This past year Amazon Web Services celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and thus "the birth of cloud computing". EC2 still serves as the principal basis of AWS services and while its technology continues to evolve, AWS is slowly shifting strategies. What can be expected from its cloud platform?
AWS has developed and marketed a wide range of cloud services since 2006. Recently, however, the company's focus has shifted to optimizing existing services. Through developing more depth and additional functionality, the cloud provider can further assist its customers. In line with that, developers are also being provided with increased support. AWS is thus moving away from being a cloud platform that requires a high degree of expertise. It mainly wants to help developers achieve their goals and enable them to accomplish these on their own.
A key focus area is adding machine learning (ML) and AI functionalities to existing services. One example is Amazon DevOps Guru, a machine learning-based tool that easily improves the operational performance and availability of an application. With this expansion of services, AWS is making it easier for users to extract valuable information from large amounts of data, by simplifying the interpreting of that data. This development reinforces the new direction AWS has taken.
Partner program
Recently, there has been much more focus on collaborating with partners and leveraging the knowledge that partners possess. Think, for example, of Sentia's SAP expertise. Due to the rapid growth in the amount of organizations making the transition to the cloud, AWS needs support in meeting customer demand and is now fully committed to supporting partners in onboarding these customers. Sentia, for example, now participates in the AWS Competence program and acquired the 'Migration' and 'DevOps' competencies.
AWS is the undisputed leader when it comes to IaaS, but it has also made a strong commitment to PaaS functionality over the past five years. Additionally, AWS is expected to increase its commitment to developments and technologies that support hybrid cloud setups, third-party tools and services so that they can seamlessly integrate with both hybrid and multicloud setups. This development is noteworthy as it will make migration to AWS easier and more accessible for a very broad group of customers by catering to an extensive variety of business requirements.
From service provider to partner
The conclusion is that AWS is increasingly enabling users to find their own way on the cloud platform. For the services of an MSP, such as Sentia, this means that they should increasingly be acting as a 'guardian of knowledge and best practices', guiding organizations through their cloud journey. It is up to them to support organizations in getting the most out of their cloud environments based on the Well Architected Framework. This is a role that Sentia, as proud AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, continues to be particularly passionate about.
