AWS re:Invent 2023 – AWS Services Fueling Customer Success

AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, USA is ongoing from November 27th through to December 1st, 2023. The conference interview opportunities are too many to count around customers using AWS managed services. I narrowed a long and prestigious list down to 2 interesting success stories from Formula 1 and Twilio, which caught my eye.

A review of AWS re:Invent 2023

My first interview was with Rob Smedley, F1 Engineer. We talked about the internal digital revolution that occurred when Liberty Media acquired Formula 1. They recognised that the substantial accumulation of existing data had huge potential. This led to F1 transforming the multi-sourced, multi-schema data repository into a real time race analysis engine for its racing-fans.

Fan engagement fueled the team’s requirements that focused on low latency arising from their project objectives. Scaling from a very low baseline of data feeds to enormous bursts of data per second throughout on race-day was an enormous challenge to overcome.

Multiple data feeds from the cars, tyres, track timings, and weather feed into an ingestion engine that would parse and normalise the data. This is where AWS enters the latest success story at F1. AWS Cloud Solution Architects quickly embedded themselves with the team and took the time to fully understand their requirements.

The resulting architecture was all about spinning up on race day. A mix of AWS managed services using temporary components was required to process and produce the desired data sets. They deployed the AWS HPC service, ingesting data feeds on top of EC2 spot instances. This layer then hands off to AWS Sagemaker for ML functionality.

The processing sequence would see the normalization of this data for analysis and aggregation. They achieved data persistence and storage at the end of the pipeline via AWS managed services like DynamoDB (NoSQL), and S3 (documents and images). The pipeline’s output distributes visualisations for display to race-fans during the race, who delight in these easily digested race statistics.

Onto Twilio, who teamed up with AWS as a key partner for their API-based digital product range in 2018. Twilio’s own growth trajectory has M&A in its background. Their acquisition of Segment brought key API technologies into the Twilio portfolio, along with key personnel like Alex Millet, Twilio’s Senior Director of Product. I chatted with Alex about this relationship, which started primarily on use cases involving Amazon Redshift. The Twilio-AWS relationship started with over 2,500 shared customers, along with an amazing opportunity.

Alex explained that Twilio product workflows run on API based communications, where machines keep each other informed of a customer’s interaction with their business. An end user of Twilio’s customer can, for example, lodge a complaint with their customer’s digital support feature. Twilio’s current product will receive this data call via API and process it for distribution to the configured endpoints. This could be the Marketing department, Customer Support department, and maybe the Logistics department keeping everybody informed of the new digital submission.

We went onto talk about Twilio’s new products embracing AI on AWS as their core platform. Alex tells me that their new product in general-release is around predictive analytics using Amazon SageMaker. Its goal is to harness company specific machine learning routines to generate predictive insights tailored to individual company needs.

For example, a Twilio customer, Box Software uses this predictive product to model who is likely to attend every conference they are going to distribute sales information about. This reduces undesirable marketing communications, which, over time, can cause brand damage.

Twilio is also developing generative AI routines using AWS Bedrock to translate natural language queries into structured storage queries. AWS services like Amazon Redshift, or any of the AWS storage services that Twilio is supporting, receive these queries for processing action.

Alex finished up by noting the overlapping customer range with AWS started this partnership, and has proven to reduce their time to market for new products. He thinks that the roadmap to continuous success for his company will have AWS as a travelling companion for many years to come.

Stay tuned for the next theme article on Security from AWS re:Invent, and an event report at Irish Tech News from me over the next 10 days.

By John Mulhall @johnmlhll | john@maolte.ie is a writer with Irish Tech News for over 7 years and also a Founder, Writer, and Engineer with Maolte Technical Solutions Limited. You can learn more about John and his IT services company at https://maolte.ie.

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