Think in Context: AWS re:Invent 2022 Werner Vogels Keynote

Published: 2022-12-05

Lastmod: 2024-06-09

Initing

Since I was selected as AWS Community Hero in early 2020, I have encountered the epidemic and have not flown for three years. It is a great honor to be invited to physically log in to the AWS annual developer conference re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas this year. I am very happy to be able to experience all kinds of live events again.

For three consecutive years, I have decomposed the CEO Keynote, which attracts the most attention among the four keynotes held at AWS re:Invent each year. This year, I want to try to sort out the other keynotes. Maybe there will be different gains in the process of sorting out, and then I will share the results of these sorting by the way. Share it with everyone.

As in the past, at the beginning of the full text, I will first try to grasp the structure of the speech, then put some observations and inferences, and then put some running notes in each paragraph for future search and use. There are extended readings at the end of the article, which can enrich the background situation or information of the speech content. I also hope to have the opportunity to lead everyone to reason together why this product or function was launched at this time point, where the trends of various industries around the world are going. Read more, compare more, and refer more. Maybe we can avoid some minefields of misjudgment. In the case of limited resources, if we go in the wrong direction, the market may not give us a chance to cut it off and practice again. My reasoning is not necessarily correct, just as a kind of practice and sharing.

New services or new launches are marked with [NEW 🚀] in this article, so that you can press Command/Ctrl+F to search on the inner page.

This article deliberately removes most of the product links first, so that everyone can focus on reading (we are all less focused these days, aren’t we?). If you need a product link, you can refer to the AWS Product List that I organize regularly.

I also welcome everyone to give me some feedback or corrections (also come and see if there is a chance to include these materials in ChatGPT 2022). Then let’s get started!

tl;dr

I think these two hours are an interpretation and statement of Werner Vogels on the metaverse, returning to the essence, through observation, and through contact with our real world, to build infrastructure, tools, various systems, and then create a variety of complex systems, and then its simulation.

Echoing the other three keynotes:

Laying a good foundation and draw salary from the bottom
- 👉 Think in Context: AWS re:Invent 2022 Monday Night Live Keynote With Peter Desantis
Unpacking async made easy
- 👉 Think in Context: AWS re:Invent 2022 Werner Vogels Keynote
Connecting everything
- 👉 Think in Context: AWS re:Invent 2022 Swami Sivasubramanian Keynote
Implementation to solve problems
- 👉 Think in Context: AWS re:Invent 2022 Adam Selipsky Keynote

Structure

This year’s keynote speech by Werner Vogels, VP & CTO of Amazon.com has buried a lot of extended reading materials. I believe it will be a speech full of dry goods for engineers who like to track technology trends and like to expand their domain knowledge. But also because there are so many dry material explosions, and Werner likes seamless transitions and switching themes, it sounds like a smooth journey and a smooth tour of multiple knowledge areas, but it is difficult to catch the breakpoint. I listened to it myself in Las Vegas and then again on a business trip in San Jose after I left, so I could sort out a rough outline.

There are two main paragraphs in the whole speech: “Asynchrony” and “3D + Simulation”

Outline of my notes:

Opening
- Matrix-style movie XDD
- Dr. Werner Vogels is going on stage (very in his style XDD
Asynchrony!!
- Amazon S3 Design Principles —> Asynchrony
- Amazon S3 Design Principles —> Controlled concurrency + Controlled parallelism
- The world is Asynchronous
- Amazon S3 Design Principles —> Decompose into small well-understood building blocks
- “Amazon’s Distributed Computing Manifesto (1998)” published on his blog
- Workflows enable us to build applications from loosely coupled components.
- Listen, learn, improve
- The world is event-driven
- All complex systems that work, evolved from simpler systems that worked — GALL’S LAW
- Simplifying the complex
- The spider in the web —> From birds to spiders!
- Events are composable
- Guest: Angela Timofte, Director of Engineering, Trustpilot
- AWS Heroes
- Event-driven architectures enable global scale
- The world is built on patterns
- Event-driven architectures help development teams move faster
The world is multidimensional —> ready to speak about 3D, simulation
- Example: Alexa and Soul Machines
- Example: James Taylor & Son
- A 3D models is worth a thousand pictures. —> Photogrammetry
- 3D will soon be as pervasive as video —> Trend prediction!
- The fusion of models, sensors and data.
- Visualize everything
- Guest: Nathan Thomas, VP, Unreal Engine, Epic Games
- AWS Ambit Scenario Designer
- Experiment, measure, learn —> Simulation
- What about the future?
- Simulate everything
Closing

