This year at re:Invent, AWS released around 100 new features and services and roughly another 1,500 releases throughout 2018. The magnitude of the AWS cloud platform and the broad range of its services coupled with its Partner Ecosystem provide a complementary end-to-end technology platform for any size or type of organization. The fact that their services can accommodate either young startups, 100+ year enterprises or fortune 100 companies at the same cost per resource is democratizing the access to cloud technology. This means anyone has access to the world’s best technology at the same cost. As an example, if you’re a customer that needs the best artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), high-performance computing (HPC) or a super scalable global database, you’ll have access to the same technology platform and pay absolutely the same hourly price as a leader or a beginner, that’s why the cloud is enabling, more than ever, equal innovation opportunity to anyone, anywhere.
With the amount, the depth and the global reach of its services, AWS has now covered it all by taking the last step and expanding to customer’s premises, this step eliminates the necessity and theory of a multi-cloud strategy; it has brought customers to a point where they will choose their main cloud provider based on the range and quality of the services along with the ecosystem around it, and will completely immerse to gain the best and consistent experience from that selected technology platform for the next 15 or even more years.
Over the next few years, we are going to see the cloud, AWS, and others becoming more of a business platform, organizations will not only set up their technology platform in the cloud but also build their business processes for interacting with customers, partners, and suppliers. This cloud native integration will speed up, scale and secure their way of doing business. That being said, every business should have a cloud-first strategy based on one primary cloud platform or on a hybrid cloud with the capability to easily develop across unified and consistent platforms to ensure it will keep up with the world’s economy, not lagging behind.
re:Invent this year was a transitioning point for business transformation, here are my 5 takeaways from the event:
- AWS is by far the leading cloud platform and is widening the gap between itself and the others.With its broad range of services for any type and size company, it’s end-to-end technology platform, and the colossal partner ecosystem it has created, AWS remains and is becoming more and more of the natural choice.
- Machine learning is spreading everywhere and in due time will become a native tool for every developer. AWS has a mission to educate a million developers on machine learning and artificial intelligence over the next coming years and we are seeing a lot more services from them that enable and/or utilize machine learning.
- Serverless is not just a trend, AWS lets customers focus on the application development and not on provisioning infrastructure. AWS released new enhancements to its Serverless toolset, starting from Lambda code options, to Lambda integrations, DynamoDB scaling, and S3 automation, and in a few years developers will not even be aware of underlying OS.
- Hybrid cloud has stepped up a notch new with the advancement of VMware on AWS (VMC) alongside with the announcement of Outposts, the hybrid cloud is now seamlessly integrated allowing on-premises customers to truly leverage consistent usage of a unified platform.
- Security still remains the phase zero on the cloud journey, AWS launched new security management and monitoring, new capabilities like VPC sharing to create even more advanced segregation of duties and reduce the risk of mistakes or failures as well as allowing endless networking options with Transit Gateway which supports enterprise networking needs by allowing customers to scale connectivity across VPCs, multiple AWS accounts, and their on-premises network.
My final words, as the founder of AllCloud, an early cloud adopter and AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Google Cloud Platform Partner. Over the past 5 years, I have trained hundreds of AWS and GCP professionals, but still, with the pace of innovation and new releases, it feels like day one and there’s still so much more to learn. That being said, I feel that in order to serve our customers with the highest level of expertise, we had to make a decision to focus on AWS and let go of the multi-cloud dream, as it seems too complex with not enough value for the customer and this will likely not change.