Amazon Web Services battles for cloud computing supremacy
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Amazon Web
Services battles
for cloud computing
supremacy
MELPOMENE/FOTOLIA
a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
AWS vies for domination AWS’s main
cloud services
within cloud market
There are six types of service,
Nick Huber investigates whether or not Amazon Web Services summarised below by Baird
can sustain its growth in the cloud computing market, despite research.
increasing competition from rivals such as Microsoft and Google
1. Networking services
Amazon allows companies to extend
Cloud computing is everywhere in business. Whether a small van-hire business their infrastructure into the cloud via
in Burnley needs a few extra servers to power its website or a multinational Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, which
wants a large data warehouse to analyse millions of customer transactions. connects a network to AWS with a
private, isolated section of the AWS
The spread of the cloud – large networks of web servers and datacentres that cloud, and launch resources in a
are hosted online rather than on users’ own computers – is in no small part virtual network; AWS Direct Connect,
down to Amazon Web Services (AWS). a private, dedicated connection to
Amazon data centres; and Amazon
In just seven years, Amazon Web Services, the services arm of US online retailer Route 53, a domain name service.
Amazon, has become one of the biggest suppliers of cloud computing. It has
hundreds of thousands of customers, including Netflix and Instagram, and the 2. Compute services
Central Intelligence Agency and Unilever. EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute)
pay-as-you-go computing capacity
Growth has been rapid. AWS’s revenue was estimated at about $1.5bn in 2012, in the cloud, with a range of CPU,
according to a report by Baird Equity Research. memory and local disk options.
AWS refuses to say how many people it employs or what its sales figures are 3. Storage services
– parent company Amazon does not reveal this information – but according to S3 (Simple Storage Service) offers
Baird research, as of year-end 2010, Amazon employed 33,700 full-time and space for storing and retrieving any
part-time employees. amount of data from anywhere on
the web; AWS Storage Gateway is for
The company’s persistent innovation has impressed analysts. And as more seamless backup of enterprise data;
businesses see computing power as a commodity to be purchased when Amazon Glacier offers low-cost data
needed, like water or electricity, AWS is well placed for future growth. There may archiving.
turbulence ahead, though.
4. Database services
AWS has seen increased competition from cloud infrastructure companies like Amazon RDS means there is no
Rackspace, as well as established software companies such as Microsoft and need to install or manage database
Google, and also IBM and Fujitsu. instances. Includes managed
MySQL and Microsoft SQL servers.
5. App services
Cloud service providers Elastic MapReduce, a web service
that enables businesses,
Most popular cloud services researchers, data analysts and
80%
developers to easily and cost-
effectively process vast amounts of
60% data; ElastiCache, is a managed
cached service.
40%
6. Deployment and administration
20% Software to help IT staff manage
AWS service. Products include
0% CloudFormation and Elastic
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Source: Forrester
-2-
a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
In November 2012, AWS said it would cut prices for its storage service S3 by
25%. Amazon and Google have also lowered prices for infrastructure services. Timeline of
If the suppliers start a price war, AWS’s profit margins will be squeezed, which
could make it harder to maintain its impressive growth. key events
Other challenges include keeping up with growing demand, which may require it March 2006
to build more datacentres, and concerns about the security of cloud computing. AWS launches Amazon Simple
Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Bright forecast July 2006
AWS launches Amazon Simple
Analysts predict the market for cloud services will grow rapidly over the next 10 Queue Service (Amazon SQS).
years. AWS and Google are leading the market.
August 2006
AWS is “making waves” in IT by “applying retail economics”, which is making AWS launches Amazon Elastic
it an “emerging IT mega-vendor”, Morgan Stanley said in a report published in Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
May 2013.
November 2007
AWS revenue could be $24bn (£15.7bn) by 2022, through a combination of AWS launches European Region
services that produce greater scale in computing tasks, and by offering “a enabling developers and businesses
continual downward pressure in pricing”, the investment bank said. to store their data in Europe.
The public cloud market is still relatively small but growing fast. The top 10 August 2008
public cloud companies grew by 37% collectively, compared with just 2% for AWS launches Amazon Elastic
traditional technology companies, according to research company Baird. Block Store (Amazon EBS).
