AWS CEO Restates Focus On IoT, Serverless, Machine Learning

By Editorial Team on October 3, 2017

When a business that is bringing in $15 a year talks, other businesses listen. AWS is going all in on technologies like IoT, serverless and machine learning, and wants to take others on the ride too.

This focus was reaffirmed by Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy.

Who was interviewed by Gartner Fellow Daryl Plummer at the Gartner Symposium yesterday, where he confirmed that AWS has three major areas of focus right now — serverless computing, machine learning, and the Internet of Things.

For the first of the bunch, Jassy said, people will continue to use full instances for a long time. But increasingly, companies will transition to the event-driven service model that AWS Lambda has pioneered. He did say that not having to deal with servers was very appealing to customers.

On machine learning, which is a slightly more complicated beast, Jassy described three layers of services are at play. The first is fundamental work done by experts on the bottom. Then comes the middle layer where traditional programmers can create their own services.

And finally, there is the top layer that consists of services and APIs that are available to users, like the Amazon Lex speech recognition service.

Amazon, he said, was investing in all three layers.

However, very few organizations have the ability to hire expert practitioners here, and more has to be done to make everything much easier and more accessible for everyday developers. The middle layer, Jassy said, is where no one has made it easy enough.

Which bring us to Internet of Things.

IoT, according to the AWS CEO, is a long journey. But he believes that in 10 to 15 years, most of a company’s on-premises footprint will be connected to devices. Many devices do not have the connectivity to get back to the cloud, making it important to have similar programming models.

The same ones that are used in AW, for instance.

Special mention of the Greengrass service that Amazon offers, which has Lambda built-in. Nevertheless, this is an area that is delivering the fastest results, according to the AWS CEO.

Good talk.