Provides infrastructure layer compute capabilities, including both bare metal and virtual servers with various optimizations includins compute, memory, IO, and disk. Also supports accelerations options such as GPUs, FPGAs, Inferentia and Trainium.
Provides image recognition capability for images (in batch or real-time) and video that provides a analysis of the content such as real-world objects, faces, celebrities, and path mapping.
Provides a publish/subscribe notification service with multiple subscription types including Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, AWS Lambda, generic HTTPS endpoints, SMS and email.
A serverless, fully-managed, message queue service that supports producing, store, and consuming messages and enables loose coupling between applications.
Provides private networking capability spanning multiple availability zones and supporting subnets, routing, network access control groups, security groups and gateways.
Provides tracing of service invocations in distributed applications for observability, allowing users to diagnose issues or optimize their service interactions.
All about Cloud, mostly about Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Why is Amazon winning the Cloud War?
2016-04-02 / 458 words / 3 minutes
2008 was a busy year. Amazon went into full production with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Microsoft launched it’s Microsoft Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS). Google announced its Google App Engine (GAE) PaaS offering. The Cloud War was on! This post looks back and provides a commentary and answers the question - Why is Amazon winning the Cloud War?
Microsoft Azure – .Net Platform as a Service
Microsoft had the .Net platform that ran on Windows PCs. The Azure platform was designed as a .Net Platform as a Service. But applications needed to be specially written to run on the Azure platform. They needed to use something that was almost, but not quite, the same as PC .Net. Similarly, the database engine was almost, but not quite, the same as the Microsoft SQL Server RDBMS that ran on Windows PCs.
Google App Engine – Java Platform as a Service
To run on the GAE applications needed to be written in Java. Java is a cross-platform language supported by many different manufacturers. Java has defined standards to help with interoperability between different manufacturers. One of these standards is the Java Persistence API (JPA). The database provided by GAE wasn’t even close to a full implementation of the JPA specification and was only eventually consistent, something highly unusual at the time.
Both the Azure and GAE platforms supported automatic scaling and high availability of applications, but in a proprietary manner. That meant adopting a completely and radically new way of developing and deploying software and resulted in vendor lock-in.
AWS – Infrastructure as a Service
Conversely, the EC2 platform provided Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Users were provided with common operating systems that they could login to. Common programming?languages would be run on those operating systems. Database software could be installed and the cost model was easy to understand. Everything was very familiar.
The Cloud War
Since that time, Amazon has built up from its infrastructure foundation, to provide PaaS and Software as a Service (SaaS) features. It has also built out to provide more infrastructure capabilities. Each new feature was a baby-step which led from the familiar foundation towards the brave new cloud world.
Both Google and Microsoft have developed IaaS products of their own. Google Compute Engine (GCE) provides access to the virtual machines in the cloud, while Microsoft bolted virtual machines on to the Azure platform. Neither vendor offers the same depth or breadth of features as AWS, which has been incessant in releasing innovative new features ever since EC2 was announced.
In some respects, Microsoft and Google were ahead of their time, but as users were first learning about cloud computing, Amazon offered the familiarity that users wanted, and they’ve continued to innovate ever since.
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