At this year’s Re:Invent, Amazon Web Services spoken directly to its customers, but questions remain as to whether the right messages are getting across. For the technologists who make up the 50,000 people at the cloud computing juggernaut, they came away with more questions than answers in their search for help in making profitable use of the cloud.
CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs are all preparing for a possible recession and reviewing their cloud costs accordingly. Their decisions about cloud spend will drive — or hold back — IT teams’ ability to undertake more cloud innovation. Technologists who have made a major commitment to the cloud now face the unpleasant possibility that misplaced cost controls will hinder their ability to move forward and innovate.
Given the potential impact of corporate belt-tightening, it was surprising that AWS management hadn’t built an even stronger and more detailed case for cloud as a tool for cost containment. Technologists who had hoped for more support from AWS now look forward to the company fleshing out its case studies that provide clear guidance.
Many success stories, few details
AWS’ concerted effort to deliver its message to the C-suite at the five-day event in Las Vegas marks a subtle shift from recent years. Amazon has worked diligently to win the allegiance of technologists and convince them of the merits of innovating in the cloud. And they succeeded. The company now has at least 33% of the cloud services market, and users are assembling the AWS building blocks in all sorts of innovative ways.
But as the global economy weakens, senior customer executives appear to be questioning spending on AWS. AWS second-quarter revenue grew 27% from the same period a year ago, but that growth rate was the slowest since 2014. AWS executives said they were focused on demonstrating the value of AWS to dubious CEOs and CIOs.
Keynote speeches by Adam SelipskiCEO of AWS, and Swami Sivasubramanianvice president for data and machine learning, were filled with customer success stories. Selipsky, for example, spoke of Airbnb’s ability to quickly adapt to market conditions thanks to its reliance on public cloud during the COVID-19 pandemic. He gave examples of companies that reduced the time they needed to develop new features for their products by more than 40% after moving data to the cloud.
Yes, these are fascinating stories. But I wonder if they will become even more powerful as AWS fills in the details. How specifically did AWS contribute to cost savings? How were projects completed faster? These are the details we need to hear, both as technologists and as executives.
Wanted: More opinions and information on the Lift and Shift Overrun
AWS has traditionally been reluctant to advise on how customers can transform their businesses in the cloud. AWS continually adds to its ever-growing collection of building blocks, then steps back and watches its customers experiment and innovate. AWS then develops other building blocks to fill the gaps that emerge from customer experiences. But it doesn’t tell clients how to use the blocks.
However, as AWS responds to business executives’ cost concerns, it may be necessary to become more opinionated and tell customers exactly what to do. For example, AWS offers around 600 instance types, leaving most customers with far too many choices. AWS would serve its customers well by helping them choose the most efficient instances and providing guidance on how best to operate them.
AWS’ message to the C-suite is: Cloud computing can be orders of magnitude cheaper than your traditional computing resources – you just need to use them the right way. The value of the cloud is not a simple lift and move, where you run operations in the cloud exactly as you ran them in your own data center. The value rises from the higher order services available on AWS.
The sooner businesses can access higher-level services, the sooner they can leverage them, and the sooner they can become more efficient in using the cloud. As customers optimize their existing spend, they can invest the savings in even better services that will drive even more innovation, which is critical.
New Services, Enhanced Security, and a Future Without ETL
This philosophy, in turn, explains AWS’s focused efforts to convince organizations to bring all their data to the cloud so that technologists can do interesting things with it. Data is the key to innovative products and services that will help businesses survive and thrive in times of economic uncertainty.
Given the C-suite’s concern over cloud data security and governance, AWS explained why it’s the safest place to store and process it. A message that will likely need to be repeated over and over again in the months and years to come.
As senior executives continue to worry about compliance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other security and governance issues, technologists were excited about the new tools that will shape the data so that it can be used.
The challenges of extract-transform-load (ETL) are likely to be significantly alleviated by the Aurora zero ETL integration with Amazon Redshift. It allows customers using both Aurora Database and Redshift Data Warehouse to move data without ETL operations. Integration is always in preview.
A similar integration between Amazon Redshift and Apache Spark. Users can now move data between the two platforms without ETL.
These product enhancements will likely be very important in realizing the vision of a future without ETL. The buzz generated by these announcements at re:Invent reinforces the desire for even more innovation in the no-code, low-code space. AWS users want easier ways to acquire new datasets. Customers also want AWS to create and manage a marketplace of different datasets that they can mine.
Still, this year’s re:Invent launches are making good progress in closing the gaps, facilitating the movement of data, and ensuring governance keeps the right information in the right hands. Good governance and structure, along with a standardized process that eliminates cut-and-paste or ghost IT, are critically important to efficiency.
Developers, it’s time to think differently
Although this year’s re:Invent keynote focused on CEOs and CIOs, the AWS team once again delivered a clear and inspiring message to technologists: Developers need to think differently when it’s about the cloud.
Our constantly changing environment does not allow the creation of products and services for a year or two. Instead, today’s dynamic conditions require developers to create something small and keep scaling it. The best way to achieve this, without requiring a complete reinvention every two months, is to use an event-driven architecture.
Customers who use the cloud as a lift-and-shift relocation of IT resources will continue to lag behind. The cloud is about event-driven architecture. If you’re not leveraging it, then you’re not leveraging the cloud at all.
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