Although Amazon Web Services Inc. has made plenty of news this week with a multitude of headline-grabbing announcements, much of the talk has surrounded Andy Jassy’s pointed remarks on Wednesday about competitors. The AWS chief executive officer delivered particularly sharp comments about Oracle Corp., which came as a surprise to some because that company lags far behind AWS in cloud market share.

Jassy is certainly not the first to call out Oracle in public (Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff has practically made a career of it), but the comments led some to speculate that AWS is gearing up for a strategic push to take significant business away from the Oracle.

“He’ll only talk trash if he’s got a solution in his back pocket. He called them an abusive partner to their customer. That’s a line in the sand; those are fighting words,” said John Furrier (@furrier, pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

Furrier joined co-host Stu Miniman (@stu, pictured, left) during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas to discuss the competitive landscape, advances in serverless models, and how new connectivity applications are changing the software world.

Microsoft gaining ground

If AWS is going to feel the heat from competition, it may come from Microsoft. The Azure cloud provider has been offering machine learning tools that enable customers to better integrate intelligent solutions into applications. AWS countered with this week’s introduction of Rekognition Video, Kinesis Video Streams and a new Transcribe service.

“Microsoft is absolutely moving the needle,” Furrier said. “They are coming up to Amazon.”

The news from AWS this week appears to be geared toward extending the company’s already significant clout into the compute continuum. One example of this is AWS Fargate, a new service announced on Tuesday that allows users to run containers on Elastic Container Service and Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes without having to manage servers.

This push into the serverless model is allowing customers to write APIs and call into AWS services. “The whole API economy that we’ve been talking about for many years, this is really coming to fruition,” Miniman said. “I can program to many of Amazon’s own APIs.”

The significant number of announcements from AWS this week have not been purely confined to the world of infrastructure management and enterprise computing. The company also revealed new cloud deals with Expedia, Walt Disney Co. and the National Football League.

The NFL will employ AWS’s data analytics services to bolster its metric tracking system for players. “What Amazon is doing is they’re integrating new kinds of connectivity,” Furrier said. “We have new software models coming, which is something that no one is seeing. This renaissance is real.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent.

Photo: SiliconANGLE