By: Girish Tandel, Principal - Cloud Architecture, LTIMindtree

Cloud adoption has grown steadily among enterprises and small businesses over the last decade and is expected to continue in 2023 and beyond. According to the latest forecast by Gartner, global end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow by 20.7% to $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. This is greater than the 18.8% growth predicted for 2022.

As a key member of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team at LTIMindtree, I have seen growth in scale, richness, and complexity concerning AWS cloud technology. Even after thousands of migrations and key projects, I learn something new and useful about AWS almost daily. Here we highlight the Top 10 AWS Trends 2023.

#1 Metaverse for the retail industry applications

Amazon, an e-commerce behemoth with innovative technology, is deploying augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality retail experiences, powered by AWS, to create more immersive shopping experiences. And you can bet that the most forward-thinking retailers in the industry are looking even further ahead, wondering what is in store for 2023 and beyond.

The days of basic e-commerce websites that simply sell products are over. Shoppers today want more interactive experiences, thanks to the engagement enabled by social media and gaming. They want to see a product from all angles with 3D images, imagine how it will look in their space, and see customizations like fabrics and colors in real-time. This is a key new trend addition to the top 10 AWS trends 2023.

#2 Industrialized data platform on AWS

Organizations have data residing in disparate sources. Each source is stored within the organization in silos. These siloed data sources can quickly turn into data swamps and become unresponsive to provide a single view of business insights, which may lead to integration and performance challenges for customer-facing applications to provide a real-time view of data.

Retail, manufacturing, and insurance enterprises should start building a unified data platform to get meaningful insights into data and improve the response time of business-critical applications as one of the top AWS trends. An industrial data platform can be implemented using a data lake on AWS. Connecting purpose-built services to this data lake using modern data architecture capabilities will allow enterprises to centralize industrial analytics to access business and operational data.

#3 Digital Immune System (DIS) to improve security

Enterprises will require adaptive and unified security controls in 2023 to secure their applications and data, particularly in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Self-learning AI with the ability to gain real-time visibility and data security in AWS will enhance user experience, and performance while reducing application failure.

The AI-powered DIS learns normal patterns of life for each user, virtual machine, and container to detect even the most subtle anomalies that point to a threat – no matter how sophisticated or novel. It analyses admin activity and raw cloud traffic in real time to create rich behavioral models that correlate patterns in AWS and beyond.

The ask from cyber experts is to gain complete visibility of workloads and administrator activities in AWS environments and is again one of the key top AWS trends. The DIS should be capable of providing unified and bespoke protection across the cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Operational Technology (OT), and network.

According to Gartner, by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity on the cloud will increase customer satisfaction and decrease downtime by 80%.

#4 AWS-based mainframe modernization and migration will be mainstream

As part of AWS trends 2023 on modernizing mainframe systems, some organizations will opt for a complete migration of code and functionality to a more technologically advanced platform hosted in the cloud. In 2023, organizations are taking a hybrid cloud approach, by offloading non-core mainframe workloads to alternative platforms like cloud-based solutions. This is done through a combination of refactoring, rearchitecting, and re-platforming existing mainframe applications, data, and infrastructure to run in a hybrid cloud environment. Organizations often adopt this strategy to reduce Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS) cost, modernize crucial applications, tackle talent shortages, and manage technical debt while aiming for cost savings.

With Low-Code No-Code (LCNC) data and AI services, technical teams can update legacy mainframe systems using drag-and-drop development tools rather than traditional coding. This eliminates the need for specialized technical skills and helps an organization to migrate systems more quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.

#5 AWS supply chain transformation to gain momentum

Supply chains present a difficult challenge for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies in 2023 and beyond as they coordinate millions of moving parts. Smart companies are incorporating agility into their supply chains by perfecting every step of the procedure. This is amongst the most interesting AWS trends of 2023.

AWS offers a supply chain solution that unifies data and offers integrated contextual collaboration and actionable insights powered by AWS Aurora, DynamoDB, AWS IOT core, SageMaker, and Amazon Rekognition services.

#6 Serverless integration supported by AWS to be lucrative

One of the most popular cloud solutions today is serverless computing, which relies on functions that are triggered by events to execute tasks. With AWS serverless integration, businesses can benefit from low costs and greater scalability.

The legacy solutions heavily utilized IBM stack such as MuleSoft for integrations with other systems, but the drawbacks include expensive overall solutions without leveraging the 100% potential of the middleware, not being easy to troubleshoot, and a long learning curve.

On the other side, the serverless stack is a lightweight, highly customizable, powerful, and easily scalable service that can help organizations build powerful integration patterns such as synchronous restful microservices patterns, asynchronous message queue patterns, or publish/subscribe fan-out patterns for applications that require near real-time updates, such as chat applications and streaming services. The biggest advantage that AWS Lambda offers for integrations is the ability to customize it quickly based on the need of the solution and trigger it with various events such as upload of file in S3, events from CloudWatch, or based on queue lengths. The serverless echo system, including AWS Lambda, CloudWatch, SQS, SNS, and Step Functions, provides a rich toolset for building various enterprise integration patterns.

#7 Advanced analytics with AWS to scale new heights

Cloud technologies like AWS have moved advanced analytics from exclusive to accessible.
AWS offers the most comprehensive set of analytics services to meet all your data analytics requirements, allowing organizations of all sizes and industries to reinvent their businesses with data. AWS offers purpose-built services that provide the best price-performance, scalability, and lowest cost for data movement, data storage, data lakes, big data analytics, log analytics, streaming analytics, business intelligence, and Machine Learning (ML).

AWS also provides new on-demand and serverless options, such as EMR and Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), allowing organizations to better understand data at petabyte scales and gain access to more intelligent analytics.

#8 ML-powered custom-built apps

ML is gaining popularity because of the creation of custom-built applications that address specific use cases. Enterprises can automate common ML use cases using cloud services like AWS. Translation, voice transcription, text-to-speech, anomaly detection, and other services assist teams working on machine learning projects in automating half of the mundane tasks.

Furthermore, one of the most recent ML and AI trends, Amazon Transcribe, can support real-time call analytics. Furthermore, the service’s user speech recognition feature assists enterprises in understanding customer sentiment and improving business operations. Enterprises can save time and resources by using these easy-to-develop and deploy purpose-built applications to stay ahead of the competition.

#9 AWS containerization will be steadily adopted

Often, companies that move to the cloud struggle with migrating legacy applications. Containerization, which creates packages for applications that contain the complete code and necessary components to run them, is one-way companies are addressing this. Companies transport these packages, known as containers, to the cloud, where they run legacy applications in isolated environments.

As more organizations adopt cloud technologies such as AWS, containerization is becoming commonplace, and so is a solution to create and manage these containers. Organizations are now leveraging AWS’s Container Orchestration and Management tool to run their legacy applications over the cloud. Such instances will only increase in 2023 and beyond.

#10 Sustainability and AWS to reshape the planet earth

Consumers’ growing awareness of climate change has prompted businesses to take action. Globally, major institutions are shifting toward more sustainable practices. AWS, for example, takes significant steps to ensure the brand’s vision includes measures aimed at a more sustainable future.

Summarizing it all

AWS well-architectured solutions, for example, assist organizations in better managing their cloud resources. This allows businesses to use far fewer resources than private clouds, lowering the total cost of ownership and the organization’s carbon footprint.

With its key initiatives, AWS empowers communities with climate change data. AWS is also collaborating with companies across industries to implement sustainability measures in their operations.