Can Amazon Web Services’ cloud offerings evolve with the times?

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Amazon Web Services EC2 has been the gold standard for cloud computing since cloud became a household name. For many, it’s also been a bastion of proprietary defense in an open source world. Since its inception, AWS Elastic Compute Cloud has evolved and gone through more than a dozen price decreases. But questions remain about exactly how big a lead Amazon has in the cloud market and what it’s doing to increase that lead.

Essentially, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a set of cloud APIs that let users host resources on remote servers and storage. AWS APIs include support for block storage, relational databases, email and tools for everything from Web hosting to content delivery. AWS EC2, its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, is a set of AWS APIs that allow consumers to control the hosting of machine images on Amazon servers…

In short, AWS is more than IaaS; it’s an evolving PaaS product.

Unlike other cloud players like Microsoft that put a specific operating system and middleware on the cloud to create Platform as a Service (PaaS), Amazon offers basic IT services through APIs without demanding that those APIs link to a particular OS. This approach is more versatile in the long run and allows Amazon to include features like content caching, which are rarely considered elements in PaaS…

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