Amazon Web Services' re:Invent conference kicks off this week in Las Vegas, and its title is apt, given AWS's ongoing transformation from an IaaS provider to a player in PaaS that enterprise customers need to have on their short-list.
There are no less than 13 tracks slated for re:Invent, starting with AWS's core competency in compute, but then onward to big data, architecture, developer tools, devops, databases, IT strategy and migration, security and compliance, mobile developer and IoT.
The conference will undoubtedly showcase proprietary AWS features such as the Lambda code execution engine and Aurora, a high-availability MySQL database, which were launched last year.
Lambda and Aurora represent a key strategy shift by AWS, says Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller: "Amazon is morphing from a grocery store where you buy your ingredients to cook your own meal, to a diner or preset menu. It's becoming a platform, like IBM Bluemix, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud."
As a pioneer in cloud computing, AWS initially set out to be open and non-proprietary, an approach that worked in part because the likes of SAP and Oracle weren't interested in building out their own cloud capacity until more recently, Mueller says.
The industry dynamics are thus changing, he adds. "Over the medium to long run, SAP and Oracle customers will know that probably, their systems are going to be run best in the SAP and Oracle clouds, not Amazon. All that load is going to go back to the original vendors." Amazon needs to pivot toward PaaS in order to create new workloads based on next-generation applications, Mueller notes.
AWS is also looking to data analysis for those new workloads, as it's expected to announce a new analytics service called Space Needle during re:Invent, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
"Analytics, business intelligence and reporting remain a key software area for enterprises, and they are being disrupted by the cloud," Mueller says. "If Amazon can take a chunk of that business, it will be good fuel for getting more load to its infrastructure."
There's another key takeway from AWS's evolution, says Constellation Research founder Ray Wang—namely, "that the IaaS market and Paas market have converged and Amazon wants to be the key public cloud platform for developers."
Check out Mueller's full re:Invent preview right here, and stay tuned for ongoing reaction and analysis during the conference.