The following is for detailed reading:

Opening

Matrix-style movie XDD
- Werner: I often say the world is asynchronous
- Now imagine a world that is ordered synchronized one by one, would you like to see that world?
- Werner: (hesitate…) Nope!!
- If you take the blue pill our story ends here and this conversation never happened, if you take the red pill I’ll show you a more ordered world one that is synchronized
- Werner: What about the yellow one? —> Memo: And yellow Jelly beans ¹ banana!!! (laughing…
- Werner took the red one and entered the world of synchronized.
  - synchronized —> birds flying in teams
  - queue before entering the restaurant
  - Order after entering the restaurant
    - Werner: Burger and fries
    - restaurant service staff: One at a time, please, sir
    - Werner: Burger
    - restaurant service staff: Anything else?
    - Werner: Fries
    - restaurant service staff: Excellent
    - restaurant service staff: The service staff went into the kitchen to cook, and first assembled the burgers, meat, cheese, and tomato slices step by step, and then began to fry the French fries, one by one, and picked them up one by one (laughs XDD
    - Werner waited too long XDD
    - restaurant service staff: Falling or overturning while walking while serving food, the movement is suspended at this time
    - After Werner ate a french fries suspended in the air, the mysterious man reappeared and Werner asked him how did you get the strawberry milkshake to drink so quickly
    - the mysterious man: It’s not HOW but WHERE
    - answering the phone…
Dr. Werner Vogels is going on stage (very in his style XDD
- VP & CTO, Amazon.com
- He is wearing a trench coat! He must be sweating after a while XDD
- As soon as he came on stage, he said “I really should have taken the blue pill to be honest”
- There’s absolutely nothing that is synchronous in this world. And if these was, we really wouldn’t have like it.
- After he took off the trench coat, he wore a short-sleeved Lambda T-shirt —> There must be a lot of event-driven or async today
- What I’ve really learned is that if you even want to build good computer systems, you have to look at the real world. And what I’ve observed is that the real world is asynchronous, it’s not deterministic.
- There are tens of millions of events happening around us all the time
- And so when I think about asynchrony, what I think is that it’s similar to that the world always keeps turning. That just no matter what happens in the world, our planet keeps turning.
- And so if I think about asynchrony, it is that we should make progress in all circumstances. No matter what happens in our world. In our digital world, we should still be able to make progress in all circumstances.

Asynchrony!!

