In front of the Re:Invent 2017 conference, Amazon Web Services made some pre-show announcements including a new program that connects machine learning experts from across Amazon with AWS customers called Amazon ML Solutions Lab.
According to AWS, this program will help to identify practical uses of machine learning inside customers’ businesses and potentially guide them in developing new machine learning-enabled features, products, and processes.
The Amazon ML Solutions Lab combines hands-on educational workshops with brainstorming sessions to help customers “work backwards” from business challenges, and then go step-by-step through the process of developing machine learning-based solutions. The plan is for customers to work with Amazon machine learning experts to prepare data, build and train models, and put models into production. At the end of the program, customers will be able to take what they have learned through the process and use it elsewhere in their organization.
The background of this program consists of work done by AWS to optimize robotic picking routes in fulfillment centres, sharpen algorithms that inform Amazon’s supply chain, forecasting, and capacity planning, provide the intelligence in Amazon Alexa’s natural language understanding (NLU) and automated speech recognition (ASR), and support Amazon’s drone delivery initiative (Prime Air). Thousands of engineers across Amazon are working on machine learning on a daily basis, the company said. The Amazon ML Solutions Lab program is an attempt to provide customers access to the same talent that built many of these machine learning-powered products and services.
New Symantec partnership
Symantec has chosen AWS as its strategic infrastructure provider for the vast majority of its cloud workloads. Symantec’s relationship with AWS is a long-term and bi-directional deal that will see Symantec not only make a major operational move to AWS, but also tapping the global footprint of the AWS Marketplace to deliver its security services.
The company built a data lake on AWS that collects tens of terabytes of data every day from 175 million endpoints and more than 57 million attack sensors.
Raj Patel, Vice President, Cloud Platform Engineering at Symantec, said the cloud-first approach to engineering requires a highly scalable and reliable infrastructure that helps our team deliver faster time-to-market and ensure that security remains our top priority. Symantec is committed to protecting the cloud generation, as well as leveraging the cloud to deliver services.
Patel added that AWS’s experience serving some of the most risk-sensitive enterprise customers was an important part of the decision to choose AWS for the company’s Integrated Cyber Defense strategy.