"We represent something different, " says Andy Jassy, sr vice president, AWS

Amazon Web Services' second annual AWS re: Invent conference, one of the biggest event, was even more grander this time. This year's event was used to announce over half a dozen new features and services. It started with an opening keynote speech from senior vice-president Andy Jassy, addressing a strong crowd of more than 9,000 curious audience.

Andy Jassy unveiled AWS's CloudTrail designed to log application programming interface (API) calls for governance and compliance. Also unveiled was Amazon Workspaces, aimed at businesses that have considered virtual data infrastructure (VDI) but found the deployment difficult and expensive. "Workspaces require no hardware or software and you can access it through a browser on the desktop or tablet device. We expect Workspace to be popular with enterprises, as desktop security has previously been viewed as a challenge and the management as very expensive." said Jassy.

Amazon AppStream was the last service released during the opening keynote which allows developers to stream applications, such as 3D games or interactive HD applications, from the cloud.

Jassy explained: "In the past, the developer has had to make the inconvenient choice of building for a user that has high-end hardware or having to water down their product to be on all devices. Amazon AppStream streams it to the user and captures user input to send back to the cloud.This changes the game for app developers as they don't have to think about only servicing high-end users or those using multiple devices. It means they can build with consistency."

"Customer is what that matters the most," said Jessy very clearly. He also mentioned how few of the corporations were petrified at the growing adoption of cloud. Innovation and agility is what Jassy emphasized on to get a competitive edge. He said, "We represent something different," when he made it amply clear that the company has no intention of building a large enterprise sales force.

"Cloud is the biggest technology shift. Corporations like Nasdaq, Nokia and Suncorp which have subscribed to AWS are reaping the benefits. Nasdaq has exported data to AWS for analytics processing. Nokia, the mobile giant was using on-premise data center which was hard to manage and fragile and then shifted to Amazon Redshift for analysis which has led to 2X faster queries at half the cost. Sunpower, one of the largest solar power providers in the world, has subscribed to Equipment Leasing Application which helps to restore data in 2 hours.

Jeff Smith, CEO, Suncorp Business Systems was a motivating speaker who emphasized that any problem can be solved. "Have a working virtual private cloud and virtual data center in under 3 months." Without false modesty, he bragged about his success.His advice for the audience was "Aim for success, not perfection, otherwise you'll lose the opportunity to learn new things in life."

During the last 1 year, there has been an explosion of enterprises migrating to cloud. Uniliver is one example which has around 1,000 websites working on AWS. Out of these 500 they have migrated to cloud and now these can be deployed in 2 weeks instead of 2 days!

Steven Orban, global CTO, Dow Jones, said, "There was a 9X increase in AWS usage in last 2 years. ASW APIs help them in price control, will be migrating 3000 applications to AWS by January 2015.

Andy Jessy concluded that more enterprises are excited about moving to the cloud in large numbers than maybe a year or two ago. However, many enterprises were curious to know "Which workload should I first move to the cloud?" There are a number of enterprises that need help regarding which workload to move to the cloud and in and what sequence. They would also want to know what partners they can work with in the AWS ecosystem. Cloud is going is to be huge and even the run-up is no less.