At the same time, Selipsky says, AWS needs to continue to expand vertically as well, by providing more complete solutions for specific industries such as health care and manufacturing. To do so, the company is bringing its services to the edge of the network, including traditional data centers, the factory floor, and even the field, and establishing an operating model that integrates AWS more deeply into businesses in virtually every industry.
<aside> ✴️ From Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2019:
</aside>
<aside> ✴️ How ‘Hyperscalers’ are Innovating — and Competing — in the Data Center
[21:50] Nick McKeown: Another big thing that’s taking place is that as these systems turn into programmable platforms, big programmable systems where the infrastructure itself is entirely programmable, the software that they’re using is increasingly made up of open source. Open source which, frankly in the infrastructure industry, apart from Linux, was considered a bit of a joke 15 years ago, is now taken as a given that the majority of the infrastructure will be built by open source. ... And this is because a lot of the pieces of the infrastructure are necessary but non-differentiating, and so it benefits them to get that sharing of many, many people from outside their own company working on this together.
[23:25] Nick McKeown: Cellular networks in the past were like these walled gardens — the industry was very protective of the way things were done. But 5G was deliberately designed and architected to feel very much like the rest of the Internet. And the reason people get very excited about 5G is that it’s essentially going to replace a lot of the wireless communications we use today. WiFi, ways of connecting within factories, connecting all of those new IoT devices ... All of that is being built of the same ideas — programmable, disaggregated, low cost, open source software that is written and owned by the mobile operators. So 5G is becoming software-defined as well. So you get this entire infrastructure inside the hyperscalers, all the way out to edge computing, all the way out to 5G — all of this infrastructure is going to be defined by software running on programmable hardware. That is going to change everything because it’s going to open the flood gates for massive amounts of innovation, which is exactly what we need.
</aside>
<aside> ✴️ Cloud Wars & Company Wars: Play Nice, But Win
[2:45] Michael Dell: So there are lots of different models that are emerging but the idea that everything is going to one public cloud, you really don’t see a lot of customers doing that. ... I can tell you from my conversations with customers they’ve sort of figured out that it’s not the public cloud, it’s not the private cloud, it’s both. And even beyond that, it’s really the edge. ... More and more customers are thinking about what’s the right place for any given workload, you’ve got data sovereignty issues, security issues, certainly cost issues.
[9:25] Michael Dell: I think one of the other things that we’re seeing is the super big organizations, and I think this will flow down to large and medium organizations over time, have basically said “I’m going to put my data in a neutral that has incredible connectivity, and I’m going to access services from each of the major public clouds because it’s just an untenable situation to put everything in one of these. I actually think that colo model is growing faster than the discrete public cloud model itself.
</aside>
<aside> ✴️ From Decentralization Effects:
If the hyperscalers all provide these edge compute and data services for industrial use cases, there will still be a need to serve software applications that work across these installations in a vendor-agnostic way. For example, if one factory implements AWS’ 5G edge solution and another factory uses the same from Azure, a data service that needs to communicate with machines in both installations would be better served by a cloud-neutral, multi-tenant, multi-location edge compute and data distribution solution.
This is why I think there will be an equally large opportunity to service “edge compute” workloads for the multi-tenant providers like Cloudflare and Fastly. The hyperscalers, working with telcos and wireless network providers, will likely represent the primary entry point for data and compute from industrial IoT use cases. However, any compute or data service that needs to transcend multiple locations and cross hyperscalers will be best served by edge applications and data distribution provided by the independents.
</aside>
<aside> ✴️ Flexera: State of the Cloud 2021
