Amazon Broadens Its Computing Reach
February 22, 2012
Amazon Web Services, the company’s computing-for-hire division, announced new products on Tuesday that make it easier to run workflow-based applications, both on Amazon’s computers and on corporate machines that are connected to Amazon’s giant computing cloud. This is a cheap (and probably easy) way for in-house engineers to build and deploy software that does tasks like analytics and billing, or internal financial operations and decision-making. It can even aid in the design logic of multiplayer games, Amazon says…
This is a big deal, because it shows AWS moving more decisively into the kind of broad-based computing and software services that will put it in competition with the likes of Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. AWS is going from basic but arcane core computing tasks, like setting up storage systems, to well-defined business software. Over the past few weeks, AWS has also started offering practical database software for large-scale corporate operations, and data storage that easily backs up what was on a corporate system.
The early products were for hard-core geeks; now AWS is broadening its market to include far more engineers, even ordinary business people, who will be attracted to the service. In the jargon of the tech industry, AWS is moving steadily up the computing “stack,” from basic commodity businesses to value-added software.
Coupled with the latest version of its Kindle reader, which has an interesting load-sharing browser, it looks like the company is moving toward a pervasive computing business from both the consumer and business ends.
Not that it’s so easy to tell the two apart in the world of cloud computing.