So let’s dissect the press release in our customary way, it can be found here:
MUMBAI, India--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(NASDAQ:AMZN) — Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), the world’s leading cloud computing platform, today announced the launch of the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, its sixth in Asia Pacific (APAC). With this launch, AWS now provides 35 Availability Zones (AZs) across 13 technology infrastructure regions globally. More than 75,000 India-based customers are already using other AWS Regions to save costs, accelerate innovation, speed time-to-market, and expand their geographic reach in minutes. Starting today, global and India-based developers, start-ups, enterprises, government organizations, and non-profits can leverage the AWS Cloud to run their technology applications from infrastructure in India, and provide even lower latency to India-based end users. Developers can sign up to start using the AWS Mumbai Region at: http://aws.amazon.com.MyPOV – Good intro paragraph… AWS has already business with an Indian DNA, so taking advantage of an in country instance is a significant step. As we pointed out a year ago, latency and data sovereignty implications are a key factor to consider in global data center rollouts, and with India sitting more or less half way between Frankfurt and Singapore, in one of the largest countries from a population perspective are all good reasons for AWS to be present in India.
[…] The new AWS Mumbai Region consists of two separate Availability Zones at launch. Availability Zones refer to datacenters in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones, with independent power, cooling, and physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance.MyPOV – Good to see that AWS stuck to the proven concept of only launching with two separate availability zones from the start / get go of a region… which allows for HA qualities right from the start. That is key especially in new markets, as traditional skepticism towards moving to IaaS are always present and can be reduced with the availability zone concept. Only the most prosperous Indian companies will have a similar setup to achieve business continuity for their operations.
“Indian start-ups and enterprises have been using AWS for many years – with most Indian technology start-ups building their entire businesses on AWS, and numerous enterprises running mission-critical, core applications on AWS,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “These same 75,000 Indian customers, along with others anxious to start using AWS, have asked for an AWS India Region so they can move their applications that require low latency and data sovereignty. We're excited to make this available today, with the same pay-as-you-go pricing, ability to get started immediately without having to negotiate enterprise agreements or wait days for access, and unmatched functionality that customers enjoy in AWS Regions worldwide – all of which allows customers to go from idea to launch faster than ever before was possible.”MyPOV – Good quote from Jassy, hitting the key aspect of quick start, low hassle sign up and now – with the Indian data centers - low latency and addressed data sovereignty aspects.
Since its founding in 2006, AWS has changed the way organizations acquire and manage technology infrastructure. With more than a million active customers worldwide, and more than 70 services across compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, messaging, machine learning, mobile, IoT, and application services, AWS has become the new normal for companies of all sizes and across all industries to deploy their business-critical applications. All AWS Regions around the world undergo regular audits by independent third-parties that validate that each region is designed and built to meet rigorous compliance standards, including ISO 27001, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), SOC 2 Security & Availability, PCI-DSS Level 1 and many more, providing high levels of security for all AWS customers. As with every AWS Region, customers have the assurance that AWS will not move their content from the region they choose. More information on how customers using AWS can meet their security, data privacy, and compliance requirements can be found at https://aws.amazon.com/security.
MyPOV – It would not be an AWS press release if not on the heels of the announcement itself, security concerns and standards would be addressed. No difference here… and as usual AWS does a big services to the industry at supporting and addressing security concern right from the get go and heads on.
India-based Customers Welcome AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) RegionMyPOV – Good reference statement for AWS, with one of the most recognized brands in India, Tata. What is remarkable is the mention of hybrid cloud here, something that traditionally all public cloud providers have shied away from, it is no coincidence that this is part of the quote though. If AWS can position itself as the ‘new’ data center in India, this will be a huge win for the vendor. From our conversations with Indian businesses and professionals we know though, this is a long way to go.
“We have been working with AWS since 2012, steadily moving workloads to the cloud, such as test and development environments for our core enterprise systems – we run one of the largest CRM based Dealer Management implementations in the world – more than 90 Tata digital properties in production on AWS, and many other applications,” said Jagdish Belwal, CIO of Tata Motors Limited, India’s largest automotive manufacturer. “Tata Motors obtained 40 percent savings by running our digital properties at scale, benefitting from the tremendous agility made possible by AWS. One of the key priorities we had was around how AWS could save us costs on traditional workloads, those without much variability or demand spikes, and we are expecting to save similar amounts on traditional workloads by running them on AWS.”
