Amazon binds itself more tightly to the enterprise
Amazon Web Services (AWS) spent years being dismissive of anything that didn’t run in an AWS data centre. Private and hybrid clouds were, we were repeatedly and vehemently told, ‘false clouds.’ There was no value in doing anything cloudy any way but the Amazon way. Non-cloudy workloads were, simply, anachronistic. Left alone, they’d get on with the job of dying soon enough.
But, behind the rhetoric, AWS engineers began to roll out features that smoothed the ramp from other places to the Amazon cloud nirvana. Virtual networks, direct connections, firewalls, IP address ranges and more all began to make it increasingly feasible to see Amazon as almost an extension of your existing data centre investment (or, perhaps, vice versa).
And, last week, a quiet announcement of a small feature masked a significant additional step.
“Customers who are using CodeDeploy to manage their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances have asked to be able to use the same fleet coordination features to deploy code to their on-premises instances. Today we’re happy to make the functionality of CodeDeploy available for use on a customer’s own servers, in addition to Amazon EC2.”
Deploy code across your own equipment and Amazon’s, using a single Amazon process. The more Amazon-ey you get, the more sense this makes. It makes it easier to seriously consider Amazon for a scalable critical workload, and it makes it easier to keep using more Amazon for workloads both similar and different. And it binds you ever-more tightly to Amazon’s cloud, making it that much harder to look seriously at the competition.
