O
fficially launched in 2006, Amazon Web
Services (AWS) was perhaps one of the
first companies to be launched with an
eye on the impending cloud revolution.
Now 10 years later, the company is firmly
entrenched as the market leader in its
segment, with only Microsoft making any kind of inroads
into its market dominance.
AWS operates out of 11 geographical regions around the
globe, and provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost
infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of
thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world.
With data centre locations in the U.S., Europe, Brazil,
Singapore, Japan, and Australia, AWS offers customers the
opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with their operations.
Businesses no longer need to plan for and procure servers
and other IT infrastructure weeks or months in advance.
Instead, AWS gives
them the option to
instantly spin up
hundreds or thousands of servers in
minutes and deliver
results significantly
faster.
According to Andy
Jassy who spearheaded and now
leads the Amazon
Web Services (AWS)
business, there was
no “ah-ha” moment
that lead the online
bookseller to one
day disrupt a trillion
dollar technology
market.
Writes John Furrier
on Forbes.com:
“Operating with a focus on delivering better experiences
internally and for merchant partners, like Target, to hear
Jassy tell it, the concept of AWS was sort of stumbled upon
while seeking to solve a recurring need, namely faster
technology deployment. This trend would manifest as an
entirely new and game-changing approach to technology
development, which involved decoupling services. No one
at Amazon knew at the time it would morph into what AWS
is today.”
What it is today, is a cloud computing platform like no other.
AWS has close to 30% market share of the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) sector, and estimates Gartner, has
10 times the computing capacity of its 14 nearest competitors combined. It has more than one million customers,
peak network traffic between its data centres is 25 terabits
per second (Tbps), and customers ran 70 million hours
of software on the platform in October 2014 using apps
offered viaits online store, AWS Marketplace.
A sample of household-name companies adopting AWS’
services includes NASA, the Obama Campaign, Pinterest,
Kempinski Hotels, Netflix, Infor, Spotify, Dropbox, Netflix,
Airbnb, General Electric, Samsung, the Commonwealth
Bank of Australia, the BBC and even the CIA.
AWS was broken out from Amazon.com as its own business segment in April 2015, and with sales of US$1.57
billion in the first quarter of the year, and US$265 million of
operating income, AWS accounts for a large percentage of
Amazon’s overall profits.
It’s not stopping there either. Market analysts have forecast
its annual revenue to cross $15 billion in the long-run (by
2019), based on the assumption that the cloud infrastructure and platform market could grow at around 30% CAGR
to reach $43 billion by 2018 (according to Goldman Sachs).
Many industry watchers back up the sales and revenue
statistics in agreeing that the AWS market proposition is a
compelling one.
“Any new class of application that is built to
efficiently use resources only when it needs
them is going to move
- the economics are
just too compelling,”
says James Staten, an
analyst at the Forrester
tech consultancy.
“It’s also incredibly
empowering to a
developer that so many
of the services they
want are just sitting
there. You don’t have
to write them, you can
simply connect to them
and your application is
finished.”
As befits an industry
behemoth like AWS,
the company has its
own annual showcase
called re:Invent. According to Amazon, AWS re:Invent is, at
its core, a learning conference, bringing together AWS users of all skill levels to connect, collaborate and learn about
AWS. Sessions are delivered by subject matter experts,
AWS engineers, and Solutions Architects or expert customers who can share their real world experiences and
lessons learned.
Agenda items at the industry’s largest cloud event include
AWS certification exams, midnight hackathons, bootcamps,
hands-on labs, gameday sessions, a global partner summit,
compliance summits, late night hands-on labs and technical
breakout sessions.
The event also often showcases industry-first innovations,
maintaining AWS’ position as a market-leader within the
cloud space. Amazon WorkMail, an alternative to Microsoft
Exchange, and AWS Lambda, a serverless microservices
platform, are examples of the company’s push towards
constantly shaking up the status quo.
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