Amazon S3 Design Principles —> Asynchrony
- We want to make sure that the system would make progress in all circumstances. No matter what the load, no matter what is failing, no matter what new functionality we are introducing in the system, it should always make progress.
- Classic synchrony
  - we enjoy synchrony, because it seems so much easier.
  - now the thing we really care about are latency and throughput.
  - In classic synchrony, throughput = 1, latency will suffer.
- Parallel synchrony
  - You have multiple workers. But they still actually have to, they are probably blocked on the shared resource, which is the flyer.
  - Maybe it looks like throughput will improve, but latency will definitely suffer.
- Asynchrony
  - So getting close to the real world is asynchrony.
  - You have one or more servers, all they do is take orders, and then they write the order on the slip, and put in a rail where the chefs can pick up. You have multiple chefs, each of them are at the station. And so they all see the order coming by, and if they need to work on it, they pick it up. You can have these things happening in parallel, behind the scenes for you. It’s parallelism but without blocking on any of the shared resources.
- Asynchrony + Parallel
  - If you really want to improve latency and throughput, you can have some of these stations introducing actually additional workers. So there was actually a system in the ‘90s that Matt Welsh developed, which was called staged event-driven architectures, where basically you have all the benefits of an event-driven architecture, but you have controlled parallelism in each of those individual units to make sure that they’re not blocked on any resources.
Amazon S3 Design Principles —> Controlled concurrency + Controlled parallelism
- 拆解鳥類飛行 bird murmuration
  - It looks like there is a centralized controller that tells all these starlings where to go and what to do.
  - This is not a singular system, because it’s nature, and nature is asynchronous.
  - So all the actions that the birds take are based on local observations.
  - Now what it does, it has three or four objectives. One of them, it wants to stay close to its mate, but it doesn’t want to fly into them, and it would like to avoid predators. And so what you see there is that if the other birds get further away, you accelerate. If you get too close to the other birds, you switch direction. And if you are sort of in a nice spot, you make sure that your speed matches the speed of other birds around it. And this actual behavior of attraction and repulsion, looks like a spring.
  - System thinking ²
    - In ‘60s/’70s, fundamental thinking. Donella Meadows ³ is one of the most famous authors of these books about system thinking, and she already came up with the notion of positive and negative feedback loops. And what you see here with these birds are positive and negative feedback loops. They continuously move back and forth.
  - Actually, in my academic days, I built simulations to do this. You have X, Y, and Z axes and basically pitch, yaw and roll. So what you see here is that it’s purely driven by local decision making. The bird is completely autonomous, even though the overall system looks like it’s working in synchrony. But it’s not. It’s a pure asynchronous system.
The world is Asynchronous
- Synchronous is
  - a simplification
  - an abstraction
  - a convenience
  - an illusion
- Systems are asynchronous
- Operation System
  - Processes
    - Blocked
  - Kernel - Clock
    - Interrupt
  - Devices
    - Network
    - Graphics
    - Hard Drive
    - Sound
  - The operating system in the 1990s re-opened from the bottom and began to open these asynchrony to the world.
    - Windows NT was probably the first one that had asynchronous communication or interaction with devices as a first principle in the kernel.
    - Linux didn’t get any asynchronous though until the early 2000s.
      - And actually, the order AIO mechanism didn’t really work that well.
      - And it wasn’t until I think 2019 that we got io_uring in Linux to actually give us truly asynchronous interaction.
- —> Memo: Each service needs to be connected to each other due to business requirements, but you can choose “tightly” or “loosely”.（Further reading: Lao Tzu ⁴）
- Synchrony leads to tightly coupled systems.
  - You cannot make any changes to this environment that the shopping cart issue forthwith without actually changing the shopping cart itself. If anything fails, probably the overall system will fail.
- Asynchrony leads to loosely coupled systems.
  - Now, if you look at any asynchronous system that actually is driven by an event broker. You see that everything is decoupled.
  - There is no tight coupling between any of the components.
  - And so the shopping cart will post an event, the order system will pick it up, and in the payment system will actually pick up the work after that.
  - Now if you want to add something like a reporting or an invoice service, you can do that without changing the overall system.
