On paper it looks like one of those strategic agreements that large companies sign with small startups. But if you look close enough, you will find that by forging a partnership with information as a service (IaaS) provider, Eucalyptus Systems, Amazon.com’s web services division is making a masterful move to dominate the cloud market. As part of the agreement, Amazon will allow Eucalyptus to use Amazon’s API to connect Amazon cloud services with the private clouds set up by large companies.
From the press release:
….an agreement that enables customers to more efficiently migrate workloads between their existing data centers and AWS while using the same management tools and skills across both environments. As part of this agreement, AWS will support Eucalyptus as they continue to extend compatibility with AWS APIs and customer use cases. Customers can run applications in their existing datacenters that are compatible with popular Amazon Web Services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems @ the Future of Cloud panel at Structure 2011.
Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, who happened to be in New York, met with me briefly (I am at our Structure: Data conference) and the beaming smile on this said it all. It was clearly a big shot in the arm for his company that has started to face competition from many quarters including the OpenStack companies.
While the idea of a hybrid cloud — one that marries public clouds such as AWS with private or company-owned clouds – has gained popularity, Amazon has been steadfast in its views on what it deems to be the cloud. The Seattle-based retailer believes that cloud is essentially what it sells as S3, EC2 and other related services.
However, Amazon might be softening its stance in small doses. In January, the company announced Storage Gateway, a way to fuse on-premise storage with its S3 service. A month later, the company announced Simple Workflow Service (SWF) that blurred the boundaries between applications that ran on internal clouds and Amazon’s public cloud.
When asked if this was a tactical admission that Amazon needs a hybrid cloud option, Kay Kinton, a company spokesperson denied that but added that is is recognition that the
integration between on-premises infrastructure and the AWS cloud is a use case that’s important to some of our customers. In addition to this integration with Eucalyptus, we’ve steadily been releasing other features that enable this integration between on-premises infrastructure and AWS, including Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), DirectConnect, and our Identity and Access Management service that many customers integrate to their on-premise identity systems.”
It seems that large companies are increasingly asking more from Amazon about ways to merge their infrastructures. When I asked if an all-public cloud option was over for large enterprises, an Kinton wrote back in an email:
Not at all and we believe that over time, most enterprises will not run their own datacenters and those that do will have a much smaller footprint. That said, many enterprises today have legacy applications and a good deal of investment in those legacy applications. This type of arrangement provides the added flexibility to more freely move workloads between those existing IT environments and AWS.
Amazon says that “a typical scenario for using this service could be a corporation that uses AWS for disaster recovery and who will need to move workloads between AWS and Eucalyptus frequently for testing purposes.” Other scenarios include companies tapping AWS infrastructure in case of spike in demand for an application that resides on Eucalyptus.
The new agreement doesn’t impact cloud management console makers such as RightScale since ”the management system built around AWS is actually assisted by having another compatible implementation of the AWS APIs.”
When I think about the news, the message is pretty clear: Amazon will do whatever it takes to keep growing its lead in the “cloud” market, even if it means partnering with private cloud providers such as Eucalyptus.
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