Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to bring its 5G edge compute service to the UK in early 2021. 

First unveiled at last year’s re:Invent event, AWS Wavelength offers optimised solutions for mobile edge computing applications, simplifying application traffic in order to fully utilise the latency and bandwidth benefits offered by modern 5G networks.

The service manages to shorten the time of mobile data response from seconds to milliseconds, making it ideal for time-sensitive sectors such as driverless cars or surgeries, as well as less critical scenarios like gaming.

Speaking at this year’s re:Invent, a three-week event which commenced on 1 December, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said that AWS Wavelength will be launched in the UK in partnership with Vodafone Business. 

This will be part of the new Vodafone Business Edge Innovation Program (EIP), which has opened its registration submissions today. The programme will provide startups, ISVs, businesses, as well as freelance developers exclusive access to edge computing training to help them develop, test and deploy a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) 5G application on AWS Wavelength and Vodafone 5G network.

Vodafone and AWS will roll out Wavelength in spring 2021, starting with a commercial Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) centre in London. The MEC centre will use Vodafone’s 5G network in order to provide an ultra-low latency zone over the extended area of the UK capital.

Commenting on the announcement, Vodafone Business CEO Vinod Kumar said that “working with AWS on edge computing means we are making it simpler for both independent software vendors and our customers to experiment with this emerging technology”. 

“We’re doing this by offering an incubation space to create and test applications that we can then industrialise and scale. And we’re already seeing some innovative applications that provide positive business outcomes from Dedrone, Digital Barriers, HERE Technologies, Groopview, and Unleash live, with so much more to come once our MEC innovation programme is running,” he added.

As well as the updates to Wavelength, AWS also used re:Invent to announce a new ML-powered operations service called Amazon DevOps Guru. The service uses machine learning to help developers detect and solve operational problems with applications.

AWS’ Machine Learning VP Swami Sivasubramanian said that the idea behind DevOps Guru was borne from customer requests to “continue adding services around areas where we can apply our own expertise on how to improve application availability and learn from the years of operational experience that we have acquired running Amazon.com”. 

“With Amazon, we have taken our experience and built specialised machine learning models that help customers detect, troubleshoot, and prevent operational issues while providing intelligent recommendations when issues do arise,”  he said.

“This enables teams to immediately benefit from operational best practices Amazon has learned from running Amazon.com, saving customers the time and effort that would otherwise be spent configuring and managing multiple monitoring systems,” he added.