- Why do we want these loosely coupled systems?
  - They are natural.
  - Advantages / Benefits of loosely coupled systems
    - Fewer dependencies
      - you can actually change the system, change the depending components without having to change the others.
    - Failure isolation
      - It’s a natural way of isolating failures. If any of these components fails, as we saw in the previous picture. Actually the whole system continues to work. And if the new version of, let’s say the reporting service comes back up , it just replaces the events that it has missed and executes.
    - Evolvable architecture
      - We build systems, but we don’t build the end system in one shot. You start off with a story of a smaller system that can do the work. And then evolve it into the eventual complex system that we had in mind.
      - Example: Amazon S3
        8 separate microservices —> in 2006, when launched
        235+ distributed microservices —> now, 2022.
        We could add to the system without taking the system down, without any impact on the other pieces.
      - So the evolvability is extremely important when you think about designing your systems.
Amazon S3 Design Principles —> Decompose into small well-understood building blocks
- Amazon Retail = Monolith —> Service-oriented—> Microservice —> Shared services (IaaS)
“Amazon’s Distributed Computing Manifesto (1998) ⁵” published on his blog
- It’s actually how our engineers were thinking at the end of the ‘90s about how to deal with the fact that they couldn’t evolve their architecture.
- And how we got moved over to a service-oriented architecture, this was way before anybody knew the service-oriented architecture was.
- It’s dated, I know. But for many of you, you’ll recognize things in that document because it’s reality for many of you still now that have to work in monoliths.
- And next to service-oriented, there’s a big chunk that says, and some of our work is workflow-oriented.
  - How do we build these workflows?
Workflows enable us to build applications from loosely coupled components.
- Workflow patterns - to be able to build workflows, you need these patterns
  - Sequence
  - Retry handling
  - Error handling
  - Parallel
  - (routing) based on data
  - Concurrent / iterative
- Two AWS services
  - AWS Step Functions
    - on one end that handles all the different types of execution
  - AWS EventBridge
    - being the event broker
Listen, learn, improve
- many customers want to do Map Reduce with their Step Functions.
- Customers want something simpler than Kafka, EMR —> I just want to write two Lambda functions, that’s it.
- Example: NOAA Satellite Images. The dataset is about 37 GB, spread out over 500,000 files.
- [NEW 🚀] AWS Step Functions Distributed Map (GA Today)
  - Orchestrate large-scale parallel workloads in serverless applications.
  - Process huge datasets quickly
The world is event-driven
- The world is asynchronous. There’s nothing we ca do about it. That’s no matter how much you would want it to be not as chaotic and how you would want it to be all deterministic, it’s not true. So the best way to handle that, to handle uncertainty, is to build event-driven systems.
- Event-driven architectures lead to loosely coupled systems
  - Basic components:
    - Events —>
    - Event Producers —>
    - Event Records —>
    - Event Brokers —>
    - Event Consumers
  - Communication patterns:
    - Point-to-pint
    - Publish-subscribe
    - Event streaming
    - (Amazon EventBridge supports all of them)
  - Martin Fowler. He’s really a big proponent of event-driven architecture.
- Example: readme dot com
  - If you make APIs, probably you’re familiar with readme dot com.
  - There you post descriptions of your APIs so that others can use them. But if you change you API, you need to remember to also change the description. Now you can actually automate that. If you change the API in API Gateway, it generate an event that goes to CloudTrail. CloudTrail then posts an event to EventBridge which triggers a Lambda function. This Lambda function picks up sort of the configuration information from AWS Systems Manager and it gets the secret API keys from the AWS Secrets Manager and then posts the updates that you’ve just posted to API Gateway on readme dot com.
  - If you evolve your API, immediately the documentation gets updated.
All complex systems that work, evolved from simpler systems that worked — GALL’S LAW
- In event-driven architectures, asynchronous systems are so close to the natural world that you can actually make complex systems work. Because remember, this here is a pretty complex system, we’re able to make it work because we have independent actions to be taken without total control. And it’s actually not just the architecture.
- If you remember the Amazon Two Pizza team approach, it is actually built on this. It allows you to have teams to be focused on one particular component, and one particular component only.
