One of the things that historically defined our coverage of AWS Cloud is that Amazon never really needed to ping us, never mind send us a press release. When a new AWS service release came out we’d see developers parsing the news and immediately kicking the tyres, often excited about the possibilities being opened to them. We’d see multiple retweets from folks, and pointers to Jeff Barr’s announcement blog. As AWS has really kicked into gear in terms of its service delivery velocity this effect has dampened a tad – it’s frankly hard for people, even the most ADD-driven developers, to keep up with the latest shiny with 1300+ releases a year. But the basic point still stands, that the market does a great job of telling stories on AWS Cloud’s behalf.
This point was really emphasised yesterday when a couple of major ISVs made announcements of deeper commitments to the platform, in the space of a few hours, at their own events – Atlassian and Red Hat. We didn’t get a heads up from AWS, but these are both pretty big wins, notable because they point to the current transition from infrastructure to platform as a service. Third parties are increasingly deciding that if you’re going to run on AWS Cloud then it makes no sense to avoid platform specifics. Value trumps portability. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
So the Atlassian news broke in the morning – Was this just new Bamboo AMIs, gee whiz mum pass the salt, or something deeper? The top line news was that Atlassian was going to offer local hosting, supporting more regions across Europe on AWS. But Barb Darrow of Fortune has a great interview with Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath that provides some important context.
He said Atlassian preferred focusing on one public cloud vendor so it can focus on that infrastructure and make use of all of its associated services. The beauty of sticking with one cloud with it is the customer can take advantage of both the basic and higher level services that cloud provider offers.
In the interview Viswanath added that lock-in is not an issue because of competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Later in the day came news that another cloud immigrant, Red Hat, too, was going to deepen integration with AWS, from its Kubernetes-based openshift PaaS and console.
Customers will be able to seamlessly configure and deploy a range of AWS services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and Elastic Load Balancing with just a few clicks from directly within the Red Hat OpenShift console.
While Oracle claims that it can compete effectively with Amazon with a much lower capex bill, AWS continues to sign exactly the kind of ISV partnership that brought Oracle to enterprise prominence in the day, when it was primarily a database vendor serving other vendor’s applications. Just as as with Oracle SQL in the late 1990s third parties are now prepared to take advantage of proprietary extensions. If customers are going to take advantage of higher level Amazon APIs Red Hat wants to be part of that.
With this alliance, AWS and Red Hat will give customers the ability to easily build and extend container-based enterprise applications with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform using a range of AWS compute, database, analytics, machine learning, networking, mobile, and various application services.
Red Hat has recently been working closely with Google Cloud Platform which made the AWS announcement – which includes a commitment to joint engineering around AWS and Kubernetes – even more interesting. I am on the record that Google should buy Red Hat if it wants to instantly become a top tier enterprise player. Red Hat is evidently not interested in putting all of its eggs in one basket unless that kind of transaction happens though. It also collaborates closely with Microsoft Azure. Bottom line Red Hat It needs to be ready to help customers take advantage of AWS APIs as they are introduced. Red Hat is also a distant second to Canonical in terms of AWS instances, so collaborating more closely with number one in cloud makes obvious sense. Meanwhile is betting there is enough on prem gravity to keep existing revenue streams humming along.
The container and app platform space is heating up for everyone, and AWS just had another good day at the office.
disclosure: Atlassian, AWS, Microsoft, Red Hat and Oracle are all clients. I totally stole the image above from the AWS blog. Hopefully they’ll be ok with that
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