EU Business News Q4 2018

20 EU BUSINESS NEWS / Q3 2018 , drivers’ mobile devices. This is designed to improve car maintenance and performance as well as reduce vehicle downtime and CO2 emissions. “AWS is a critical component of our innovation strategy so having a region in Italy will only accelerate our innovation and transform our business,” said Daniele Benedetti, Head of ICT Architectures and Innovation. “The plethora of services available on AWS enables us to build highly reliable, scalable, and secure applications, such as Cyber Car and Cyber Fleet, available across the globe, in record time. To further accelerate our innovation, we placed AWS Serverless technologies, such as AWS Lambda, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon DynamoDB, as well as DevOps best practices at the heart of our development processes, dramatically improving time to market for new features for customers. We can now configure runtime environments in just days instead of weeks and can deploy new micro-services and features in just tens of minutes, instead of several days. This agility is critical to better meet our customer’s expectations and only AWS was able to provide us with this level of scalability and flexibility.” GEDI Gruppo Editoriale publishes some of the largest circulation newspapers in Italy, including La Repubblica and La Stampa. “For millions of Italians, we are their trusted source of news so knowing we will soon have reliable AWS infrastructure in Italy is invaluable for us,” said Luigi Lobello, CTO of Gruppo Editoriale. “Using AWS has allowed us to scale up and down whenever our news cycles require it, meaning we can deliver the news to our readers when they need it most. A good example was around the Italian General Elections on March 4, 2018 where we saw the highest peak of traffic ever for Repubblica.it. On that day we had over 80 million pageviews and 18.8 million visits. Instead of spending all our resources on making sure the website was available, we provided our readers with continuous special election-day coverage with real- time data of elections results. For us to do this on-premises we would have needed hundreds of servers in a datacenter the size of San Siro stadium football pitch, which would have sat around idle until the next peak. Instead, we were able to do this with just 190 Amazon EC2 instances.” Public sector customers throughout Italy entrusting AWS with mission-critical workloads include The City of Cagliari, the administrative center of Sardinia, which used AWS to support municipal elections in 2017. Piero Orofino, Technology and Innovation Officer for the City of Cagliari said of the news, “AWS has always been a trusted partner for the City of Cagliari so we welcome the news they will bring an infrastructure region to Italy. Using the AWS cloud has enabled us to reliably and securely support our constituents in their democratic voting duties. Before the 2017 election, we experienced challenges supporting the web traffic after polling stations closed, as the website tracking electronic results wasn’t able to cope with demand. Working with AWS, we developed a solution based on AWS Lambda and deployed it from scratch within 20 days of the election – supporting over 7 million requests, more than 200 per second – all for a total cost of €125. To deliver this project, in this short time, at this low cost would have been impossible if we did it ourselves.” Italian academic and research institutes are also using AWS to lower operating costs and accelerate scientific research. The National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) conducts research in astronomy and astrophysics, ranging from the study of planets and minor bodies of the Solar System, to the large-scale structure of the universe, and uses AWS for its High Performance Computing (HPC) needs in its search of complex lifeforms outside of Earth. “Knowing we will soon have an AWS Region in Italy is a great opportunity for the Italian scientific community,” said Dr. Filippo Maria Zerbi, Scientific Director of INAF. “Our researchers turned to AWS for a large project to detect the presence of complex life outside of Earth and to complete a census of Earth-like planets that could sustain life. This project requires very large amounts of computational power, needing millions of GPU per hours of analysis, and the ability to store hundreds of terabytes of data collected by the ESO Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Running this type of workload on-premises would be cost prohibitive, especially since we don’t require this computational power every day. Thanks to AWS our researchers were able to perform this research with minimal costs and were able to provision the resources in five minutes, as opposed to several weeks previously, helping us in our quest to answer the question ‘Are we alone in the universe?’” Start-ups using AWS to rapidly scale include Musixmatch, a Bologna-based business that has quickly become the world’s largest lyrics catalogue, with more than 50 million users and serving 80 percent of the worldwide music streaming market. Musixmatch is all- in on AWS and leverages AWS’s global footprint to serve users around the world. “I am looking forward to the wave of innovation and entrepreneurship that the new AWS Region will unleash across Italy,” said Max Ciociola, CEO and co-founder of Musixmatch. “When we founded Musixmatch in 2010 we knew we had to work with technology that would allow us to rapidly scale, and most importantly, would enable us to constantly innovate. AWS was the obvious choice and today, thanks to the vast offering of services, we are leveraging technologies that we would have only been able to dream about before, such as Amazon SageMaker for Machine Learning. In just three days, we started using Amazon SageMaker to train models to analyse the language of songs and identify the mood and emotion of the lyrics, such as