- They don’t need to know the big picture. Your ordering service doesn’t need to know that there’s an email notification service present.
- So you can evolve the overall system and move really fast by focusing on building your local components.
- Evolve or die
  - Build systems that can evolve. And the best way to make evolvable systems is to focus on event-driven architectures.
- Example: serverlesspresso
- Memo: In the past, when you went from the ground to the cloud, you installed a whole package of software on a certain host, so the whole package of software would be overwhelming, and people’s inertial thinking would become to compare where I want to put it. What kind of host, what kind of computer room, which cloud vendor’s specifications, but you may forget to check the whole package of software, has the problem to be solved been solved? Is it because of the software architecture that the associated problems have not been solved? Can this whole package of software continue to grow, maintain and expand its functions? Or has formed some kind of strong interdependence, can only stay in place to grow, and has its growth ceiling?
Simplifying the complex
- [NEW 🚀] AWS Application Composer (Available in Preview Today)
  - Visually design and build serverless applications quickly
  - Visually canvas makes composing serverless applications easier
  - Maintain a model of your architecture that’s easy to share and build with team members
The spider in the web —> From birds to spiders!
- The spider is the most central thing in the web.
- And in our world, the event bus is the spider in the web.
- Amazon EventBridge
  - Routing
  - Coordination
  - Scheduling
Events are composable
- The way that you’ve seen this event broker systems work is that you can actually stitch things together to create a bigger application out of that. And there is extreme power in composing. Unix has shown us that.
- The power of
  - UNIX
  - composing
  - The power of composing in UNIX was pipes.
  - Pipes make it very easy. And McIlroy, who led Bell Labs in the early days of UNIX, came up this concept. That you should have small components with a standard interface, and standard format of interaction and as such, you could build bigger applications out of smaller components. It’s extremely powerful.
  - Here is a brief introduction to the beauty of the simplicity of the CLI (command line interface)
- Can we do this with AWS Services?
  - So many of our customers that want to actually build these sort of connections between different services have to write a lot of glue code. —> There is a demand for “connecting” again!!
- [NEW 🚀] Amazon EventBridge Pipes (GA Today) —> Another product that connects multiple services!
  - Connects event producers and consumers in seconds.
  - Build advanced integrations in minutes with enhanced security, reliability and scalability out of the box.
  - Example: When the user buys football tickets, he is not sure which brokler to buy from to be trusted, so Trustpilot is used for filtering. Then found out that Trustpilot is also an AWS customer and has an interesting event-driven architecture.
Guest: Angela Timofte, Director of Engineering, Trustpilot
- I’m here today to talk about a single word. It can be hard earned but has the power to shape our relationships and fuel business growth by increasing consumer’s confidence. That word, is,
- Trust
- At Trustpilot, we enable people to read and write reviews and find companies they can trust.
- Consumers — Business
- We help ignite trust within this community and we are on a mission to become the most recognized symbol of trust on the Internet.
- Since 2007, we’ve grown to house over 190M reviews. However, our growth hasn’t been linear. In 2021 alone, we have received over 47M reviews.
- And to scale trust, we need to have both reliability and integrity.
- However, scaling trust is no mean feat.
- If we look at where we started, our platform was built on a monolith and on-prem databases. Our experience started well, but we soon found we were unable to handle our growth. Hiring more people wasn’t the answer. Immense planning, alignment and reverting changes due to bugs were all a headache. And more usage caused more reliability issues resulting in product outages. Not the best experience for our users.
- Monolith
  - Platform growing —> New hires —> developer experience —> Bugs —> Outage
- Event-driven
  - But how does that work? Review are obviously at the core of our business. But now let’s look at one.
- Use Case
  - Meet Sylvia, who had a great experience with a flower shop and wants to share it by writing a review on Trustpilot. When Sylvia submits her review, behind the scenes, an event is being published on Amazon SNS topics.
  - The review submitted topic has over 20 subscribers, with each one of them completing a different asynchronous process using Amazon Lambda, Amazon ECS and other Amazon services.
  - One of those processes is to publish the review, which is another Amazon SNS that stands out for Amazon SQS to consume and trigger other processes.
  - One of them being storing the data.
