Evolving the Cloud at Amazon’s AWS re:Invent

When it comes to the public cloud, Amazon is the clear leader. In fact, like many people, my own first experiences at building a cloud-based system were done using Amazon’s cloud services. And looking at some of the big announcements coming out of Amazon’s AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas this week, they appear to be focused on continuing to push the envelope of cloud capabilities.

Looking at the announcements coming from Amazon at AWS re:Invent, there is no one clear area of focus. The new features and technologies that Amazon is talking about touch many areas, from security to management to developer-oriented tools.

Probably the biggest announcement, or at least the one getting the most attention, is Amazon Aurora. While Amazon has had cloud based databases before, Aurora is the first MySQL-compatible relational database that is designed to compete with and supplement traditional enterprise databases. It’s not clear that businesses will be dumping their big databases to use Aurora but it will definitely be worth investigating when building new cloud-based infrastructures.

Other capabilities announced at AWS re:Invent include improved key management services designed to help with implementing and managing encryption, as well as new configuration capabilities for infrastructure automation and resource configuration. There are also multiple new coding tools to ease the creation of cloud applications and manage code repositories.

While these new capabilities will continue to make Amazon AWS one of the top choices for cloud computing, it’s not clear that these will lead to full dominance over major challengers. In my opinion, cloud computing is one of those technology areas that will always support multiple options. Some businesses will turn to Amazon for some tasks, while potentially using Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and other cloud providers for other capabilities.

But at AWS re:Invent, Amazon certainly didn’t do anything to hurt their position as one of the public clouds top providers.

For more on this topic, read the Aberdeen report Flash Forward: How DevOps Will Affect Evolution to Hybrid Cloud