SiliconAngle article by Jason Bloomberg
Massive throngs turned out for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s massive post-pandemic re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week. As with its previous shows, AWS did not disappoint, with its laundry list of new and improved products, services and features.
For a company its size, AWS continued to do a remarkable job pushing the innovation pedal to the metal. Nevertheless, the most interesting innovation stories were scattered amongst the 350-strong exhibitors showing their wares in the Venetian Convention and Expo Center’s cavernous halls.
It took me 80,000 exhausting steps, but I managed to pare the list down to six of the most innovative vendors, plus a well-deserved tip of the hat to AWS itself. Here are my favorites:
AWS: Not just about cloud anymore
For all its innovation, AWS no longer emphasizes its core offering: cloud computing. Everyone takes the cloud for granted, of course – but this deemphasis reflects more Amazon’s recognition that it has largely won the infrastructure-as-a-service battle.
Instead, its focus has shifted to value-added services, in particular data- and AI-centric offerings. Also on the list: increasingly comprehensive support for application development efforts, especially when those efforts string together various combinations of AWS services.
Event-driven workflows that combine such services – with Amazon’s Lambda serverless offering as the glue – formed the core of Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogel’s outstanding keynote (see Mark Albertson’s article on Vogel’s keynote and Kyt Dotson’s deeper dive for in-depth analysis).
As such, although individual products demonstrate AWS’s continuing innovation, how it enables its customers to combine services into increasingly sophisticated, high-performance applications is perhaps the most exciting part of the AWS offering today.
Managing and optimizing cloud costs: more popular than ever
With a looming recession on the horizon, it’s no surprise that some of the more innovative vendors at re:Invent were focused on cloud cost optimization and management. As with other innovative corners of the market, different takes on this product category led to some confusion as to the best approach to cloud cost optimization, or CCO.
Some vendors focused on CCO as an aspect of FinOps, providing information for chief financial officers and chief information officers to help them with the big picture of cloud budgeting. Other vendors took a more hands-on approach, helping customers adjust their cloud usage to avoid overspending.
The standout for innovation in the crowded CCO space was Zesty Tech Ltd. Zesty purchases storage and compute cloud resources on behalf of its customers, and then resells those resources to them on an optimized basis much like a gym membership.
Different customers consume more or fewer resources at different times without affecting the amount they pay. Zesty then passes along economies of scale to its customers.
Zesty’s core innovation is its artificial intelligence-driven prediction algorithm that enables it to set optimal pricing based on each customer’s expected cloud usage, thus optimizing customer cloud costs while still allowing Zesty to make a profit.
Comments
Comments are closed.