Its better to cannibalise yourself than have someone else do it for you - AWS boss

We pick out the highlights from Andy Jassy’s keynote at the virtual re:Invent conference

       Amazon Web Services boss Andy Jassy took to the stage live from Seattle for AWS' annual partner conference AWS re:Invent.

We’ve rounded up the top announcements from his keynote.

1. Force' the public cloud naysayers to change This summer, Jassy took a jab at businesses he says are still trying to

avoid migrating to the cloud, calling it “defying gravity”. When discussing modernising AWS compute capabilities, Jassy reiterated his call to action to those IT professionals. “You have to challenge people who may know more than you do and you have to have the courage to pick the company up and force them to change,” he said. “You want to be reinventing all the time. Some of it is building the right reinvention culture, and some of it is knowing what technology is available to you and jumping on it to make that reinvention happen. He added that convenience shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of the drive towards public cloud adoption. “If you step back and have conviction that something is going to change because it’s a better experience for customers, it is going to change – whether you want it to or not, whether it’s convenient for you or not.” As another warning shot across the bow of IT professionals who remain resistant to embracing public cloud, Jassy raised the spectre of the DVD market vis a vis Netflix. “It’s better to cannibalise yourself than having someone else do it to you.” Jassy announced multiple new compute capability updates as part of AWS' “own reinvention”. They include five new instance types for Amazon EC2, two new AWS outposts SKUs. And they’ll also run Apple’s MacOS operating system, offering an alternative to Microsoft Windows and open-source Linux. Jassy was quick to point out that no other major cloud provider has computing instances running MacOS. The nod to major customer Apple is perhaps unsurprising considering Apple’s iCloud services rely heavily on AWS. Last year, there were reports Apple was sending monthly payments to Amazon’s cloud division of more than $30m. 2. Multi-cloud. What multicloud? As well as what he said, what was noticeable is what Jassy didn’t talk about. There was no enthusiastic embrace of multi-cloud. In fact, there was no mention of it at all. It appears the world’s cloud market leader is not yet backing the growing partner clamour that multi-cloud is the way forwards for maximum workload flexibility. For partners that may mean that the company’s reversibility policy - how much it charges partners and customers to move workloads out of AWS - is here to stay. In Europe, in particular, there are growing calls for all the markets' top vendors to include reversibility as a core component of their strategy to avoid vendor lock in. Jassy’s stance is in contrast to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, who last month wrote a blog post where he espoused the virtues of the hyperscaler market “providing choice, flexibility and openness.” 3. A US expansion and COVID-19 momentum lasting into next year Jassy also announced three new AWS Local Zones locations across the US, to cover Boston, Houston and Miami. And revealed plans to launch in 12 more US cities in 2021. Echoing Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Jassy credited the coronavirus pandemic with accelerating cloud uptake. “I think when you look back on the history of the cloud, it will turn out that the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption by several years,” he said. For Jassy, it’s a momentum he sees pushing on into next year. “One of the things that we’ve seen is that enterprises that we’ve been talking with for many years about moving to the cloud where there’s a lot of discussion and dipping the toes in the water, but not real movement. “So many of those enterprises have gone from talking to having a real plan. And that, I think, is going to be one of the biggest changes you see.” 4. New machine learning and analytics capabilities Market analyst firm Forester recently forecast that more than 60 per cent of B2B sellers will be enabled by AI, machine learning and automation in 2021. And that may be music to AWS' ears, because Jassy focused a segment of his keynote on developments in that area. He unveiled five new AWS industrial machine learning services. Amazon Monitron will provide customers with an end-to-end machine monitoring solution to detect “abnormal equipment conditions” that may require maintenance. Amazon Lookout for Equipment gives customers with existing equipment sensors the ability to use AWS machine learning models to enable predictive maintenance. AWS Panorama Appliance enables customers with existing cameras in their industrial facilities with the ability to use computer vision to improve quality control and workplace safety. AWS Panorama Software Development Kit (SDK) allows industrial camera manufacturers to embed computer vision capabilities in new cameras. And Amazon Lookout for Vision uses AWS-trained computer vision models on images and video streams to find anomalies and flaws in products or processes. Jassy called on partners to invest in the services, which he said have been built to “work on problems that really matter to customers.” “We have the most powerful machine learning inference instances with our Inf1 instances,” he said. 5. And finally The final takeaway is that it seems it wouldn’t be an AWS event without at least one dig at a competitor. Like last year’s event, Jassy took a none-too-subtle swipe at Microsoft. “If you look in the enterprise technology space, there are some providers who are competitor-focused,' Jassy said. “They look at what their competitors are doing, and they try to fast-follow and one-up them. We have a competitor like that across the lake from us here in Washington.” Jassy insisted that AWS' operational maturity gives the cloud provider an edge over competitors. “We are not close to being done investing and inventing,” Jassy said. “People are seeing a big difference.”

Author: nima.green@incisivemedia.com(Nima Green)

Date: 2020-12-02

URL: https://www.channelweb.co.uk/news/4024393/cannibalise-aws-boss

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