Some experts believe AWS can replace expensive corporate technology November 2008
investments, including computing power, storage, databases, messaging and AWS launches Amazon CloudFront.
other building blocks, to run business applications.
December 2008
One of AWS’s most eye-catching contracts was to provide computer AWS launches Public Data Sets
services to America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) via a private cloud on AWS. Amazon EC2 launches in
developed in the organisation’s datacentre. The deal, news of which EU West region.
emerged in March 2013, was described by Wired magazine as “seismic”
shift in cloud computing. January 2009
AWS launches the AWS
AWS grew out of Amazon’s core retail (e-commerce) business, which Management Console.
has operated at a massive scale for more than a decade, and requires its own
April 2009
AWS launches Amazon Elastic
MapReduce.
Amazon Web Services growth projection
May 2009
AWS launches AWS Import/Export.
Morgan Stanley projects AWS will grow from a $2bn
business in 2012 to +$24bn in 10 years October 2009
AWS launches Amazon Relational
Database Service (Amazon RDS).
December 2009
AWS launches Northern California
Region in the US.
December 2009
AWS launches Amazon EC2 Spot
instances and an additional pricing
option for customers. Also launches
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
(Amazon VPC).
Source: Amazon, Morgan Stanley Research, company data and IDC
-3-
a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
powerful, flexible and centralised technology infrastructure. Amazon engineers
created a platform for third-party online sellers. The platform became AWS. April 2010
AWS launches Amazon Simple
Pay as you go Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
AWS launches Amazon RDS in EU
One attraction of cloud computing for businesses is that they don’t have to pay Region. AWS launches Asia-Pacific
for expensive technology (computing power, storage, databases) up front to run Region in Singapore.
business applications. Instead, they can pay for computing power when needed
– just as businesses only pay for the electricity they use. July 2010
AWS introduces cluster compute
AWS’s sales pitch has been used by outsourcing suppliers for decades. Why instances, an Amazon EC2 instance
spend most of your IT budget and staff time on IT chores – for example, running type tailored for high-performance
servers and checking that you have sufficient storage – which is not your main computing.
business and is unlikely to boost growth or give you an edge over rivals?
September 2010
Some analysts believe web services, including AWS, will increasingly underpin AWS launches AWS Identity and
the IT industry, replacing the old model whereby companies own or rent their Access Management (IAM). Oracle
own IT kit and software, which is stored on their premises. certifies enterprise software on
Amazon EC2.
Main services May 2011
SAP certified SAP Rapid
AWS’s best-known services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon Deployment. Solutions and SAP
EC2), which lets customers buy computing power via web-based servers, BusinessObjects to run in production
and Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), which it says lets customers store on AWS.
and retrieve “any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web”.
AWS offers lots of other cloud services (more than 40), including high-speed August 2011
computing and big data services. AWS launches AWS Direct Connect.
AWS launches AWS GovCloud, a
AWS provides services from datacentres in different locations (availability zones) region designed to allow US
that are designed to be as resilient as possible. In some places, it has reserve government agencies and
datacentres to ensure services can carry on if the main datacentre fails. contractors to move more sensitive
workloads into the cloud by
The company has had a few big and widely reported data outages, of course. addressing their specific regulatory
However, analysts say the glitches have not damaged the company’s reputation. and compliance requirements.
AWS launches Amazon ElastiCache.
AWS is strongest in “infrastructure services”, whereby virtual servers are rented
from AWS for different amounts of time. Customers rent virtualised storage – December 2011
paying for what they use. Contracts are flexible, and can be short or long. AWS launches South America (Sao
Paulo) Region.
January 2012
AWS usage continues to rise AWS launches Amazon DynamoDB.
AWS launches AWS Storage
(billions of objects stored) Gateway.
1,000 February 2012
905bn
AWS launches Amazon Simple
762bn Workflow Service (Amazon SWF).
800
600 February 2013
AWS launches Amazon Redshift.
400 AWS launches AWS OpsWorks.
262bn
200 March 2013
40bn 102bn AWS launches AWS CloudHSM.
3bn 14bn
0
Q4 2006 Q4 2007 Q4 2008 Q4 2009 Q4 2010 Q4 2011 Q1 2012
Source: Company Reports and RW Baird
-4-
a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
AWS is widely used for is for testing software. Organisations developing their
own software will try it out using AWS systems “renting sometimes large
amounts of server capacity for a short amount of time and shut it all down after
the test is over”.
The testing service is quick and easy to use, says David Bradshaw, research
manager for software and services in Europe at research company IDC. “The
customer doesn’t want to wait months for servers which they might not want.”
Big savings?
Size matters in the cloud. Amazon Web Services says it can keep charges low
because it builds and manages infrastructure “at a massive scale”. It claims to
have lowered prices over 30 times since 2007.
“We’ve saved
According to Amazon, every day AWS adds the equivalent server capacity to
power Amazon as when it was just a $5.2bn business. tens of millions of
AWS says its customers have made significant savings. “We’ve already saved
dollars in the small
tens of millions of dollars in the small initiatives that we’ve done,” Michael Harte, initiatives that
CIO at Commonwealth Bank, is quoted as saying on AWS’s website. “And
we’re looking forward to saving hundreds of millions of dollars buying specified we’ve done”
services on demand.”
Michael Harte, CIO,
It is hard to find independent research to verify these claims, though. Research Commonwealth Bank
from IDC, which was sponsored by AWS and interviewed 11 organisations
running applications on AWS, found that the average return on investment
over five years was 626%. Average payback time on AWS services was seven
months. The average saving per application was just over $500,000 (£325,000).
Much of these savings came from moving applications onto AWS infrastructure,
which has lower capital and operational costs.
AWS enables better economics from scale and automated elasticity
Source: Morgan Stanley Research, Microsoft and Amazon
-5-a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
There is also evidence that AWS can help IT departments get more done. IT staff
productivity among the AWS customers surveyed increased by 52%, IDC found. Main global
But saving money and increasing efficiency by using AWS may not be executives
straightforward. As Morgan Stanley notes, the savings you can make depend on
a range of factors, including the size of the organisation, the type of application Andy Jassy, senior vice-
it is using and whether fewer employees are needed to manage the AWS president, Amazon Web Services
technology. and Amazon Infrastructure
Leads the Amazon Web Services
Complex charging (AWS) business and the Technology
Infrastructure organisation for
To make the most of AWS technology, however, IT departments need to Amazon.com. A member of
understand its pricing. Amazon.com’s senior executive team
since 2002, Jassy is also responsible
AWS charges customers in three main ways: pay-per-use, reserved instances, for helping to guide the company’s
and spot Instances. overall direction.
An “instance” is a virtual machine or virtual server. Instead of buying a server to Adam Selipsky, vice-president,
sit in your office, you purchase an instance – a virtual version that sits on the Amazon Web Services
AWS cloud. The customer runs the machine. Joined Amazon Web Services in May
2005. Oversees developer support,
A reserved instance is like saying, “I need a server for three years and I need product strategy, demand
it to have X CPU power, Y memory.” You choose the instance type (the type generation, “evangelism” and
of server you need based on your required specifications) and make a small marketing communications. Before
upfront payment, typically around $250. joining Amazon Web Services,
Selipsky was vice-president in
The payment reserves the server for you for three years. You pay $0.012 per several areas for RealNetworks.
hour when you use the server.
Werner Vogels, chief technology
Spot instances are when customers can bid in an auction on unused AWS officer, Amazon.com
cloud capacity. Responsible for driving the
company’s technology vision. Before
If demand for cloud services is low, there may be surplus computing capacity, joining Amazon, he worked as a
meaning that the “spot price” is low. Conversely, when a lot of people are using research scientist at Cornell
a lot of cloud computing, the spot price increases. University where he was a principal
investigator in several research
projects that target the scalability
and robustness of mission-critical
Fast-evolving AWS services enterprise computing systems.
160
UK, Iain Gavin, director,
150 Amazon Web Services
140 Looks after AWS’s UK and Irish
customers. Gavin was one of the first
120
members of the AWS team in
Europe. Has more than 20 years’
experience in the IT industry,
Number of services
100
covering software and digital
82
80
products.
61
60
Charlie Bell, vice-president
48 of utility computing, Amazon
40
Web Services
24 Responsible for worldwide
20 engineering, operations and product
management for AWS. Bell began
0 his career in 1979 as a developer of
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012E mini-computer software used in the
engineering of Space Shuttle
Source: Company Reports and RW Baird
-6-a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
The spot price is set by AWS based on an algorithm that takes into account payload sets. He later worked for
many factors, such as the last bids, how much excess capacity is available, and Oracle and co-founded Server
other factors like supply and demand. AWS says customers can get up to 66% Technologies Group.
discount on the on-demand price, by using spot pricing.
Stephen E. Schmidt, general
All clear? manager and chief information
security officer, Amazon Web
AWS’s pricing structure is “transparent but complex”, says Gartner, which Services
advises customers to be careful to take in storage and networking-related Duties at AWS include leading
costs, not just computing costs. “Consolidate and tag your bills, negotiate product design, management, and
an enterprise agreement, commit to a minimum volume, and buy reserved engineering development efforts
instances to get lower prices.” focused on bringing the competitive,
economic and security benefits of
Data demand cloud computing to business and
government customers. Before AWS
As companies produce ever greater amounts of data, they need bigger he was a senior executive the Federal
repositories (data warehouses). By using AWS, organisations can avoid building Bureau of Investigation.
extra datacentre capacity or in some cases, having a datacentre at all, says
IDC’s Bradshaw. Jerry Hunter, vice-president of
infrastructure, Amazon.com
“Instead of having an enormous capital expenditure, you are effectively paying Leads the infrastructure team at
a rent for the servers you use. You pay flexibly for the service you use. So if you Amazon.com. This team consists of
need 100 servers during the day and only 10 at night, then that’s what you pay datacentre build and management,
for,” he says. capacity management, acquisition
and management of servers and
Cross-industry users networking and management of
dozens of facilities across the globe.
AWS is used by companies of various sizes and industries. AWS won’t say
exactly how many customers it has; only that it has as “hundreds of thousands Teresa Carlson, vice-president of
in more than 190 countries”. They include Samsung, SAP, Netflix, Shell, AWS Worldwide Public Sector
Dropbox, Yelp, Nasdaq, Adobe, Nasa, Pinterest, Spotify, Ticketmaster, Unilever, Responsible for strategy, sales and
IBM, Lionsgate and Farmers Insurance. business development for Amazon’s
Web Services and cloud computing
Governments and public bodies have been more reticent about using AWS business. She is charged with driving
services, says IDC’s Bradshaw. “The only industry where there are potentially “revenue and partnership strategy” in
problems is government or things linked to government, where people generally the public sector. Before joining
like to have their data stored in [the same] country,” he says. Amazon, Carlson was vice-president
of federal government business at
Fortunately for AWS, most companies store at least some of their data outside Microsoft.
the country in which they are headquartered. Can AWS still grow while cutting
prices – piling services high and selling them cheap, like a supermarket?
UK strategy
Iain Gavin, director, at AWS, is responsible for UK and Ireland customers. In
an interview with Computer Weekly, he says the UK market is good but says
he cannot give figures for recent sales growth, profits or customer numbers
because of AWS’s parent company.
The lack of financial information about AWS makes it hard to judge its
performance and prospects. But analysts say AWS has a good reputation UK office
among CIOs.
Amazon.co.uk Limited
Their most common demands are saving money, getting rid of older IT by giving Amazon Web Services Support team
tasks to a supplier, innovation and flexible services, says Gavin, who talks to Patriot Court
many UK IT leaders. He gives some examples. 1-9 The Grove
Slough
One customer, a global business, developed a big new website using AWS’s Berkshire
EC2. Shortly after the site went live, the CIO was told that a bug had been found SL1 1QP
in the site. The bug, which Gavin says was not due to AWS’s technology, was
-7-a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
causing transactions on the site to slow. Customers were unaware of the glitch
but the company needed to fix it before it became a major problem.
The company bought 12 extra servers for around two weeks. The extra
computing capacity helped the company to fix the problem in the software
application.
Cloud computing can help companies innovate by making it easier and cheaper
to develop new technology, says Gavin.
Say an IT team wants to test and develop a new SAP application. Traditionally,
the team would need to get permission and funding for the project from its CIO.
A large project may require a company to buy 20 servers and cost millions of
pounds.
It is much easier to try new things if you have a cloud computing supplier, Gavin
says. “With AWS, you can spend thousands rather than millions of dollars.”
If any idea doesn’t work, a company using cloud computing would probably
spend less time and money on the project than it would by doing it all itself, the
argument goes. Think of software testing, like a low-key product launch. During
this time, the company can get quick feedback from customers and staff.
“I have worked in IT for about 20 years,” says Gavin. “A lot of people won’t
admit there is a problem with software applications [because an organisation]
has spent so much time and money on it.”
Case study: BP
When oil company BP wanted to make its IT more efficient and secure, it used cloud technology from suppliers including
AWS. For a multinational company with around 87,000 employees and complex IT, moving to the cloud was a challenge. BP
took a cautious and calculated approach to bridge its cloud gap, using a mix of private cloud, public cloud and in-house IT
infrastructure.
BP, which is the fifth largest company in the world in terms of revenues in 2012, has a large and expensive IT infrastructure
– including 90,000 PCs, 57PB of data, 340 WAN connections and 17,000 servers. Its IT services are run by 3,500
employees and contractors, as well as 7,000 staff from managed service providers.
Speaking in June at Cloud World Forum 2013 in London, BP CIO Dana Deasy said: “Like every large company, we had
legacy IT and somehow had to burst into the cloud.”
The oil and gas company wanted to migrate some of its workloads to the cloud environment to gain efficiency and optimise
performance and security, he said. The IT team chose nine cloud service providers to provide a mix of infrastructure as a
service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) to meet its cloud requirements.
The IaaS platform is provided by AWS.
Although it is public cloud provider Amazon’s service, it is a virtual private cloud (VPC). Amazon VPC allows users to
provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch resources in a virtual network that you define.
“A majority of AWS customers are demanding Amazon VPC,” said BP’s chief cloud architect, Paul McMohan.
Having benefited from cloud’s agility and scalability, BP’s IT team is now building a technology strategy to look at the cloud
ecosystem. “When we started, AWS was leading, and we were testing and developing our services using its services. But
now, the cloud marketplace is evolving fast,” said McMohan.
The company is assessing AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud services. “We are also looking at traditional service
providers, such as IBM, and then there is OpenStack which is maturing too,” he said.
-8-a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
Is AWS’s strategy for the UK to sell more advanced services, such as its
data warehouse service? Gavin does not elaborate, saying only that its data
warehouse service is good value and will appeal to small and large businesses.
“Enterprises say they can do more data warehouse applications [using AWS’s
data warehouse service]. For example, they can try 10 to 15 data warehouse
applications rather than the five [they did] previously.”
As companies try to make sense of their big data by analysing their customer
data – for example, billing and buying patterns – demand for low-cost data
warehouses could increase. But if AWS gets into a price war with rivals such
as Microsoft and Google, won’t its profit margins and growth suffer?
Gavin does not seem worried about AWS’s price cuts becoming unsustainable.
“CIOs have a huge list of things they want to do and a finite list of resources.
When we drop prices, we drive more business and volume to our business.”
Innovation
One of AWS’s strengths, according to analysts, is its ability to churn out new
products and services.
“Innovation lies at the core of Amazon’s approach to cloud computing. Amazon
evolves its service with unprecedented rapidity,” Gartner says in research on
AWS. “It may release new features several times a month.”
AWS benefits and challenges
CHALLENGES BENEFITS
Flexibility Lock-up
• Companies pay only for what they use, without upfront or • AWS’s proprietary infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
long-term commitments. By swapping upfront capital software may make it harder for companies to switch away
expenditures with ongoing operating expenses, startups from AWS once workloads are already committed to an
can bring their product to market quicker through AWS. AWS cloud. Competing open source cloud platforms may
alleviate some companies’ lock-up concerns.
