Cloud computing is changing the way IT is delivered, enabling users to consume technology as a service and only pay for what has been used with no upfront capital investment in infrastructure, long-term contracts or ongoing maintenance costs. Amazon, a company that has helped popularize this model, is now growing its focus in the enterprise.

“They built a platform from scratch for themselves, for the market, they were really present at the creation of this new agile mindset,” SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier highlighted on theCUBE’s opening segment at the recently concluded AWS Summit. The event saw the debut of several new features geared specifically towards large organizations and government agencies as well as the launch of the WorkSpaces, a desktop virtualization service Amazon first introduced at re:Invent last November. The company also announced a new round of price cuts, its forty second since launching AWS in 2006.

“This is a massive sea change. What cloud computing is doing is changing the game, it’s the printing press of the modern era. It is changing the game on business, how business is structured, how they’re organizing their value creation activities – everything about a business is completely changing because of cloud computing,” Furrier tells co-host Jeff Frick.

AWS is the most popular cloud platform by a wide margin, with a broad customer base and a formidable portfolio of services that is second to none in terms of scope and breadth. The firm is leveraging its dominant position among developers as a stepping stone into the enterprise, but whether it will be able to replicate its success remains to be seen. “Amazon is the tidal wave that’s hitting the beach, the question is how much of that beach they will take in the enterprise,” Furrier notes. All bets are off now that entrenched vendors like IBM and HP are aligning behind OpenStack and actively pushing back with an open source spin on hybrid computing.

Despite increased competition from the incumbents, AWS is continuing to gain traction among enterprise users as the growing need for agility drives frustration with the sluggishness of traditional IT procurement processes. As Amazon vice president of cloud computing Andy Jassy pointed out in his opening keynote, it usually takes between 8 to 10 weeks to provision a new server on-premise whereas in the cloud, thousands of virtual machines can be spun up in a matter of minutes.

“They’ve really used the DevOps way of doing things and brought that into the enterprise in a way that you couldn’t do before,” Frick remarks. And the company is continuing to push the envelope with new workload-optimized solutions.

“They’re coming out with new versions of some of the earlier instances, with higher computing capacity, and then they’re coming out with specialty flavors of their core services specialized around I/O, specialized around memory, specialized around storage. So they just continue this relentless pace of innovation,” Frick details.

Amazon is pursuing a development roadmap that is both evolutionary and revolutionary, focused in equal parts on improving existing services and pushing out new products like Kinesis that completely change the game on consuming technology. The company predicts that the majority of corporate workloads will soon run in the cloud, but Furrier doesn’t see AWS displacing traditional on-premise infrastructure, only changing it. The data center of tomorrow will have a radically different architecture and operational model, but it will continue to serve as the workhorse of the enterprise.

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