As I fly the friendly skies on my way back home from the Amazon Re:Invent show that I was lucky enough to be a part of last week in Vegas, I thought I would take a few minutes to share some thoughts about the show.

The biggest takeaway here was that this event for me cements the “coming of age” of the cloud space, particularly for the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) segment.  While there have long been cloud-focused events, they were typically multi-vendor or analyst think tank sessions or individual company events by software companies that include cloud (VMworld for example).  This was a single vendor (albeit the 800-lb gorilla in public cloud) event by, for, and exclusively about cloud – and it dominated the discussion, twitterverse, blogosphere, and industry press.  And that for me says that we, as an industry, have really arrived.  Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) said it best when asked if they can successfully target startups and enterprises, “We’re already doing it”.

That’s a clear message to the rest of the vendors in the space, for the customers and cloud users.  The cloud is here, right now, and growing incredibly fast. Gartner recently estimated the market for IaaS will be $6.2 billion in 2012, growing at the fastest rate of any sector of the cloud market at 45.4%. And it’s not just test and dev anymore – hundreds of millions of live, production workloads are in the public cloud today with many more being added every day. I encourage you to check out some of the session videos from the event to hear more: http://aws.amazon.com/live/

The second thing that struck me was how deeply embedded Amazon is with the IT channel and the ecosystem.  For a company that started out just doing it all directly, they now work with, rely on, and are dedicating themselves to integrators, resellers, and other software vendors who bring value add.  This is something that 6fusion has always recognized – that the channel and the vendor ecosystem is critical to success, and it is interesting to see it played out in front of us by a vendor as big as Amazon.

The last big takeaway for us is the recurring theme discussed at the event – cost management, allocation management, and optimization are critical.  Amazon can provide so much scale so quickly and efficiently that it is incredibly easy to be inefficient with your resources.  Reed Hastings from Netflix mentioned this during his discussion with Andy Jassy – determining what instance sizes to use, the right mix between on demand and reserved, and what to run on and off premise is critical to success – both performance wise and cost wise.  Utility metering is going to be the answer to these questions.

Last but certainly not least I have to congratulate the AWS team on an excellent show.  This was the inaugural event and they nailed it.  The organization was great, the content was outstanding, and the whole thing came off with a high level of polish.  They even had air hockey and laser tag at the social event.

Anyway – a great event for this attendee and for the industry as a whole.

Rob Bissett

VP Product Management

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