Scalability • There are also bandwidth and time costs associated with
• Companies can easily increase and/or decrease AWS moving data in and out of AWS.
resources to meet customer demand and manage costs.
Security
Cost-effectiveness • Because workloads outsourced to AWS are located
• Potential for significantly lower total cost of ownership on AWS-owned hardware in external datacentres,
(TCO) in certain cases, such as applications with spiky and companies are reluctant to send critical workloads to the
unpredictable use cases. cloud due to the perceived lack of control.
• Allows employees to focus on their core competencies, • Primary workloads that are outsourced to public clouds
and leverage the resources and experience that Amazon are mainly low-sensitivity, high-latency data ROI changes
provides. over time.
• Companies in early stages of growth may see attractive
Breadth of offering ROI from outsourcing to AWS. However, as a company
• The convenience of managing all your IT needs from grows, economies of scale may make in-house ROIs more
storage to computing power to database management attractive.
through one supplier is an attractive proposition to SMEs.
Regulatory
Experience • Regulatory requirements on data controls.
• SMEs can leverage Amazon’s 15+ years of experience in
delivering large-scale, global IT infrastructure in a secure
fashion.
Source: Morgan Stanley Research
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Nearly all of the technology for AWS is developed in-house at Amazon,
according to Gartner. Key facts
Amazon has AWS developers, support and sales staff around the world. AWS began in 2006
A substantial percentage of its developers are concentrated in its Seattle Revenue is expected to reach an
headquarters, but it also has developers in many other locations, including low- estimated $1.5bn in 2012, and could
cost offshore locations. reach $24bn (£15.7bn) by 2022,
financial services firm Morgan
Challenges Stanley has forecast.
AWS has done well so far, but it is still a young business and has three main Main UK customers
challenges. The first and biggest one is growing competition in cloud services – Channel Four
in particular from Google, Microsoft and Rackspace. Unilever
Guardian Newspaper
Google and Microsoft have “deeper pockets and larger R&D budgets”, Shazam
according to Baird research. It suggests Microsoft and IBM could become Zoopla
bigger than AWS in the cloud services market. Within infrastructure services, Totaljobs
AWS’s main rival is probably IBM, followed by Fujitsu. These companies can Trinity Mirror
promise to keep customers’ data in the UK, for an additional price – a major uSwitch
concern for some organisations.
Although AWS’s growth has been impressive, it has a small share of some big IT
markets. For example, Baird estimates that AWS has a 2% share of the market
for datacentre systems. The total market for data systems has been estimated
at $140bn (£92bn).
Further competition comes from traditional hardware suppliers that have
announced hundreds of service provider partnerships to offer public cloud
services.
Overview
Founded in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a fast-growing subsidiary of Amazon.com. AWS is one of the biggest
providers of cloud computing. It supplies software developers and businesses with services hosted online, ranging from
pay-as-you-go computing power (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2) and storage (Amazon Simple Storage Service, S3)
to databases (Amazon Relational Database Service, RDS) and payments (Amazon Flexible Payments Service, FPS).
The company refuses to disclose its revenue, but research company Baird has estimated AWS’s revenue at $1.5bn in 2012.
AWS is best known for two services: Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. AWS is thought to be the market lead for infrastructure
as a service (IaaS).
AWS refuses to say how many employees or customers it has – saying only that it has “hundreds of thousands of
customers” in more than 190 countries. Its customers include Netflix, Instagram, the CIA, Unilever and The Guardian
newspaper. AWS has lots of public sector customers, including more than 500 government agencies and 2,000 education
institutions.
Despite a few high-profile service outages, AWS has a good reputation for reliability and customer service. Analysts praise
AWS’s record of innovation. Overall, things look promising for AWS. Demand for cloud computing is likely to continue for the
foreseeable future, although AWS has growing competition from cloud infrastructure companies like Rackspace, as well as
established software companies such as Microsoft and Google. For big customers, such as the CIA, AWS will build a
private cloud.
In 2012, AWS said it would cut the price of its storage service, S3, by 25%. Google and Microsoft also announced price cuts.
