A key goal of Amazon Web Services over the past couple of years is attracting more enterprise customers and mission-critical, production workloads to its service. During a keynote at its re:Invent conference on Wednesday, AWS got three prominent companies that fit that description to take the stage and discuss their work with the cloud vendor. Here's what they said.
FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority)
The privately held FINRA acts as a regulatory agency for securities firms doing business in the U.S. It has moved its critical "market surveillance" system, which monitors trading data for anomalies and suspicious activity, to AWS, said SVP and CIO Steve Randish. "We started with the crown jewels."
Market surveillance has become more difficult in recent years with the advent of high-speed trading. Following the 2010 "flash crash" that took $1 trillion in value out of the market within minutes, only to see it mostly restored almost immediately, the SEC added stiffer mandates for market surveillance.
FINRA had built its system on data warehouse appliances, leveraging Oracle database technology. In 2013, it began looking at options for a cloud deployment using open source big data technology, Randish said. It chose AWS, began building the new system and completed it this July.
AWS is "several years ahead of its closest competitor and that gap is increasing," he said. FINRA rewrote its applications from the ground up as part of the move and moving off Oracle to AWS's Aurora database service. It has experienced "massive" perfomance improvements and considers AWS's security to be superior to on-premises data centers, Randish added.
McDonald's
Fast food giant McDonald's isn't yet all-in on Amazon, but it too has used AWS to build a core asset—its sprawling POS (point of sale) system, which encompasses 200,000 registers and 300,000 devices, said CTO Tom Gergets.
McDonald's has a $1 billion business in Asia and as growth continued the company realized it needed the scalability provided by public clouds. The e-commerce system McDonald's ultimately built incorporates a wide variety of AWS services and will be a global deployment.
The chain plans to expand its use of AWS significantly at the PaaS level, with the use of Aurora, Lambda, SQS and microservices, Gergets said. Like FINRA, McDonald's is not using AWS for commodity workloads, but rather a transformation of its IT strategy.
Workday
The fast-growing cloud HCM and financials vendor may have selected IBM as its preferred public cloud provider for development and testing purposes, but it has gone with AWS for production workloads.
All of Workday's applications will be running on AWS, a decision made after the company conducted a "detailed examination of all the options," said CTO David Clark. Workday has been using AWS services for quite some time for various purposes, but this move represents a dramatic expansion of its committment as a customer. "[AWS] is right for enterprise workloads and that's why we've made this selection and embarked on this multi-year partnership," he said.
The deal allows Workday to focus on developing its applications rather than running data centers, and gives customers more choices for where and how their applications get deployed, particularly regarding sensitivies over data residency. The rollout begins next year in Canada with the US and Europe to follow.
It's a big win for AWS, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. That's because SaaS vendors are great partners for IaaS, since they bring massive workloads by themselves. "Compare that to a single customer moving. There's much more scale."