Complacency at AWS Summit

Sitting there last week at the AWS Summit in London, I was struck by how similar Werner Vogel's message was to Googles at the GCS Next conferenece. It was just that AWS's CTO was far less punchy in his delivery and much more obsessed with technical detail. At the same time there was no recognition that AWS might actually have competitors. 

It is true that Amazon, with its AWS service, is far in front of Microsoft and Google in terms of richness of its technical offering and market penetration, but at the same time this gap is closing. Recently, I saw a great conversation on LinkedIn started by a recruiter for cloud specialists who had noticed a growing demand for Azure specialists, having spent the previous year only recruiting AWS staff. This shows, that in large corporates at least, a dual market is naturally emerging as Microsoft leverages the installed base of AD and Office products to move them to O365 and Azure. Also, I did not see the sort of financial innovation that Google is bringing to the market with its highly flexible pricing options.

In fact it took me a while to identify what differentiates AWS from its closest competitors. As much of Werner's pitch was spent identifying improvements to current offerings within its services. The things which stood out were:

• AWS has more virtual server type offerings than its competitors, with some services now into their 5th release or so of maturity. Although this comes at the downside of increased complexity and need for an intepreter to translate for the uninitiated as many of the services are labelled in the format AN (A = a character and N = a version number) in the manner of a technical labelling convention rather than a meaningful name.

• AWS is now offering "serverless computing" via its Lambda service using functions instead of virtual servers. Whilst this obviously offers a great deal of agileness for rapid delivery, it may be risky in terms of encouraging sloppy development resulting in monolithic resource hungry applications which are expensive to run and difficult to maintain. It also may present a new form of vendor lock in risk, as migration to other cloud platforms in the future would be less easy.

• AWS is now offering a niche service for FPGAs. Which allows a mature and tuned application to be "burnt into hardware" with corresponding double digit improvements in performance. This may be important for people with well proven machine learning applications

• The suite of security services available is also impressive with extensive DDoS capability embedded as standard.

• AWS now has a UK point of presence and others are being established throughout Europe to ensure that data privacy and export sensitive security concerns can be addressed. Although global coverage is still a little patchy and the Middle East in particular seems poorly served.

• AWS's IoT offering also appears to be maintaining its edge. It's still the only one to have a rules engine built in and additionally, Amazon is now launching a standalone environment which can be run on the Things (i.e. the intelligent devices which are networked in IoT networks) which is consistent with the rest of the service.

For me the most interesting part of the day was visiting the start-up partner stands and a presentation on Amazon Launchpad. Launchpad is its service for helping "ready to go to market" startups to promote themselves and gain extra visibility in the online market place, coupled with help in delivering their on-line presence. This is currently focused on "tangible product" companies, but may be extended to services in the future. Noticeable amngst them were Cocoon (a company which provides remotely manageable security devices based on infrasound), Beeline (a company which provides simple digital navigation devices for bicycles) and Roli (a company which makes electronic music generation simple and accessible).

So, to recap and summarise, AWS maintains its technical edge, but appears over comfortable and complacent. It needs to hone its marketing and value proposition to continue to remain relevant in the future.