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Cloud drives freedom, control

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Las Vegas, 08 Oct 2015
Cloud computing enables organisations to turn capital expense to a variable expense, says Andy Jassy, senior VP at Amazon Web Services and Amazon Infrastructure.
Cloud computing enables organisations to turn capital expense to a variable expense, says Andy Jassy, senior VP at Amazon Web Services and Amazon Infrastructure.

Cloud computing gives organisations the freedom to control their own destinies.

That was the word from Andy Jassy, senior VP at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Infrastructure, speaking during a keynote address at the AWS re:Invent Conference taking place in Las Vegas. There are about 19 000 delegates attending the event.

AWS, a collection of remote computing services, also called Web services, make up a cloud computing platform offered by Amazon.com. The most central and well-known of these services arguably include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon S3.

Amazon markets these products as a service to provide large computing capacity more quickly and cheaply than a client company building a physical server farm.

According to Jassy, cloud has become the new normal for companies of all sizes and is the biggest transformation technology in our lifetime.

Capital vs variable expense

"So why are companies flocking so quickly to the cloud? We get asked about this so many times," he noted. The first reason is cloud computing enables organisations to turn capital expense to a variable expense and this is very attractive for companies, he explained.

"With cloud, an organisation replaces its upfront capital expense with low variable costs and pays for what it uses. In essence, they convert capital expense into variable expense."

He added that cloud also allows organisations to scale seamlessly and gives them incredible agility. It also provides elasticity, he noted, adding that instead of waiting for 10 to 18 weeks for a server, organisations can get it in a matter of minutes via the cloud.

Companies are also able to deploy their applications in worldwide infrastructures with low latency, he said.

"These are some of the reasons why people are moving to the cloud." However, he said, this does not really explain why companies are so excited and passionate about the cloud.

Demoralising past

"When we talk to developers, development managers, line of business managers and CIOs, what they tell you is that cloud computing is very much about freedom and being able to control your own destiny."

Prior to cloud, for lots of years, developers were constrained, he said. "Whenever they had an idea that they wanted to impose, usually the answer they got was 'no'. This was very demoralising. The same is true for CIOs. The cloud is about giving the developers and CIOs the freedom to control their own destiny."

He noted the first case of cloud freedom is the "freedom to build unfettered". It is really difficult in this day and age if an organisation is not able to move fast, he observed. "Just look at what start-ups have done in disrupting industries.

"Cloud not only enables you to move fast but removes many of the barriers developers faced. Cloud gives the new-found ability to get an idea to market faster than ever."

Jassy believes cloud also gives organisations the freedom to get real value from the vast amounts of data they have. With cloud, he said, it has never been easier to collect, store, analyse and share data.

The other freedom that cloud computing enables is the ability for organisations to get their data into or out of the cloud easily, said Jassy.

Data hiccups

He added cloud computing also gives organisations freedom from "bad database relationships".

The cloud has completely changed the relationships between technology suppliers and their customers, he pointed out, noting customers now have a lot of control and they expect to be treated differently than the case was 30 years ago.

In a thinly-veiled attack on rival database company Oracle, Jassy said one technology area that has been seen the slowest change has been the database space. "The old guard database solutions are very expensive, proprietary, and have high amounts of lock-in. That is why a lot of companies are moving from proprietary to open source databases."

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