Amazon’s AWS re:Invent extravaganza is worth exploring for two reasons. First, it offers a look at where the market leader in cloud computing is going to try to take the market overall. Second, it offers an opportunity to see where cloud software features and tools will be heading, and that could have a major impact on both edge computing and carrier cloud plans. It’s not that Amazon laid all this out, but that it’s possible to deduce a lot by summing what they did say in the various announcements at the event.
Perhaps the clearest signal the event sent was that Amazon wants more cloud-selling feet on the street. Despite the fact that Amazon’s reseller partners have been criticized for high-pressure sales tactics, the company is expanding its commitment to channel sales. That demonstrates a basic truth, which is that Amazon is looking for a bigger total addressable market (TAM) by going down-market. Some large channel players with vertical specializations can credibly sell to enterprises, but most enterprises expect direct sales. Not so the smaller buyers, who are looking for reseller/integrator types with expertise in their specific business.
That doesn’t mean Amazon isn’t interested in the enterprise; they also announced their Mainframe Modernization service, aimed at getting enterprises to actually move stuff to the cloud rather than use the cloud as a front-end to static data center applications. The service is aimed at applications that enterprises developed themselves, or at least have source code for, and it allows these applications to be translated into Java applications (refactored) or run the code (largely or somewhat as-is) in the cloud.
I can understand these two moves by Amazon, because rival Microsoft has a much stronger position with businesses, as opposed to web-scale startup types that are a big piece of Amazon’s business. Amazon can at least work to mitigate the bad press on channel sales tactics, and a partner-based cloud strategy is likely to be a bigger benefit to a smaller firm with limited access to skilled in-house expertise, it’s likely to succeed. On the Mainframe Modernization front, though, I’m skeptical.
There are some enterprises who’ve told me that they would like to be able to walk away from mainframe data centers, but the view is held primarily by line organizations and some tech mavens, not by CxO-level people. Most of the latter are simply not prepared to cede business-critical processing and the associated databases to the cloud. I think Amazon may have seen a few eager inquiries from people who really can’t make the decision, and read this as the leading edge of an “everything-to-the-cloud” wave.
A related enterprise-targeted offering is the Enterprise Private 5G service. This has been kicked around at Amazon for some time, and essentially it’s a CBRS-shared-spectrum 5G plug and play deal, where Amazon provides the hardware needed and hosts the 5G software on AWS, giving the enterprise private 5G without the hassle of spectrum auctions and installation and maintenance. But while I’ve seen a fair amount of enterprises kick 5G tires, I’m not seeing (or hearing) a big commitment. Not only that, it’s far from clear what you really accomplish with enterprise 5G based on CBRS. Why is this a better strategy than WiFi, particularly WiFi 6? You’d have to have a fairly large facility or campus, a need for a private mobile network on it, and some reason to believe your spectrum wouldn’t be subject to interference by other unlicensed users.
For the line organizations, Amazon announced a couple of things that play to the citizen developer space. The most obvious is Amplify Studio, a new way of doing low-code development on a cloud platform, to then be run there as well. The other is expanded AI/ML tools, including a free ML on-ramp service, whose UI isn’t too much of a stretch for citizen developers. Reasoning that line organizations are more likely to be interested in getting rid of the data center than the CIO teams, Amazon is making sure that the line departments don’t get befuddled by early complexity.
This smacks to me of the same throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks thinking as the Mainframe Modernization service. There were some potentially useful announcements relating to moving work to the cloud, in terms of controlling the border-crossing access charges and supporting high-performance file server migration to the cloud, and I think the combination indicates that Amazon is trying to broaden its engagement with enterprises. That they’re likely not getting it right at this point means that they’re risking having Microsoft and Google take their shots, with smarter targeting.
From all of this, it’s tempting to say that re:Invent didn’t invent much, which is in fact how some characterized it; as “more incremental”. There were two things that I think are signs of significant thinking and planning on Amazon’s part, and these are where market-changing trends might be signaled, or supported.
The first is the AWS IoT TwinMaker, which fixes an Amazon void in the creation of digital-twin representations of real-world processes that are synchronized through IoT and used to control material handling and production, for example. This service creates a twin-graph and users can provide their own data connectors, which means that the service shouldn’t require users host everything in the cloud, but rather allows them to use Amazon’s premises-extension tools for IoT. That means that things that require a short control loop can still be supported without cloud-level latency. It also means that if edge computing from Amazon were to come along, more could be done in the cloud without disrupting the digital-twin visualization that anchors the whole system.
That plays with the other thing, which is AWS Cloud WAN. This service takes aim at the needs of enterprises whose major facilities are widely dispersed geographically, and what it does is create Amazon-WAN links to avoid having to do wide-area network connections among those sites. It doesn’t seem to be targeting the replacement of VPNs (so far, at least) but rather at ensuring that cloud adoption isn’t hampered by the need to link cloud-distributed applications across private network resources. This sort of thing would be most useful if enterprises were to adopt (yet-to-be-offered) AWS Edge Computing services.
The net here is that the big news from re:Invent, IMHO, is that it’s signaling Amazon’s intentions to get full-on into edge computing, and that it’s presuming that the edge opportunity will be driven by IoT and that it will be connected by what’s essentially “Amazon NaaS”, a point I’ll address in another blog this week. Amazon’s decision to get into the edge business also suggests it will be getting more into the network business, and looking to make “NaaS” a true cloud service, even including transport. That surely puts the network operators on notice; start thinking seriously about NaaS or watch it tap off your revenue rather than augment it.