AWS: Re:look - Has Cloud been re-invented?

Pratima H

INDIA: Now that the Amazon Web Services’ Re: Invent developer conference has wrapped up, it’s a good time to read the tea leaves as they settle at the bottom.

Of Course, there was a spate of updates and feature-frills to the cloud platform. Of course, there was a lot of fuss made around IoT and Lambda (the service that allows developers to write snippets of code which thanks to Amazon’s provisioning of servers, then get executed in response to event triggers). At the same time, AWS managed to roll in storage on wheels and a new hat in the virtual private server ring. It has amply loaded new arrows and is pitting itself against Digital Ocean, Linode and Vultr when it ushers virtual private servers at a new/almost-disruptive price point.

Amazon is managing well to be omnipresent – even across edge computing (GreenGrass, Snowball Edge), AI, deep learning, Dockers, Containers etc. New rabbits like SnowMobile - the massive, container-based storage device and Lambda extensions stay in the spotlight even after the initial noise died down. It is note-worthy to see a player as massive and multi-pronged as Amazon amplify serverless computing and make it more rounded with new languages, capabilities, integration with other services and the adjunct tooling needed.

AWS has also appeared as a more gregarious company this time around. The new-found compatibility of PostGres with AWS’ Aurora database is worth a glance. Lambda is now C# friendly but would be vying with Azure Functions service and Google Cloud Functions for a seat in the function-based compute services market.

Naveen Chhabra, senior analyst at Forrester, who attended the AWS event last week, notes how AWS is focusing on services that enable Artificial Intelligence and is backed by the introduction of services like Lex, Polly, and Rekognition. It has made a foray in image analysis with AWS Rekognition, in text to speech through Amazon Polly and is tinkering with speech recognition and natural language understanding with its senior baby Lex.

Amidst all those 24 new products and services brought in, what is standing out is how the market's marrow  is getting a second look when a player of this size and might starts focusing on what surrounds a cloud, per se.

The attempts are visible.

Chhabra calls launching a container-size storage pod sitting on a 45 feet truck novel but maintains that what remains to be seen is that how many clients can bring all the data from disparate sources and are willing to move to AWS?

“Clients will be cautious to put all eggs (data) in one basket. This is not introduced in India as yet, as AWS needs to overcome logistical requirements and challenges to introduce this service to clients in India.”

But infrastructure is the gravy that still rules.

If Gartner has sussed it out well, overall worldwide public cloud services market could be growing 17.2 per cent in 2016 to touch $208.6 billion, up from $178 billion in 2015, with the highest (42.8 per cent) component coming from cloud system infrastructure services (Infrastructure as a Service). In fact, as per Gartner's 2015 cloud adoption survey, organisations are saving 14 per cent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption.

Incidentally, a recent report by 451 Research augurs a world where AWS would be the default-tier of cloud leaving room for one more spot for other players, thus making the space a lot more about a bigger, broader, deeper array like servers, computing, storage, security, application management, business process hosting etc.

This echoes with what Gartner puts ahead as well. The use of private cloud and hosted private cloud can rise at least through 2017 leading to a multi-cloud environment augmented with the higher use of multiple public cloud providers, and spurt in various types of private cloud services.

If that hybrid-world is shaping up then players would need to up the ante in assuaging concerns from customers around integration, application incompatibilities, management tools, APIs and vendor support.

As to the services launched in the infrastructure layer, Chhabra opines that those were primarily changing the instance size and capacity; so not much attractive.

“AWS is also betting for its growth on movement of clients data from on-premise to its storage services. AWS is seeking a position of strength and to be a one-stop shop for firms that can tie multiple cloud services and develop innovative new age digital services for their businesses. Innovation is the key to any firm’s growth and AWS is all out to support that. However clients’ education about these services is of utmost importance and AWS India has scaled up its team to address this.” He contends.

In a report post Owen Rogers and Carl Brooks at 451 Research have compellingly reminded that the ability of simply removing heavy elements, automating, software-ising hardware and simplifying scale that hyperscalers adopted has paid well. In amaz-ing margins and economies of scale - as it is quite clear by now. It still looks like a value-oriented market for customers even though there appears to be enough room for premium that enterprises can pay for things that matter above basic efficiency and compute beef - security, performance, brand, stability, compliance et al.

Now that should be reassuring because if the market indeed goes for commoditisation then price would pop as the sole differentiator and something that doesn’t need innovation to slay anything around it.

All in all, the cloud infrastructure market is not the same as it was before Amazon walked into Las Vegas. Is this ‘not the same’ going to be huge and hyper again? Would 2017 turn out to be year showing AWS+1 strategy as 451 Research has guessed?

The industry and customers will decide.