Tag: AWS Reinvent 2023

Here’s everything Amazon Web Services has announced at AWS re:Invent so far | TechCrunch

Amazon Web Services kicks off its AWS re:Invent event today from Las Vegas with a rapid-fire stream of announcements, including many unveilings of recent things it’s been working on.

We know you don’t always have time to watch the whole keynote today, so we’re taking that on and will deliver quick hits of the biggest news as they are announced, all in an easy-to-digest, easy-to-skim list. Here we go!

Stay tuned for more developments throughout the day.

Amazon Q

Amazon Q is Amazon’s new AI-powered chatbot. (Image credit: Amazon)

The big announcement for the day was Amazon Q, an AI-powered chatbot for AWS customers. During his keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky described it as being able to “easily chat, generate content and take actions. It’s all informed by an understanding of your systems, your data repositories and your operations.” Kyle reports that Q is trained on 17 years’ worth of AWS knowledge and will go beyond just answering questions, but will also do things like understand the nuances of app workloads and suggest AWS solutions and products for apps that only run for a few seconds. Read more.

Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock

AWS Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock

The new Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock tool lets companies define and limit the kinds of language a model can use. For example, define topics that are out of bounds for the model, so it simply doesn’t answer irrelevant questions, Ron writes. Read more.

New chips

AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium (prototype) (Image credit: Business Wire)

Amazon unveiled the latest generation of its chips for model training and inferencing (i.e. running trained models). Kyle writes that Amazon already discussed AWS Trainium2, designed to deliver up to 4x better performance and 2x better energy efficiency than the first-generation Trainium. The second chip was announced this morning, called the Graviton4, is intended for inferencing. The fourth generation in Amazon’s Graviton chip family (as implied by the “4” appended to “Graviton”), it’s distinct from Amazon’s other inferencing chip, Inferentia. Read more.

AWS S3 Express One Zone

Amazon AWS has a major update to its S3 object storage service called AWS S3 Express One Zone, a new high-performance and low latency tier for S3. Frederic reports that One Zone will offer a major performance improvement for data-intensive applications, including AI/ML training, financial modeling and high-performance computing. Read more.

Going serverless

Amazon announces three new serverless offerings to make it easier to manage Aurora, Elastic Cache and Redshift serverless services. Ron writes that “Because each of these options is severless, it means that Amazon manages all of the hardware in the background, and delivers just the right amount of resources you need, scaling up when needed without IT having to deal with all of the back-end management work.” Read more.

Now that’s using your palm

Amazon One Enterprise

AWS lifted the lid on a new palm-scanning identity service that allows companies to authenticate people when entering physical premises. Paul reports that Amazon One Enterprise builds on the company’s existing Amazon One offering which it debuted back in 2020 to enable biometric payments in Amazon’s own surveillance-powered cashierless stores. Visitors to Amazon Go stores can associate their payment card with their palm-print, allowing them to enter the store and complete their transaction by hovering their hand over a scanner. Read more.

Virtual desktop environment

Image Credits: Amazon

Amazon launched new $195 devices that allow enterprise users to access virtual desktop environments, like Amazon WorkSpaces, over the internet. Sarah writes that the devices are housed in Fire TV Cube hardware — a decision Amazon made to leverage existing expertise from the arm of the retail giant that makes streaming media players. The company explained its decision to build new hardware came from customer feedback about wanting to lower IT spending by replacing desktops and laptops with less expensive hardware. Read more.

Christine Hall

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November 28, 2023
AWS brings Amazon One palm-scanning authentication to the enterprise | TechCrunch

Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary AWS (Amazon Web Services) has lifted the lid on a new palm-scanning identity service that allows companies to authenticate people when entering physical premises.

The announcement comes as part of AWS’s annual Re:Invent conference, which is running in Las Vegas for the duration of this week.

Amazon One Enterprise, as the new service is called, builds on the company’s existing Amazon One offering which it debuted back in 2020 to enable biometric payments in Amazon’s own surveillance-powered cashierless stores. Visitors to Amazon Go stores can associate their payment card with their palm-print, allowing them to enter the store and complete their transaction by hovering their hand over a scanner.

While the technology has raised concerns over how Amazon manages and processes biometric data, in the intervening years the company has doubled down on the technology, offering cash incentives to entice customers to enrol their palm-prints, expanding the service to all of its Whole Foods stores in the U.S, and forging partnerships with third-party retailers.

Amazon One Enterprise seems a natural extension for this technology, given Amazon’s role in the enterprise software stack and dominance in the cloud infrastructure market. Despite the remote work revolution, companies still want their workers in the office, at least some of the time. And with Amazon One Enterprise, they can deploy contactless authentication devices wherever people flow, be that office foyers, universities, airports, and everywhere in between.

Moreover, Amazon says the technology can also be used to control access to certain restricted software, perhaps where financial or HR data resides. This effectively positions Amazon One Enterprise as a potential replacement for multiple forms of identification, such as badges and fobs that are typically used to access buildings, and passwords and PINs used to access software.

Companies wanting to install Amazon One Enterprise have the choice of two scanning devices — a standalone contraption that they can embed wherever they need it such as a doorway or barrier, and one that comes mounted on a pedestal that can be placed anywhere. From there, workers will have to enrol in Amazon One Enterprise using their physical badge before associating their palm-print with their profile. Or, if the normal authentication method is a password or PIN as is more likely to be the case with software, they can also associate their palm-print with such credentials during the enrolment phase.

Amazon One Enterprise Image Credits: Amazon

Distinct

While Amazon’s new enterprise palm-scanning service is clearly based on the same technology and infrastructure as its consumer offering, the company is keen to stress that it’s distinct from the system that people use to authenticate themselves at retail stores. Enterprise-grade data privacy, and all that.

“You will not be able to use your palm to pay at a Whole Foods Market or other Amazon One-enabled locations even if you enroll at an enterprise,” the company notes in a FAQ. “This is because, with Amazon One Enterprise, we offer a private collection of palm signatures for each enterprise resulting in strong data isolation and security.”

The company says that it stores users’ palm-print and badge ID on AWS Cloud, though they can delete their biometric data through an Amazon One enrollment device similar to the one they originally used to sign up. Amazon also says that it will automatically delete users’ data if they don’t interact with an Amazon One Enterprise device for two years.

Amazon One Enterprise is available in preview for U.S. customers now.

Paul Sawers

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November 28, 2023