AWS re:Invent 2014: Highlights and analysis

1. Summary

Last week Las Vegas was host to the largest cloud event in the tech industry — AWS re:Invent. In its third year, it is clear how far this conference has come. With over 13,000 attendees, 400 speakers, 250 sponsors and more than 200 sessions, the Sands Expo convention center was buzzing with action. From large system integrators to well-known ISVs to emerging startups, the expo area was undoubtedly the epicenter of the cloud world, sending shock waves to competition.

Compared to re:Invent 2013, this year saw AWS transform into a bigger, bolder and more ambitious company that’s determined to become a formidable force in industry. During his keynote, Andy Jassy, SVP at AWS, emphasized that cloud is the new normal while sharing some staggering numbers related to his company’s growth. Amazon S3 is experiencing 127% YoY growth in data transfer. Amazon EC2 is growing at the rate of 99% each year. And none of this includes Amazon.com’s usage.

There are over a million customers using AWS with hundreds of system integrators offering professional services. According to Jassy, over 900 government agencies and 3400 academic institutions are using AWS’ cloud. AWS Marketplace, which acts as an exchange for launching software stacks on AWS, has over 1900 listed products across 23 categories. AWS is the fastest growing enterprise IT vendor with over 40% YoY growth.

Based on the last few major announcements from AWS — Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon Zocalo and AWS Directory Service — which were squarely focused on enterprise, the industry expected AWS to continue this focus with new enterprise services. While AWS did announce these, it took a balanced approach by also targeting developers and operations professionals. This year’s re:Invent announcements are proof that AWS is still a developer-centric company and it hasn’t wandered too far from its roots.