Stephen O’Grady nails down and confirms what Esteban Panzeri and I saw in the winter of 2009 when we were in discussions with Amazon Web Services to built a cloud application for a hardware project in a former life. Amazon is much, much more than a store these days, and up on the hill above Seattle, in the old Veteran’s Hospital, looms a revolution in cloud computing that is going to cause a train wreck among traditional enterprise software companies.
When I learned from Pooj Preena that Dropbox was using AWS to host its excellent cloud storage service; and after reading J.D. Lasica’s seminal white paper on identity in the age of cloud computing, I began to grok the implications of Amazon’s servers-in-the-skies. But add on that some higher level services in the stack and things start to get very very very interesting. Here’s O’Grady’s piece:
“Maybe it’s the lingering perception that they’re just a retailer, but the lack of a healthy fear of Amazon is still curious. Even as players large and small acknowledge the dominance of AWS within the public cloud computing market, the lack of an immune response to its continued expansion defies simple explanation.
“If Amazon restricted itself to basic public cloud computing services, that would be one thing. Most of the large systems players have turned their attention to the burgeoning market for quote unquote private cloud services. Whether these same cloud players appreciate the fact that a large portion of their interest in the private cloud is a function of the public cloud economic realities established by Amazon is unclear, but unimportant. Amazon is singularly responsible for the framing that is the public cloud today, a framing which generally relegates those with traditional enterprise margins in mind to private cloud settings.”
via Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services – tecosystems.
They moved. They’re down by South Lake Union, now. Beautiful new space….