Amazon is quietly, slowly, but surely becoming a software vendor (in addition to being the largest etailer), with product offerings that compete directly, and in some cases, are broader than the “traditional” software vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft.
For example, a simple review of Amazon Products shows no less than 3 database options Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), SimpleDB and DynamoDB (launched earlier this year), which offers almost infinite scale and reliability.
Amazon also offers an in-memory cache – ElastiCache. You can also use their SIMPLE services: Workflow Service (SWF) – e.g for business processes, Queue Service (SQS) – for asynchronous inter-process communications, a Notification Service (SNS) – for push notifications, as well as email (SES). Amazon calls them all “simple”, yet a number of startups have been built and gone public or been acquired in the past couple decades on the basis of a single of these products: PointCast, Tibco, IronPort, just to name a few.
This is not all … Amazon offers additional services in other product categories: storage, of course, with S3 and EBS (Elastic Block Store), Web traffic monitoring, Identification management, load balancing, application containers, payment services (FPS), billing software (DevPay), backup software, content delivery network, MapReduce … my head spins trying to name all the companies whose business is to provide just a single one of these products.
Furthermore, Amazon is not just packaging mature technologies and slapping a “cloud” label on them. Some of them, like DynamoDB, are truly leading edge. Yet, what is most impressive, and where Amazon’s offering is arguably superior to that of Oracle, Microsoft or the product category competitors, is that Amazon commits to supporting and deploying these products at “Internet scale” – namely as large as they are. This is not only a software “tour-de-force” but also an operational one – as anyone who has tried to run high-availability and high-throughput Oracle or SQL Server clusters can testify.
Given its breadth of products, its ability to operate them at Internet-scale with high-availability, Amazon could become the default software stack: a foundation on which to architect products, displacing the traditional stacks such as: .Net, LAMP, or {mySQL,Oracle}-Java-Apache-JavaScript
The costs of deploying software on the Amazon stack is another story … and the topic of a future post