AWS Wavelength had already been announced at re:Invent 2019 by the Seattle-based cloud giant. Now the company has announced that its Wavelength is available on Verizon’s 5G network. Currently, Wavelength is present only in Boston and San Francisco Bay Area. These are the first two Wavelength zones available for the general public. However, AWS has already partnered with several 5G telecom providers to embed AWS hardware and software in their data centers.
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What is AWS Wavelength?
Wavelength is aimed at bringing AWS services to the edge of the 5G network to cut down on latency issues. It enables developers to serve edge computing use cases that require ultra-low latency, for example — machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and video and game streaming. AWS developers can deploy their applications to Wavelength Zones to cut down on the latency hoops that their application traffic would typically go through. Thus, customers can fully benefit from the speed advantage that 5G has to offer.
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Here’s how AWS defines Wavelength’s capabilities, “Wavelength will also deliver a consistent developer experience across multiple 5G networks around the world, and allows developers to build the next generation of ultra-low latency applications using the familiar AWS services, APIs, and tools they already use today. By providing a common developer experience, Wavelength makes it easy for developers to deploy across different telecommunications providers even if these providers have different deployment and operations semantics.”
How To Use AWS Wavelength?
AWS Developers looking out to utilize Wavelength will have to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to the Wavelength Zones. AWS also made a blog post detailing how to utilize the Wavelength zone and how all existing AWS and EC2 knowledge still holds true for Wavelength, which you can read here.
The same blog post made by Jeff Barr also talks of use case scenarios for Wavelength, “These [Wavelength] zones are now accessible upon request for developers who want to build apps to service Verizon Wireless customers in those metropolitan areas. Initially, we expect developers to focus on gaming, media processing, e-commerce, social media, medical image analysis, and machine learning inferencing apps. I suspect that some of the most compelling and relevant use cases are still to be discovered and that the field is wide open for innovative thinking!”
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As of now, while using the Wavelength services, EC2 events will be charged on an on-demand basis, with the option to purchase a savings plan. Further, Wavelength currently supports t3 (medium and xlarge), r5 (2xlarge) and g4 (2xlarge) events. Wavelength will also come equipped with the capability to create ECS clusters, EKS clusters (using Kubernets 1.17), and use auto-scaling.
Further, other pre-existing AWS services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS CloudFormation, and Amazon Cloudwatch will perform just like before, without the need for any efforts on the part of developers.
AWS also plans on expanding its Wavelength zones beyond the current two cities to other areas in the United States toward the end of 2020. Not just this, the Seattle cloud giant is also working with other leading telecom providers, including Vodafone, SK Telecom, and KDDI, to launch Wavelength Zones across Europe, South Korea, and Japan.