Key takeaways from AWS re:invent 2015
Well this year's re:invent has come to a close. This was a fun event where I attended a number of very informative sessions and also got to spend some time with AWS partners for various kinds. There is so much going on in the cloud world, here are a few noteworthy observations:
System Integrators/Outsourcing Partners: It was interesting to see what game did the outsourcing and IT services companies bring to the table in the premier cloud computing event as its generally believed that these companies along-with internal enterprise IT divisions are in the cross hairs with the fast cloud adoption. Guess what, they are transforming as well by building core competencies around cloud transformation, data migration, IoT and enterprise cloud readiness services. Infosys even has a product that scours the locally deployed apps and give recommendations on how ready these apps are for going the cloud way. An important aspect of this transformation that remains to be seen is the affect of the sheer volume of work that used to be outsourced getting smaller overtime (it is widely believed that this trend will play itself out over the course of time) along-with thinning margins. How these big behemoths like TCS, Infosys, Accenture to name a few, change this around quickly as the whole promise of cloud is agility, flexibility and cost efficiency (more bang for the buck) by the adoption of frugal architectures and these trends may not be in favor of such SIs. For the moment there is still some juice left for these companies because most of the enterprises aren't transformed fully yet and currently operating under the hybrid model and the journey to cloud is a long one. There is also an opportunity for these companies to offer cloud transformation services to their customers. Enterprise IT: Very important component of corporate America is also undergoing change. It has to, otherwise it is going to get wiped out. After attending the AWS enterprise customer sessions i think they have pretty much found a place for themselves by basically becoming the gatekeepers on the enterprise's path to cloud. Internal IT folks have essentially become the brokers working on behalf of the company to help in selection of the "right" cloud vendor, they then assume total control over the services on offer and then hand out computing resources to the enterprise customers. This is a new flavor of what used to happen before with the only difference being the apps that are now hosted on cloud as opposed to them running internally. The role of EI will become even critical as the spread of cloud apps becomes more and more disparate overtime with increasing demand from business.
Startups: A lot of interesting activity is going on in that space as so many small companies are offering a variety of services such as storage, backups, reporting, log management, monitoring, automation, IoT etc. The interesting thing to note is that in most cases these companies are providing core AWS functionality that is available as a platform service (such as storage) by just creating wrappers (apps: both web and mobile) around them and offering the whole affair as a managed service for their customers. Really keeping things simple here as most of the underlying application infrastructure has now been commoditized (even though AWS doesn't like this term for their own good reasons) the time to bootstrap functionality is reduced exponentially. A trickle down effect of this phenomenon is that it provides an opportunity to mix and match the underlying functionality to create something new, just like using the cloud infrastructure as lego blocks, all that while remaining lean. Another aspect: the cost of failure for a startup has also drastically reduced, meaning its really cheap to fail and by the same token very cheap to have another shot at making something else work without going complete broke :) There was also a lot of redundant functionality on offer, maybe that's a good thing as it gives the customers the peace of mind as they can see that all is not Amazon, i.e. they don’t have to go to and depend on AWS for every single thing and having a competitive market works to their advantage Partnering with AWS also provides safety to the startups, especially when their customer/subscriber base shoots through the roof instantly, the experience that AWS brings to the fold really benefits the companies manage the load once they are able to find success (ask Tinder) Enterprise Application Integration: The subject is close to my heart, hence a section dedicated here. EAI/ESB (I have a loosely clubbed both together here) is a middleware discipline which many believe has matured overtime and kind of saturated. The technologies built around this principle have served their purpose and that too, really well within the enterprise when the apps were pretty much hosted internally (initially in a single DC and to multi DCs overtime). EAI and then later ESB provided flexibility of connecting up-to a myriad of apps because it came with out-of-the-box set of connectors/adapters for most of the apps on the market and it also provided an opportunity to create intelligent middleware but in today's world where cloud (on all fronts, Infrastructure, Platform and Software) is promising utmost flexibility with continuous deployment mechanisms built into it. On the other hand the flexibility that once tested and proven off the shelf ESB platforms provided, is becoming a bottleneck now simply because the tested-and-proven systems are finding it difficult to keep pace with cloud's flexibility and in most cases ESB is becoming just another point of failure. ESB is also somewhat of an anti pattern to Microservices based architectures. This subject requires a dedicated blog that I will publish in the near future. Don't get me wrong here, the need for integration is still there (as the apps landscape is becoming more and more diverse and hence it is also required of them to be talking to each other for various reasons), the question is: which technology and methodology would work well in this eco system; the answer: cloud friendly, lightweight, super fast and not so complicated middleware :) That is the direction that TIBCO is taking with simplr (the whole solution is hosted on AWS), WebMethods is also fully cloud now, Mulesoft has already become a household name in this arena and there are some startups also trying their luck out in this space.
The winners:
Startups: As mentioned already, the cost of failure is extremely low and hence the opportunities are multifold
Open source Software: Open source is extremely hot and sexy these days; darling of the developers. The surge in the adoption has really got the big software vendors grappling to maintain their space and hegemony. The ability to purchase rather rent the software pennies on the dollar is also levelling the field for open source software.
Managed Services: Companies who are providing managed services, especially the open source software, are making a killing these days, for obvious reasons
Of course AWS :)
The strugglers:
Hardware Companies: Things are consolidating big-time. The industry vertical is already stagnating and is looking for a breakthrough or a disruptive trend that could help spur the growth. Cloud computing gaining territory isn't helping matter much in my view as most of the high powered computing is needed only by the likes of Amazon and other top cloud vendors, the consumers just need thin clients to interface with the processing backend running in the cloud. This trend is very similar to how things worked in the past where the users entered commands through the terminal (thin client), the CPU processed the requests and sent the results back to the terminal for the user's consumption. In today's world the thin client is your mobile device and the CPU is your cloud backend. This is pretty much a trend reversal for the hardware companies that saw major gains during the PC days. All is not lost here either as most of these companies are hoping for the IoT windfall. Well just wait and watch for that to happen, for now, at-least.
Big software vendors: read IBM (especially), SAP et. al with the exception of Microsoft that is second best to AWS when it comes to IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) plus its a major platform company and having this diversity helps it steer it's ways better than its competitors. Most of these big software companies used to make top dollar by licensing their software, well that space has changed dramatically. Even though these companies have made significant investments into bringing the much needed change and cloudify themselves but so far, they have been playing catchup.