Amazon's AWS Deep Learning Containers simplify AI app development

Amazon wants to make it easier to get AI-powered apps up and running on Amazon Web Services. Toward that end, it today launched AWS Deep Learning Containers, a library of Docker images preinstalled with popular deep learning frameworks. "We've done all the hard work of building, compiling, and generating, configuring, optimizing all of these frameworks, so you don't have to," Dr. Matt Wood, general manager of deep learning and AI at AWS, said onstage at the AWS Summit in Santa Clara this morning. "And that means that you do less of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of installing these very, very complicated frameworks and then maintaining them." The new AWS container images in question -- which are preconfigured and validated by Amazon -- support Google's TensorFlow machine learning framework and Apache MXNet, with Facebook's PyTorch and other deep learning frameworks to come.