Amazon CTO: AWS Will Erase the Line Between Physical and Digital

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, shared his predictions about the future of cloud services. According to him, the distinction between physical and digital will disappear and AWS will continue to bring new intelligent capabilities to physical devices like Amazon’s Echo — a smart device connected to AWS to gain access to the Alexa intelligent assistant and control smart home devices, capabilities that, without the cloud, would have required far more computing power.

5G cellular connectivity will go hand-in-hand with that kind of change, Vogels said. As 5G continues to proliferate, more devices and services will take advantage of it and, as a result, be able to connect to AWS, including everything from cars to factory lines.

The Amazon cloud platform is extending its reach into space by launching at least 10,000, more satellites in the coming five years. Some of those are microsatellites. Vogels said that “there’s a lot of young businesses going around, building these microsatellites, that have one or two very specific functions, and do low orbiting.”. Rather than those young companies having to build out their own antenna stations to communicate with their microsatellites, Vogels says that Amazon Base Station steps in to give small companies the ability to process satellite data and scale satellite operations via AWS.

Klemens Arro, head of ADM Cloudtech, the first Amazon Consulting Partner in Estonia, points out that most of the future technologies at an early stage might seem like something of science fiction, but in reality, technology develops very fast and those who prepare in time, usually benefit the most.

“Today, it may seem that 5G, satellites, quantum computing, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence that emulates almost a human level, etc., are all the domain of science fiction, and they do not find the real-life application — at least not during this lifetime — but looking back reveals that even the first smartphones were considered as something unrealistic that only a few business people would use. Actually, it was very similar to cloud services, when they first hit the market. They were considered by the top experts in the field as a failed technology. But in all these cases, actually, the opposite has happened — smartphones are an integral part of everyday life for almost all of us, and cloud services are used by almost every individual and company who uses the Internet. And talking about AI — people interact with artificial intelligence without their knowledge on a daily basis,” Klemens Arro explained.

He adds that thanks to cloud services, most of these “future technologies” are available to everyone already today. “On the one hand, this accelerates their development and adoption even more. And on the other hand, they are lowering prices and bringing these services to businesses today.”

When talking about the future, Vogels said that Amazon is banking on using its growing quantum computing capabilities via its Braket service: “Quantum computing has come to a point where it is becoming practical. And what we see with our new service Bracket is that larger enterprises, especially in the financial services space, and in the life sciences space, are starting to experiment, and try to figure out what quantum could mean for them.”

According to Vogels, in the next 2–3 years companies will begin to make major changes and advances in software and software development to exploit quantum computing and speed up their workflows.

Amazon Web Services is the most popular cloud platform in the world, accounting for 31% of the global market. ADM Cloudtech is Amazon Consulting Partner since 2017.

Originally published at https://www.admcloudtech.com on April 6, 2021.