A price war for cloud services will squeeze AWS’s profit margins. Will it sell more at lower margins or less at higher margins?
Another challenge is keeping up with customer demand. Some analysts believe AWS will probably need to build more
datacentres to give it enough computing power to satisfy customers.
-10-a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
The second challenge is financial. To maintain growth and boost profit margins,
AWS will either need to sell more services, or sell fewer but more higher-value
services, such as its new data warehouse service. And the bigger a business
becomes, the harder it is to maintain fast growth.
“The challenge for [AWS] is to build a similar market share in some of the major
continental economies. To address that they probably need to build another
European datacentre,” says IDC’s Bradshaw.
Another challenge is the immaturity of the cloud services market. Getting started
on AWS’s infrastructure and platform services is easy but, as Gartner has
cautioned, “as customers expand their adoption, they encounter challenges in
managing availability, performance, security, cost and internal governance”.
Although cloud infrastructure as a service alleviates hardware-provisioning
challenges, it does not eliminate most other IT operations tasks or concerns.
“The most successful organisations not only adapt their traditional IT operations
processes for the cloud, they also use the unique capabilities of the cloud to
transform the way they do IT operations,” says Gartner.
In only seven years, AWS has become one of the biggest suppliers of cloud
computing, winning customers in companies of all sizes and industries, and
gaining a reputation for reliability and innovation.
Maintaining this impressive performance is getting harder, though, because
of growing competition in cloud services from Internet-based companies and
traditional hardware suppliers.
AWS may need to build big (and expensive) new datacentres to keep up with
growing demand and keep prices low. Getting more customers to use its data
warehouse services will also help to ensure that its cloud has a silver lining. n
-11-a supplier profile from ComputerWeekly
Products and services
Service Description
Amazon Elastic Compute A web service that provides resizable compute
Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) capacity in the cloud
Currently AWS offers a range of operating systems on Amazon EC2, including: Red
Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux, Windows Server, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Amazon
Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo Linux, Debain
Other software can also be run on top of Amazon EC2 to give customers the agility,
flexibility and cost savings of the cloud, but using technology they are familiar with.
Examples below (this is not an exhaustive list):
Databases: Microsoft SQL Server; MongoDB; Apache Cassandra; IBM DB2; MySQL;
Oracle
Application servers: IBM WebSphere; Zend Server; Adobe ColdFusion
Content management: Microsoft SharePoint; Drupal, WordPress
Business intelligence: SAP BusinessObjects; Oracle; Jaspersoft
Is a web service that enables businesses,
Amazon Elastic MapReduce
researchers, data analysts and developers to easily
(Amazon EMR)
and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data
Allows customers to scale their Amazon EC2 capacity
Auto Scaling up or down automatically according to conditions
they define
Automatically distributes incoming application traffic
Elastic Load Balancing
across multiple Amazon EC2 instances
Allows customers to provision a logically isolated
Amazon Virtual Private section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud
Networking
Cloud (Amazon VPC) where they can launch AWS resources in a virtual
network that they define
A highly available and scalable Domain Name System
Amazon Route 53
(DNS) web service
Allows customers to establish a dedicated network
AWS Direct Connect
connection from their premises to AWS
Provides a simple web services interface that can be
Amazon Simple Storage
Storage used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at
Service (Amazon S3)
any time, from anywhere on the web
A very low-cost storage service that provides secure
Amazon Glacier
and durable storage for data archiving and backup
Amazon Elastic Block Store Provides block level storage volumes for use with
(Amazon EBS) Amazon EC2 instances
Transfers data directly on to and off storage devices
AWS Import/Export using Amazon’s high-speed internal network to allow
fast transfer to data in to and out of the AWS cloud
A service connecting an on-premises software
appliance with cloud-based storage to provide
AWS Storage Gateway seamless and secure integration between an
organisation’s on-premises IT environment
and AWS’s storage infrastructure
Content Delivery Network Amazon CloudFront A web service for content delivery
Amazon Relational Database A web service that makes it easy to set up, operate
Database
Service (Amazon RDS) and scale a relational database in the cloud
Currently, AWS offers a range of database engines on Amazon RDS, including:
MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server
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