I’m at the AWS Summit in New York this week, along with over 10,000 other AWS customers and partners, learning about all the new services and features AWS has built for us. The new additions to the AWS lineup, as expected, are timely and exciting. Amazon’s continued focus on artificial intelligence, deep learning, compute and performance is a bellwether of cloud computing.

I’m looking forward to experimenting and learning more about each offering and sharing my thoughts and experiences with you. I’ve included a list of today’s announcements at the end of this article.

All of these announcements made me pause though. As a (well) seasoned AWS customer and partner, I know which new services are important to me and which new features I should spend time on. But what if you’re new to AWS? Where should you start?

When I first started working at Amazon (I work at Lucid now), AWS was still in its infancy, sporting only a handful of services. Architects and builders had to make due with “just” core services like EC2, S3, SQS and RDS, and a few supporting players. I counted: There were 11 services total then, and that was it.

Fast forward just eight years and the story and landscape have changed significantly. AWS has evolved to continue meeting its customers’ needs and, in doing so, greatly expanded both breadth and depth of their service offerings. Core, intrinsic resources like compute, storage, and networking have been joined by many others, including entire families of services focused on serverless, containers, security, and AI/ML.

Today there are over 125 AWS services!

Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all services. Need a database? What kind? Relational, graph, NoSQL? Take your pick. Deciding between serverless and containers? You choose. Purpose-built is the new norm. You determine how and what you’re going to build, AWS builds the right tools to do the right job.

This means that as builders and innovators, keeping up with the pace of innovation set by AWS is never-ending. Our requirements are ever-changing, AWS is ever-innovating. Deciding where to start can be a significant hurdle to overcome.

My advice to both veterans and rookies alike is this: Be like Amazon, start with your customers. Let your customers decide what you spend your time on. Determine what’s important to your customers and focus on the AWS services and features that help make them successful.

If you take this approach, you won’t go wrong.

Here are the new services and features announced by AWS at the New York Summit this year:

 

2018
New services introduced	None. This means AWS re:Invent is going to be a real doozy!
New features announced	Amazon SageMaker: Streaming algorithms, batch transform Amazon Transcribe: Channel synthesis Amazon Translate: 12 new language pairs (and 12 more coming soon) Amazon Comprehend: Syntax identification Amazon EC2: New instance types: SB1 (run on Snowball Edge), R5, Z1d Amazon S3: Request performance increase Amazon VPC: Bring your own IP

Enjoy, and keep on innovating!