AWS re:Invent is a technology conference that, for most of the world, needs no introduction. This year, more than 60,000 technology professionals descended on the Venetian in Las Vegas for the week to share best practices, hear about the latest innovations in cloud technology, and discuss infrastructure, data, and AI strategy.
Cloudera had a big presence on the expo floor and throughout the week in sessions. It was our busiest re:Invent ever. Here are some of the top takeaways, stories, and announcements from the week, and what they mean for our customers.
It’s (Still) All About AI
In last year’s recap, our top takeaway was the pervasiveness of AI across the event. This year was much the same. Booth conversations, announcements, sessions, and demos were centered around nearly universal questions from attendees: how can we deploy AI in production safely and securely, and how can we build AI that we trust to run core parts of our business?
While everyone was talking about the promise of AI, many of the execution challenges lay down the stack, in the data infrastructure. In the largest enterprises, data is still often siloed in various systems, clouds, and data centers making it difficult to find, unify, secure, govern, and provide access to that data for analytics and AI.
Ultimately, distributed environments will be an inevitability, and hybrid architectures are likely the result. The goal is to leverage a platform that can apply a common set of security and governance policies across distributed data stores and enable portability so customers don’t have to care where their data lives. Taking a “cloud and data anywhere for AI everywhere” approach can solve many of the challenges customers face in delivering on their AI vision.
AWS Announcements
Amazon Web Services (AWS) made several announcements that Cloudera customers should know about.
AWS Graviton5 release. Last year, we wrote a blog post announcing support for AWS Graviton, which provides customers with cheaper, more efficient, and more sustainable compute power. Now, according to AWS’s benchmarks, AWS Graviton5 delivers 25% higher performance and several customers have reported significant performance improvements.
New capabilities in Amazon Bedrock. Many Cloudera customers use Amazon Bedrock for AI model development. AWS announced reinforcement fine tuning within Amazon Bedrock, which enables customers to create more accurate models that learn from feedback and deliver better business results. Reinforcement fine tuning is automated, so even developers who aren’t machine learning (ML) experts can use the tool.
Amazon S3 Vectors is now GA. Amazon S3 Vectors is the first cloud object storage to support the storing and querying of vector data. Now, customers can run and query vector-based AI and ML workloads directly on Amazon S3 without moving the data into a specialized vector database. Amazon S3 Vectors integrates with Amazon Bedrock, further streamlining AI workloads in AWS.
Sovereign cloud was another theme of the conference, and a critical point for many customers dealing with sensitive data or regulatory concerns. Ultimately, Cloudera and AWS are working together to ensure customers have access to the cloud innovation they need to be successful with AI while being excellent stewards of their customers’ data.
Cloudera Sessions
Cloudera experts and customers presented at several sessions throughout the week. Here are a few of the topics we covered, with links to the videos where they are available.
From Data to Action: Agentic-Powered Humanitarian Response. This session focuses on how Mercy Corps used Cloudera’s “Data Anywhere for AI Everywhere” approach to build MercyCORE, an agentic AI platform that enables the delivery of mission-critical insights to support humanitarian aid and revolutionize crisis response.
Powering Credit Risk Modernization with Cloudera and AWS. Most financial services institutions still struggle with manual processes, especially when they need to work with sensitive data. This session focuses on how financial institutions can integrate reasoning models and agentic patterns to arrive at a credit decision efficiently while maintaining compliance.
Hands-On Lab: Build an AI Agent with Cloudera Agent Studio. In this hands-on session, we introduced attendees to Cloudera Agent Studio, part of Cloudera AI Studios, and walked them through a workflow to build their own agents.
Cloudera Booth Demos
Cloudera booth demos highlight the depth and breadth of our platform capabilities, and our ability to support our customers’ AI journeys across a diverse set of organizational requirements. While we covered many data and AI topics, here are some of the highlights:
Building a Knowledge Graph with Cloudera. Knowledge graphs solve the two biggest problems with generalized large language models (LLMs) for business use: they are inaccurate and they’re not deterministic. By giving the data relational context through a knowledge graph and making that context available to the model through graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG), we can produce more accurate, more deterministic results from AI. Cloudera AI supports this process by unifying the underlying data across silos and systems so models have the best context available.
Cloudera Octopai Data Lineage. Data lineage is one of the biggest challenges and opportunities in data governance. Often, the large organizations we talk to don’t know where all their data lives. The first step in building a unified view of data is understanding where it lives and how it flows across the organization, and Cloudera Octopai Data Lineage makes it easier than ever to see the full view of your data estate.
Data in Motion. The need for real-time insights has never been greater. Automating operational workflows often requires action at the point of ingestion–well before the data lands in a data lake. Cloudera Data in Motion enables organizations to ingest, process, and analyze data in true real time, and customers are using these capabilities for everything from network monitoring and automation to fraud detection to cybersecurity.
Cloudera AI Inference Service, powered by NVIDIA on AWS. Although most organizations have deployed AI in some capacity, many are struggling to move from experimentation to reliable, scalable deployment. The first step in operationalizing AI is having a trusted, high-performance inference layer that can serve models consistently across teams and environments. Cloudera AI Inference Service makes it easier than ever to deploy, scale, and govern AI workloads with enterprise-grade speed and control.
AI-Powered Knowledge Base on Cloudera with AMD EPYC on AWS. Making data searchable and turning unstructured documents into usable knowledge is a common AI use case, but organizations struggle to do so in a cost-effective manner without relying on large, GPU-intensive models. Small language models (SLMs) on Cloudera—powered by AMD EPYC™ CPUs on AWS—make it easy to build a secure, high-performance knowledge base, delivering fast semantic search with no GPUs required.
Protegrity Banking Demo: Secure GenAI & Analytics on Cloudera with AWS. Protegrity and Cloudera have showcased a banking solution that secures sensitive financial data on the Cloudera platform. By integrating Protegrity’s data-centric protection with Amazon S3, the solution establishes granular, role-based access controls. This approach keeps data protected by default, empowering enterprises to confidently scale their AI and analytics pipelines while adhering to strict compliance mandates.
Next Steps
AWS re:Invent 2025 reinforced what we’ve been hearing from many of our customers: everyone is at least experimenting with AI. A lot of organizations are under pressure to start to show value from their AI projects. And building AI securely, reliably, and in a cost efficient way is mission critical.
Our partnership with AWS, and our joint vision for a unified data and AI ecosystem that ensures unified, secure, governed access to organizational data, is the solution enterprises need to be successful with their AI initiatives.
If you’re ready to see Cloudera on AWS in action, check out our 5-day trial, which features many of the capabilities we showcased at re:Invent.
