Amazon.com will let customers put servers used in the company’s cloud computing data centres into their own facilities, an effort to reach businesses that want to store some of their technology functions in the cloud while keeping tighter control of others.
The move announced on Wednesday by Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy helps provide hybrid cloud strategies desired by many larger enterprise customers in an area where cloud competitor Microsoft is making headway.
AWS announced a slew of other new or updated offerings at its cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, seeking to maintain its lead in the market for Internet-based computing:
- Glacier Deep Archive is a data storage service coming in 2019 that is about a quarter of the cost of Amazon’s current storage pricing, Jassy said;
- Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is a Windows-compatible service that may help Amazon win cloud computing customers who might otherwise shift to Microsoft’s Azure;
- New services for machine learning, a powerful type of artificial intelligence software;
- AWS announced Inferentia, its first chip for drawing inferences from data, which will go on sale next year;
- The company also unveiled a service to make it faster and cheaper to use machine-learning algorithms in Amazon’s cloud; and
- Amazon Managed Blockchain, a new service that can be used to manage peer-to-peer payments, process loans and help businesses transact with distributors and suppliers.
Amazon uses the annual re:Invent conference to highlight new tools and features, seeking to stay ahead of cloud rivals Microsoft and Google. The global public cloud market will grow to US$278-billion in 2021, up from $176-billion this year, according to Gartner.
AWS sales will reach $71-billion in 2022, which would give the division a valuation of about $350-billion, according to Jefferies analyst Brent Thill. — Reported by Spencer Soper and Dina Bass, (c) 2018 Bloomberg LP
