AWS makes public cloud infrastructure available on-prem
CEO Jassy announces AWS Outposts in keynote littered with jibes at the competition, including Oracle's Larry Ellison
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to package its public cloud infrastructure in an on-prem solution known as Outpost.
Announcing the release at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, CEO Andy Jassy said the package will to be sold on Amazon-designed hardware and be available in two formats.
One format will run on native AWS software, and another will run on VMware software - extending the relationship between the pair which came to the UK in March.
Jassy took a subtle swipe at AWS' competitors when announcing the product, claiming their equivalents are not fit for purpose.
While the CEO did not name names, Microsoft released an on-prem Azure offering last year.
"We get customers that say ‘I have workloads that will be on-prem for a long time, that need low latency to something else on-prem'," he said.
"They have asked if we can provide AWS services, like compute and storage, on-prem but in a way that interacts with the rest of the apps on AWS.
"We thought a lot about this because customers say ‘I need it to be the same and I need it to be consistent'.
"If you look at the options out there trying to solve the problem, they are not the same - it is different APIs, different tools… it is why those options aren't getting much traction."
AWS said it will deliver and install the racks to customers, and handle all maintenance and replacements.
The vendor said that Outposts is currently in "private preview", and will be available in the second half of 2019.
This was not the only opportunity Jassy took to swipe at the competition during his 150-minute keynote, with the size of AWS' public cloud market share often the ammunition.
He said that AWS' growth "sometimes confuses people" because it comes from a higher base than its rivals.
AWS' most recent quarterly report saw it claim to have a run rate of $27bn (£21.1bn), with growth of 46 per cent year on year.
He claimed that percentages are not necessarily the best method of comparing the market leader with other providers, while also digging at others for not publishing their public cloud numbers.
"Let me give you an example," he said. "This is a bit hard to do because we are the only ones that break our cloud numbers out in a clear way, but I'll take triangulated analysts' numbers to try to do it.
"If you take the provider that most people think is second in the marketplace, in their last financials they grew 76 per cent year over year.
"Seventy-six per cent is more [than AWS], but in reality that represents about $1bn of growth. If you look at the 46 per cent [growth] of AWS, on our much larger base, it represents $2.1bn. AWS not only has a significant market segment leadership position, but also on an absolutely revenue basis we are growing meaningfully faster than anybody else."
As many would expect, Oracle was also in the firing line, continuing a war of words largely led by Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
Jassy showed a graph depicting AWS' dominating market share (pictured), highlighting that some vendors are not even included when analysts rank the public cloud leaders.
"Some providers don't have enough revenue to show up here, and they only get attention when they pop their heads up themselves," he said, as Ellison's head appeared in various places around the chart."
Ellison had recently poked fun at AWS for using Oracle's database solutions, rather than its own. However, speaking at the event in Las Vegas, Jassy said that AWS will be off of Oracle databases by the end of 2019, CNBC reported.