Belwal continued, “We are so happy to have an AWS Region in India. AWS has allowed our IT teams to focus on innovation and become more nimble to the business demands. Environments that used to take weeks to setup can now be done in days or hours. AWS also makes it extremely straightforward for us to progress on our cloud journey utilizing a hybrid architecture, since it is important to us to leverage the past investments we’ve made in equipment and technology on-premises for a period of time; as we work to modernize and streamline our operations on the AWS Cloud. Rather than decide on ‘what workloads can move to the AWS cloud,’ we have moved to asking ‘how fast and which ones will be next in line.’”
Ola, India’s leading cab aggregator and an Indian online transportation network company, is building their business on AWS. “We are using technology to create mobility for a billion Indians, by giving them convenience and access to transportation of their choice,” said Ankit Bhati, Co-founder and CTO, Ola. “Technology is a key enabler, where we use AWS Cloud to drive a superior customer experience, and innovate faster on new features and services for our customers. This has helped us reach more than 100 cities and 550,000 driver partners across India. We do petabyte scale analytics using various AWS big data services and AWS deep learning techniques, allowing us to bring our driver-partners closer to our customers when they need them. AWS allows us to make more than 30 changes a day to our highly scalable micro services-based platform consisting of 100s of low latency APIs, serving millions of requests a day. We have tried the AWS India Region. It’s world-class and should help us continue to enhance the experience for our customers.”MyPOV – After a B2B brand use case, off to a B2C one with Ola, great quote, great use case for both Ola and AWS.
Shaadi.com is the world’s no. 1 matchmaking service providing a superior matchmaking experience to Indians all over the world. “As one of the key initiatives of becoming a world class tech organization, we decided to migrate to the AWS Cloud. We have many interdependent applications built over the last 15 years having unique High IOPS requirements,” said Ketan Doshi, CTO and Sr. VP, Engineering at People Interactive. “We worked closely with AWS teams and migrated ‘all-in’ to AWS successfully. We leveraged AWS Database Migration Service to reduce the time required to migrate our databases by 40 percent and also realized 55 percent cost savings by moving some of them to Amazon Aurora. We are planning to move our other databases to Amazon Aurora. We are now able to efficiently manage spiky workloads by using AWS for Auto Scaling our compute resources and improving our site’s performance by 50 percent. AWS has allowed us to exploit the potential of serverless architectures (AWS Lambda + DynamoDB) that has delivered more than 80 percent cost savings. Our Redshift data warehouse solution analyses 67 billion records to derive key business trends. Being an ‘all-in’ customer of AWS, it is exciting to see AWS launch their region in India. We will continue to adopt the latest AWS services to accelerate innovation and continue to redefine the way Indians find a companion for life.”MyPOV – Next up – match making service shaadi.com – an example for a software based business going ‘all in’ on the AWS technology stack. Already mentioned in Jassy’s quote – AWS will cater to the readiness of Indian businesses to save investment dollars by moving from traditional on premise technology stack vendors to AWS. To get the comfort level right, AWS needs to provide references and showcases of both feasibility and differentiation of the AWS technology stack in India, and this is a good start.
Novi Digital, a wholly owned subsidiary of STAR India, is one of the largest media and entertainment companies in India. The company uses AWS to run Hotstar, a flagship over-the-top (OTT) broadcasting platform for delivering movies and live sporting events via the internet. “Hotstar is India’s largest premium streaming platform with more than 85,000 hours of drama and movies in eight languages, with coverage of every major global sporting event. Launched in February 2015, Hotstar quickly became one of the fastest adopted new media and entertainment apps anywhere in the world,” said Ajit Mohan, CEO, Hotstar. “It has now been downloaded by more than 68 million users throughout the world and has attracted followers on the back of a highly evolved video streaming technology, with high praise from customers on the quality of experience across devices and platforms. The reliability of the highly scalable AWS Cloud infrastructure has been a contributor to Hotstar’s ability to build and deliver a compelling streaming service for our global customers.”MyPOV – Streaming video of ‘spiky’ events like sports and entertainment events are key cloud elasticity showcases… and Novi Digital / STAR India are a great reference for this.
Investing in India’s Cloud FutureMyPOV – And there are of course SI and ISV opportunities in India, already before the AWS region was available, there was interest and sign ups on the AWS side. The ISV opportunity is twofold: For India based ISVs to go abroad, but also for foreign ISVs to get started in the Indian Market.