  - Now, choosing the right data store has been a challenge in itself, as the number of reviews being read daily increased from thousands to millions. We had to find a scalable, flexible and cost effective database. And Amazon DynamoDB stood out as the right database.
  - We all know we can plan for expected increases in traffic for events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which just passed, even when having a monolith architecture. But our latest event-driven architecture and the use of Amazon DynamoDB provide us with increased flexibility. Meaning, both expected and unexpected traffic increases can be easily dealt with.
  - One of those unexpected events that we can probably all still remember, is COVID-19.Everyone was forced to buy online. We all needed to know who to trust. As a result, searching and reviewing on Trustpilot became more important than ever. This increased our traffic more than we could have ever predicted. But thanks to the cloud elasticity and the use of an event-driven architecture, our platform is able to scale for expected and unexpected traffic increases, while our teams can continue focusing on product releases and innovation.
  - Dealing with the scale and growth of reviews on Trustpilot is one challenge. But maintaining authentic, useful and trustworthy information is quite another.
  - If we go back to Sylvia’s review, by treating everything as an event, we are in a position to easily integrate and evolve our existing architecture. As an example by subscribing to the Review Submitted topic and using Amazon Kinesis for real time ingestion to send data to our compliance and fraud detection models, we are able to scan 100% of reviews coming through.
  - While by using Amazon Step Function, we can orchestrate workflows to take action on abusive behavior or unusual patterns in reviews, just to name a few.
  - Scale, adapt, react / Protect platform integrity / Teams working in parallel
  - We live in uncertain and rapidly changing times. We all need to spend wisely.
  - Better and more trusted decisions.
  - 她是 AWS Hero!!
AWS Heroes
- The AWS Heroes program recognizes 253 AWS experts across 53 countries whose enthusiasm for knowledge sharing and making the community better is unparalleled. They have a real impact on the community.
- It’s one of these things at our AWS events, we give hundreds of thousands of classes to you where you can learn. But the best way to learn sometimes is from the people that sit next to you
Event-driven architectures enable global scale
- Example: Amazon DynamoDB
  - 10 trillion requests per day
  - Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables
    - So global tables, it gives you the ability to just write to your local DynamoDB instance, and it will actually automatically replicate those updates to other regions that you’ve indicated where you need to have global tables available. Then it gives you a multi-region, multi-active database. You still do local reads, very quickly and fast, while actually having the tables globally available.
    - There is no synchrony here. It’s purely asynchronous environment.
  - Active-active architecture
  - How would you build this?
  - DynamoDB Streams
  - We use the SQS queue as the coordinator for this event-driven architecture. If any of the replications fails, it easily gets restarted again and can re-read from the queue to pick up exactly where the failed replicator had stopped. So we can have thousands of these replicators. And so they would take care of replication to any of these other environments. It’s purely event-driven architecture.
- Patterns in event-driven architecture
  - Change data capture
  - Asynchronous coupling
  - Self-healing replicators
The world is built on patterns
- After all, the world is built out of patterns. You see them everywhere in nature. So we should follow these patterns. And of course, us as computer scientists, we have all read the book on design patterns from the famous Gang of Four. At Amazon though, we keep our patterns in the builder’s library.
- The Amazon Builders Library
  - How Amazon builds and operates software
- Challenges building applications today
  - Define configs
  - Integrate tools
  - Set up projects
  - Automate workflows
  - Manage dependencies
  - Multiple codebases
  - Inconsistent environments
  - Collaborate across systems
- [NEW 🚀] Amazon CodeCatalyst (Available in Preview Today)
  - A unified software development service that makes it xxx to build and deliver on AWS
  - Create a project with everything you need in minutes
  - Easily define CI/CD pipelines
  - Switch between codebases with one click
  - Collaborate with your team seamlessly
  - Extend the core experience and integrate with existing tools
Event-driven architectures help development teams move faster
- Case Study: Cinch in UK
  - make use of 3D technology to show you cars. so you can basically at home, look at this car, decide whether you want to buy it or not.
  - They built it in only 6 months!

