A while ago, the Amphinicy team attended the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. This learning conference for the global cloud computing community, which is hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), gathered around 30.000 tech professionals. Toni Jelavić, our CEO, introduced Blink, the first software modem for Earth observation available at AWS Marketplace on the conference stage. Our colleague Marko Galenić, both a software engineer at Amphinicy and a Blink project team member, was also there. We'd like to bring some of the conference background, its topics and feelings across, from Marko's point of view. Thanks, Marko for sharing your experience!
"Las Vegas, with its grandeur, is certainly a sight to see and an experience in itself. Due to the huge interest, AWS re:Invent was spanning across several resorts and convention centres, with The Venetian being the main one. You guessed it, a Venetia theme, after having seen Cesar's Palace (Rome), Wynn (Mediterranean), and Mandalay Bay (Asia). Still, these places are used to huge gatherings, and even having accommodated more than 10.000 people, the convention quality certainly didn't fail. We had an opportunity to hear world-class tech sessions from all sectors: telecoms, public health system, energy supply chain, sustainability, financial sector, STEM education and outreach - and aerospace, of course. There were quiet rooms for meetings and big conference rooms reserved for workshops and certification programs. Not to mention international food and music played by DJs. Even the transportation between conference venues was amazing. Filled with a good Las Vegas vibe, our team was ready to conquer the scene."
"You may have learned that Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon, provides flexible, robust, and transparent on-demand cloud computing platforms coupled with APIs (and more!). The main objective of the conference was to describe the fundamentals of such services in basic courses while digging deep into the intrinsic details in advanced ones. New technologies were also presented and some powerful keynotes were delivered. "Cloudifying" your service offers hugely competitive advantages and cost reductions.
For our team, it was an honour to share a slot in the program, and to be able to speak about Blink in front of the public. The main objective of Amphinicy's presentation was to illustrate both the feasibility and the advantages of software-defined radios (SDR) over hardware-defined ones and to present Blink, the first wideband pure-software modem that runs on GPUs. With throughput levels that are the same as (and in some cases, greater than) hardware modems, far better deployment dynamics, and with a more robust monitoring and control system, it is only natural for it to be in the next generation of satellite modems. It integrates seamlessly with AWS Ground Stations and offers competitive pricing. It is only a matter of time until this new concept goes mainstream."
"Our breakout session was delivered by Chris Stoner from AWS, Matt Thirman from Satellogic, and Toni Jelavić, the Amphinicy CEO. It was about observing the Earth and her nature from space. The consequences of doing this are truly crucial: weather or economic predictions, and facilitation of evacuation during natural catastrophes where precious lives are at stake. Sometimes it may also be surveillance in cases of large heists (pirates!). Since the users are interested in the end product, which may be a picture, video, etc., the satellite data reception system is expected to be streamlined.
AWS Ground Station offers exactly this. At a click of a button, an EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) instance is opened on the AWS cloud with the Blink software modem ready for the reception of satellite information. Everything "just works" from the user perspective, it's all transparent! However, if the user wants to delve deeper into the signal analysis, AWS Ground Station and Blink also offer significant intermediate data just for that.
Overall, this conference experience will certainly leave a beautiful memory."
Curious to learn more details? Check out the recording of our presentation at AWS re:Invent.
If you have any questions or are willing to collaborate with us on developing software solutions for the satellite industry feel free to reach out!
The company's participation at re:Invent 2021 has been co-funded by the European Structural and Investment Funds (European Regional Development Funds, Operational Programme Competitiveness and Cohesion 2014 - 2020). The content of this article is under the full responsibility of Amphinicy Technologies.
