I interviewed Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Andy Jassy today at the AWS re:Invent conference. Before the interview I asked my Twitter followers what they’d like to ask.
I could not use all of the questions but I’ve included a few here to give you a snapshot of the full recording, which is embedded below.
Accel Entrepreneur In ResidenceNick Mehta asked: RedShift is one of the 1st forays by Amazon that arguably is closer to the application layer (data warehousing); more to come?
AWS had lots of requests for a data warehouse service, Jassy responded. In the past they’ve had similar requests for services that has led to new offerings such as Elastic Map Reduce. AWS will add services when it makes sense to add to the AWS environment.
Startup advisor Miko Matsumura posted on Twitter: What does Jassy thinks of mobile back end as a service (MBaaS) and when will the MBaaS space be consolidated?
Jassy said that we should expect to see a higher level of abstraction, perhaps a container approach, to automate the process. And regarding consolidation? He said he wishes he knew when that would happen.
Estaban Kolsky, a customer strategist, asked this beauty: How do you see the competition with Oracle ramping up in the next few years?
Jassy said this is best summed up by customers who, from the start, want to choose how they build their own stacks. That flexibility will always be a core aspect of AWS. It also comes down to AWS customers. They are end users all over the globe, he added. Plus, large tech companies will go after the high-margin business. AWS is all about the low-margin, volume business.
Salesforce.com MVP Nick Hamm wanted to know: When is Amazon releasing their PaaS product line?
Jassey says he is a bit confused about what PaaS really is. He sees it more of how to cater to the broad range of developers in the market. Some will be more sophisticated than others. Catering to those different communities will take a number of forms. That’s not a great answer but it seems a bit of a stretch to think AWS will invest in a platform similar to Engine Yard or Heroku.
This was a fun way to conduct the interview with Jassy. I even asked a few of my own questions about APIs and OpenStack. Here’s the full recording. Warning: the recording includes the sound of my fingers pounding on the keyboard. Sorry. Let me know what you think.