3D & Simulation

The world is multidimensional —> Ready to start talking about 3D, simulation

It’s not just one line. It’s not just we’re used to 2D, why? Because of the machines we have. Keyboard, screen, mouse, finger, that’s how we have built our digital systems and how we interact with them. But it’s not the real world. The real world is multi-dimensional. —> I was also thinking about this before, how to get rid of the limitation of the flat 2D information presentation carrier?
So how can you get a digital system as close to the real world as possible? And we’ve really seen great, great strides in that.
Example: Alexa and Soul Machines
- We should use normal technologies to access our digital systems.
- Soul Machines is a company that have actually taken this a step further. They actually have digital personalities that can express emotion while you’re interacting with them, which is another very normal, natural kind of way of interacting. It’s not sufficient to hear what I say, you’ll all looking at my face. What do I think is important? What do I don’t like?
- So Alexa and Soul Machines are really the first steps in this. And our real world is multi-dimensional. And as such, we should be looking in our digital systems to present the world as multi-dimensional.
Example: James Taylor & Son
- We went to the store of James Taylor & Son, and they are a cobbler out of 1857. And they use the same techniques and processes today as they used a hundred years ago. They produce what is called a last, which is a physical representation of my shoe, in wood, against which the shoe is being made.
- And I was really surprised actually, that this 165-year-old company was using very modern technology to get this done. I get to sit on a chair, and put my feet on a device that had a bunch of cameras, that actually made a 3D image of my foot. And then they were using that image about sort of then to make the last out of that and make a pair of shoes that exactly fit me.
- I need to have 3D images on a 2D screen. —> WebGL
- Virtual Try-On —> Use mobile phone camera + AR to simulate the feeling of wearing shoes on feet
A 3D models is worth a thousand pictures. —> Photogrammetry
- Actually, about 130,000 pictures.
- Photogrammetry
  - This is the science of how many images do you really need, 2D images, to create a very good approximation of the 3D world.
- NRF = Neural Radiance Fields
- Actually, we don’t see that real in peripheral. it’s our brains however that stitch these things together and fill in the gaps. That’s what’s NRF is as well.
3D will soon be as pervasive as video —> Trend prediction!
- Five or six years ago, 3D was still much more exclusive. These days, everyone is putting it everywhere. 3D is the same.
- So of course, it means that you not only need to create a 3D object of the object that you’re interested in, but you also need to have an accurate representation of the environment where it is in. And so we already have a number of engines that work really well in that.
- Open 3D engine, O3DE
- Demo: Matterport
  - Matterport allows you to actually use your cell phone to make a 3D representation of your room. You have a device you can put your cell phone on and it will turn around the room, make an accurate representation of your room, or you can actually use some of their cameras which have LIDAR in it to build an accurate representation of the environment. Then all the data goes into their 3D platform.
  - AWS IoT TwinMaker
  - You can scan the entire factory, select a machine in a 3D perspective environment, and watch the current status of the machine.
The fusion of models, sensors and data.
- Scanning a pile of luggage stacked in the trunk
- Spatial intelligence
  - The 2D map is great, it can basically show you from point A to point B, but it can’t show information such as the height limit of trucks.
  - Demo: Zoox vehicle
Visualize everything
- Systems don’t need visualization by themselves; they’re all for us. Humans need to visualize these things.
Guest: Nathan Thomas, VP, Unreal Engine, Epic Games
- by creators, for creators
- Architecture
  - Unreal Engine 5 —> PS5 amd XBOX X
    - 16 square kms
    - 40,000 drivable cars
    - 35,000 metahumans
- Automotive
  - MetaHuman, TwinMotion, RealityScan
    - Metahuman Creator - an online web service
      - Amazon EC2 —> 2M metahuman created
    - Twin Motion - our 3D visualization tool
      - Twin Motion Cloud —> built on AWS
      - Amazon EC2 G5 —> 65% increase in publishing and views
    - RealityScan
      - Real world object capture
      - RealityScan (Now Available on iOS)
- Simulation
  - Project Antoinette - flight simulation
  - CITY Samples
  - AWS Ambit Scenario Designer
- Films & TV
  - UNREAL ENGINE film animation
AWS Ambit Scenario Designer
- Open-source suite of tools to streamline 3D content creation at scale
- It was published in February 2022.
- You just point to a city in OpenStreetMap and immediately Ambit will create the 3D world out of the data in OpenStreetMap. You don’t need to do anything with that.
Experiment, measure, learn —> Simulation
- If you go back to the 1997 letter to shareholders that Jeff Bezos wrote, this is key in it. We will continuously experiment, we will measure, and we will learn from that. And that means that whether it’s positive or negative, you need to learn. But you also need to be able to experiment.
- Now at larger scale, especially in a world where you can maybe not immediately manipulate the real world, simulation is key.
- Simulation
  - 200BC - Roman Empire
    - Roman generals simulate battles and test strategies.
  - 1500AD - Renaissance
    - Leonardo da Vinci builds scale model prototypes to test his inventions.
  - 1950s - Early computing
    - John Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam pioneering mathematical models. World first computer simulation.
    - Monte Carlo simulation
  - 2000s - Desktop computing
    - Simulation on desktop is limited to the latest hardware
  - 2022 - Today
    - Almost every vertical has their own type of simulation
      - Life science
      - Financial services
      - Oil & gas
      - Design & engineering
      - Climate & geosciences
      - Autonomous vehicles
- Why do companies simulate?
  - Physical limitations
    - Simulation uses 3D
  - Hazardous scenarios
    - Aurora self-driving trucks
  - Manipulation of time
    - You can manipulate the fourth dimension. That of time.
    - Do things in a few hours that used to take more time
- Spatial simulation
- [NEW 🚀] AWS SimSpace Weaver (GA)
  - Run massive spatial simulations without managing infrastructure
  - NOW GO BUILD - Terraformation, in Hawaii. They are working to combat climate change by wanting to build a trillion trees around the world, as trees are the best carbon capture engine that you can imagine.
    - How could simulation help reforestation? —> reforestation
      - Where should we place resources?
      - Where should we plant seeds?
      - What types of tree should I plant?
      - What’s the carbon capture?
      - Can we encourage biodiversity?
    - Biodiversity
  - What else you simulate?
  - Why simulate?
    - innovation
    - improve safety
    - improve performance
    - train staff
    - optimize processes
    - cost
    - experiment
    - design new systems
What about the future?
- Unsolvable problems
- Fast forward 20 years <— working backwards
- Quantum simulation
  - The hardware is not yet stable
  - But to try the state of the art quantum computers, the prototypes of that you can use Amazon Brackets.
- Representing quantum objects as bits
  - 2^1 bits = 1 quantum object
  - 2^2 bits = 2 quantum objects
  - 2^N bits = N quantum objects
  - 2^285 bits <— for example, a molecule of penicillin, it has 41 atoms. And to model that, you would need 285 electrons.
    - That’s more memory than we have available in the whole world.
    - He doesn’t want to read the whole thing XDD
  - 285 Qubits - error corrected
    - In a quantum world, however, you can represent an electron with some other quantum object and you can manipulate that as well. You don’t need this large amount of memory.
    - A qubit is a fundamental unit of quantum information. And it can be used to encode quantum objects from your collection.
  - Example: A common application, when you think about quantum simulation, is that of producing fertilizer.
  - But it’s real, and it is the reality of the future. It’s how we are going to build our systems.
- Curiosity with Dr. Werner Vogels
  - Quantum computing with John Preskill who is an Amazon scholar, and he is the Richard Feynman professor of theoretical physics at Caltech.
  - And his mind is full of quantum.
  - —> Go to find and watch this video
- But don’t watch it tonight. We’ve something else to do tonight.
  - Once again, we have the number one DJ in the world playing at our re:Play party.
  - Martin Garrix
  - AWS re:Play 7:30pm
Simulate everything
- So what do I want you to walk away with?
- Use simulation, start thinking about how in your systems that you’re building, which is both customers and maybe interaction with the real world, how can you use simulation?

Closing

earth photo <— the system, universe
I started the keynote by saying that you should think about the world as asynchronous. And why should you think about it like that? Because it is.
And I ended it by showing you how you can model the world more accurately and use it to build better systems and products.
I hope that you can all agree that we can learn from something like looking around us, and observing the greatest system in existence, the universe itself. The universe itself is extremely fragile. It’s extremely fault tolerant as well, and resilient, and robust.
We should learn from sort of the principles that we see in nature and world around it when we start building our computer systems.
Memo: I think these two hours are an interpretation and statement of the metaverse by the nerds, returning to the essence, observing, and contacting our real world to create corresponding infrastructure, tools, simulators, and various systems.
Now go build!!

Next step

If you feel that this thread dismantling note has caught the key points you want to read and is helpful to you, I hope to continue this kind of in-depth article in the future, welcome to pat and feed me a coffee ☕, or forward the article to your friends and colleagues, community, thank you for your encouragement and support.

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