Amazon AWS Archives

Jun 12

Gartner Search Analytics Shows Spike in Platform as a Service (PaaS) Inquiries in 2011

Trends of search terms from user accounts and topics of their inquiries form the catalyst of research agendas in many IT advisory firms. At Gartner these two factors and others like them are commonly regarded as leading indicators of future IT spending.

Gartner has been delivering short analyses of these subject areas to clients in the form of reports, with the latest being Search Analytics Trends: Platform as a Service published on June 9, 2011. This report covers user search activity from April, 2009 to March, 2011. For purposes of the report, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is defined as cloud application infrastructure services delivered as a service. Gartner makes the point that PaaS includes no traditional software license and is expensed on a metered or utility basis. Presented below is the time series of searches by month from the report.

A few key take-aways emerge from the report, and they are presented below:

Cloud Middleware Services including Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are still unknown to many Gartner IT user clients. As a result this area is seen with skepticism by many of their clients. In studies of PaaS adoption from other analysts at Gartner and Forrester, it is evident that internal software development will make or break the credibility of PaaS initiatives for the long-term.

When Gartner IT users search for PaaS on the website and throughout online research, the four most common secondary terms are IaaS and SaaS (7.05%), Magic Quadrant (6.12%) and cloud (5.72%). Clearly Gartner IT user clients are looking to define their own technology stack in this area and looking for a framework of reference of where PaaS fits into their own IT plans and architectures. The competitive intensity across the analyst community will most likely go up as a result of the uncertainty many IT buyers have over PaaS.

The top three vendors that Gartner IT users search for are Microsoft (18%), Amazon (13%) and Tata (11%). Additional vendors include IBM (11%), Salesforce.com (11%), SAP (7%), Google and Oracle (4%).

Bottom line: The key to PaaS adoption in larger enterprises, many of which are IT user clients of Gartner, is how successfully Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) clarify their value proposition and how their apps add value to the platform layer.

Mar 10

Building Powerful Web Applications in the AWS Cloud

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Jinesh Varia, Technology Evangelist at Amazon.com created the following presentation to illustrate how Amazon EC2 instances are being used for creating high performance Web applications. He relies heavily on the integration technologies that unify the AWS Cloud Stack, which is shown to the right. To see a larger image of the stack, please click on it.

What is interesting about this slide deck is the detail it provides in explaining the more complex programming concepts of AWS. He provides useful insights into how Cloud Elasticity as an application platform component works through the use of detailed system-level diagrams. For example slides 21 and 22 are examples that show how Cloud Elasticity can be achieved with AWS Scaling Zones.

There are system-level definitions of AWS workflows including security that rely on EC2 instances as well. At 70 slides, this is an excellent overview of Web application development on AWS.

Feb 14

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Data Without Limits – Insights from Werner Vogels of Amazon.com

O’Reilly Media’s Strata, Making Data Work Conference held February 1rst – 3rd, 2011 in Santa Clara, California was one of the most interesting and multifaceted events of the year. Included were presentations on data science, real-time data processing and analytics, data acquisition and crowdsourcing, visualization, in addition to many other topics. You can find the complete list of speaker slides and videos for the event at this link, Strata 2011 Speaker Slides & Videos.

What enriches this conference is the quality of the case studies presented. Be sure to check out the presentation from DJ Patil of LinkedIn on Innovating Data Teams. His discussion illustrates just how critical big data is to LinkedIn and how their approach to managing it enriches the user experience, and is transforming LinkedIn functionality at the same time.

One of the best overall presentations features Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com titled Data Without Limits. The video is provided below and provides a glimpse into how pervasive AWS is becoming as a foundation for accessing, aggregating and transforming data in real time.

Aug 4

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SaaS-based ERP Systems are Business Process Stress Tests in Progress

Bottom line: Signing up for an Amazon AWS account is faster than creating a profile on Expedia. As a result, there are dozens of SaaS start-ups in the analytics, CRM, social CRM, ERP, supply chain management and many other areas of enterprise software. The ones that are going to make it already have a very clear vision of which complex, challenging, impossible business processes their customers face that they can standardize on, drive down cost per user per month down, and build a real business on.