Amazon has announced some big moves lately, taking on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform directly by targeting hybrid cloud customers with on-site servers.
The cloud leader wants to gain business from larger vendors that want in on hybrid action — that is to say, they want to store some of their technology functions in the cloud, while keeping tighter controls of others.
To that end, AWS will now let customers put servers used in its cloud computing datacenters into their own facilities.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy made this move official at the company’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, highlighting how hybrid cloud strategies are desired by many large enterprise customers these days.
It’s a big statement to the industry at large, and a clear signal that Amazon is going to become an on-premise hardware vendor — an area where cloud competitor Microsoft has already made headway.
This move is also a boom to VMware, which is majority owned by Dell Technologies. The AWS hardware that will be put into customer datacenters as part of this new offering will have VMware virtualization software on it, with both companies sharing the revenue.
Not contend with all this, Amazon also announced a few other notable products and services at its annual conference.
Including Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, which is a Windows compatible service that may help Amazon Web Services win cloud customers who might otherwise shift to the Azure platform. New machine learning and blockchain solutions were also on the agenda at the event.
Amazon seems to be doing all it can to stay ahead of cloud rivals Microsoft and Google in this rapidly growing market.
Gartner estimates that the public cloud market is on track to reach the highs of $278 billion in 2021, up from $176 billion this year. And moves like this will only make things more competitive for all the big players involved.