The rapidly expanding AWS Partner Network (APN) is made up of tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) around the world who are building innovative solutions and services for the AWS Cloud. The APN program helps partners build successful AWS-based businesses by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market (GTM) support. In India, the number of partners joining the APN program has grown over 80 percent in the past 12 months. AWS SIs such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, Accenture, PwC, Blazeclan, Minjar, Frontier, Intelligrape, Progressive, Cognizant, and Team Computers are helping enterprises migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications on AWS, and are providing a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers’ AWS environments. AWS ISVs in India include SAP, Microsoft, Adobe, Druva, Freshdesk, Manthan, Indusface, Newgen, RAMCO, Seclore, Mediology, Mithi Software, Vinculum, Infor, Splunk, and many others who are providing software solutions that are either hosted on, or integrated with AWS. Customers can easily find, trial, deploy, and buy software solutions for the AWS Cloud on the AWS Marketplace.
AWS offers a full range of training and certification programs to help Indian professionals who are interested in the latest cloud computing technologies, best practices, and architectures, advance their technical skills. More than 16,000 attendees have participated in various AWS training events since January 2016 to learn about the latest in cloud technologies, AWS best practices, and get hands-on instruction with the AWS Cloud. The AWS Educate Program promotes cloud learning in the classroom and has been adopted by more than 500 universities worldwide. The program helps to provide an academic gateway for the next generation of IT and cloud professionals.MyPOV – Good to also mention training and certification, given the Indian thirst for learning technology, key to catch and be present at the right universities. This does not only matter for AWS in India, but beyond India, as many Indian IT professional will attempt to use AWS certification and skills to launch a career abroad (as they have been for decades now).
The AWS Activate program provides India-based startups with the resources they need to quickly get started on AWS and scale their businesses. AWS has teamed with accelerators, incubators, Seed/VC Funds, and startup-enabling organizations such as Nascomm 10K, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, Tlabs Accelerator, GSF Accelerator, and others that provide a range of services including training, AWS credits, in-person technical support, and other benefits.MyPOV – What has been missing in the press release? Capital for startups to build on AWS, where AWS has the Activate program – something that could not be missing in the Indian Region announcement…
To further enable AWS customers to rapidly deliver their websites, applications, and content to India-based end users, AWS also recently opened a new AWS point of presence (PoP) in Delhi for its Content Delivery Network (Amazon CloudFront) and DNS service (Amazon Route 53). This is the third AWS PoP in India, joining Mumbai and Chennai, and is part of the global AWS network of 56 edge locations across the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America.MyPOV – Good to see AWS expanding its point of presence location, it will need to add more for India, given the slow latency in the country, but three in country is a good place to start.
Teams of Account Managers, Solutions Architects, Technical Support Engineers, Professional Services Consultants, Technical Trainers and various other functions are available to support Indian customers from offices in Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, and Pune in their use of the AWS Cloud. Through Amazon’s local selling entity, Indian customers are provided local invoices and payment options, enabling payment in rupees via credit cards or bank transfers. Additionally, AWS recently established an AWS Technical Support center in Bangalore that leverages local engineering talent to help AWS customers around the world with everything from break-fix situations to advice on application development, architectures, and best practices. The new AWS Mumbai Region, along with the various other investments for assisting Indian customers who are building their businesses and running applications on the AWS Cloud, are part of the $5 billion overall investment that Amazon announced is part of its commitment to India.MyPOV – Amazon the retailer has seen its challenges in India, which for the moment seem to be under control. Nothing works better than local investment and the overall (incl. AWS) commitment to invest 5B in Indian is always a good start, and it looks like AWS / Amazon has turned around the conversation for the better of the vendor.
Overall MyPOV
The ‘monopoly’ race between public cloud providers is in full swing only that more properties are allowed in each country. But being early always helps in IaaS, as long as enough load can justify the further build out that drives economies of scale. That matters even more in countries like India, where bandwidth into the country, energy supply, weather challenges are more pronounced than e.g. Western Europe. Securing access early and growing fast maters. AWS is in a good position here. Kudos also to AWS to deliver the region right at the time it was announced.There is little to be concerned about in India, an expansion of PoP points will be important, but is a more minor investment. It’s key for AWS to accelerate the pace in the location game though, and the vendor has announced more region to come. Likewise AWS should have / could have proactively declared the separation of its retail IT load vs its IaaS load – something the vendor needs to re-confirm again and again, especially in new markets. If there was one thing missing on the press release it is this one.
But overall a good day for AWS customers and prospects, not only if they are India based or have already an Indian business, but also for enterprises and ISVs to get a foothold in the 2nd largest country from a population perspective. Stay tuned for the uptake, my guess is we will learn that Mumbai is the fastest growing region of AWS at reinvent in fall… outpacing its next older sibling in Frankfurt.
More on AWS
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