Note to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud competitors: To win customers from AWS, stop worrying about AWS. Just listen to customers. That’s how AWS has become the 800-pound gorilla — or better yet, cheetah — in the room.

Borrowing a phrase from Wikibon Inc. chief analyst Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, summed up the AWS advantage: “They’re the cheetah. They move really fast; they’re really nimble.” (* Disclosure below.)

Miniman and co-host John Walls (@JohnWalls21) (left) discussed AWS’s enduring market lead and its new service announcements today at AWS Summit in New York City. 

Today, the company announced AWS Migration Hub, which simplifies the journey from on-premise infrastructure to cloud. In particular, it helps enterprises track large swaths of applications and databases in transition.

A second service announced today, AWS Glue, manages ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) data science tasks. There was no competitive pressure to bring this service to market; the customers spoke, and AWS delivered, Miniman said.

AWS’s new involvement in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — home of Kubernetes container orchestration management — is top of mind for conference attendees. “All of a sudden, they’re platinum level, on the board. They have a voice on how Kubernetes is going to be rolled out going forward,” Walls said. However, AWS has not made any concrete Kubernetes announcements so far.

Machine learning levels playing field

Machine learning is one area where AWS’s competitors are paying attention to customers, according to Miniman. Google Cloud Platform is particularly strong in machine learning, and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure is also pushing ahead there, he stated.

“It is still early days in machine learning, and while Amazon has an undisputed lead in overall cloud, machine learning is one of those areas where everybody’s starting from the starting point,” Miniman said.

AWS’s growth has simmered down from past years’ 70 to 80 percent to just 42 percent, while Google and Azure are gaining speed, Miniman pointed out.

AWS, however, has shown that it will bend over backwards to maintain its lead. At the Google Next conference last March, many small-to-medium-sized businesses praised Google’s lower pricing compared to AWS, Miniman recalled.

“The week after the show, Amazon changed their pricing,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is an unpaid media partner for AWS Summit. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE