Amazon Web Services Inc. kicked off its one-day summit in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday with keynote presentations that covered a number of cloud services, but the company’s focus was clearly on SageMaker, designed to create and deploy machine learning algorithms. AWS announced multiple updates to SageMaker at the event, including a “local mode,” which will allow developers to train machine learning models using personal computers.

“Here the story is all about SageMaker and the continued dominance of AWS,” said John Furrier (@furrier, pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “My prediction is that SageMaker will surpass Aurora as the number one shipping product.”

Furrier and co-host Stu Miniman (@stu, pictured, left) analyzed the AWS San Francisco Summit keynote session presented by Dr. Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon.com, and Dr. Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at AWS. Furrier and Miniman discussed the company’s emphasis on machine learning and the growing competitive landscape.

Machine learning on the rise

SageMaker will have to expand rapidly to surpass Aurora, the AWS relational database built for the cloud. Aurora was described by AWS Vogels during the keynote as the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS.

“SageMaker is really growing fast,” Miniman said. “Amazon isn’t just about infrastructure and cloud anymore.”

The machine learning emphasis by AWS comes at a time of growing competitive pressure for the public cloud provider. Microsoft Corp. flipped the switch last week on its inaugural availability zones for the Azure cloud. And Oracle Corp. announced the first general availability of its Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud last month.

“The major cloud players are going to fight tooth and nail for market share,” Furrier said. “You’re seeing Amazon for the first time dealing with competitive pressure that’s old school tactics.”

Despite the competitive landscape, Amazon continues to gather new business. On Wednesday, the company announced the addition of Shutterfly Inc. and Cox Automotive Inc. as cloud services customers.

“The buzz that I hear is Amazon listens, they still move really fast when they need to make changes,” Miniman said. “We watched the rolling thunder that is AWS rolling through the entire industry and now rolling all over the globe.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit San Francisco event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE