stack. Apparently AWS increased the capacity of their (already capacious) backbone network by 80% last year. That's a whole lot of fibre. (Though they probably spell that incorrectly).

After thanking the myriad event sponsors, Kay invites Dave Brown, VP of Compute Services to the stage. Dave is also not dressed for a boxing match, or a dance show, so I think my hopes will be dashed today.

Kay announces today the, typically clumisly named "Global Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance", promising to give 100,000 UK students the skills they need to *checks notes* get a job at Accenture?

We're already onto the AI nonsense. "A new customer adopted AI every singe minute". Sure, Jan.

Alison is from London, where she claims Babbage, Lovelace, and Turing started their work. In the latter case, Manchester would like a word.

The first fighter takes to the right: Alison Kay, VP UK&I Apparently 20,000 attendees at the event today, way more than my earlier estimate.

What if, tho -- and hear me out -- the keynote is now nothing but a dance show? That would be bold.

Ok, it's almost 10am, so we're kicking off. Mellow EDM plays, and the huge video screens on the stage rise to reveal... more video screens. And... dancers with AWS backpacks? This is novel.

AWS Summit After Party - Register your place Sign up and join us for an evening filled with free-flowing drinks, snacks, games and an opportunity to network with 200 peers from across the UK Cloud Leaders ecosystem; it's set to be the ideal post...

While you're waiting for the keynote to kick off, why not sign up to our afterparty here? I can guarantee you'll enjoy it more than a warm conference bottle of lager. info.scalefactory.com/aws-afterpar...

Quick fit check: I’m wearing the latest in Scale Factory/Ten10 couture, with headgear and hydration from the AWS Ambassador community. My bag is vintage Puppet, from their limited 2015 speakers edition.

This food truck I spotted earlier sets some expectations.