Amazon took full advantage of its inaugural AWS: Reinvent show to push out all sorts of news, most notably a new data analysis service based on Paraccel technology that it says will take on data warehousing powers Oracle, IBM, Hewlett-Packard at much lower prices. Attendees of the show, including Netflix executives lauded the new Redshift service, especially since it will enable them to keep using their fancy data analysis tools — MicroStrategy, Jaspersoft et al.
In Netflix case, it’s MicroStrategy. “For every man-year we have invested in our data warehouse, we have 20 invested in MicroStrategy,” Yury Israilevsky, VP of cloud computing and platform engineering for Netflix.
Amazon Chief Data Scientist Matt Wood works with customers to meet their big data needs, and uses lessons learned to create services like Red Shift as well as a new Data Pipeline service to make it easier for AWS customers to automate and schedule common workflows that ship their data from DynamoDB and S3 storage to Elastic MapReduce or wherever it makes most sense. The service is “ pre-integrated with AWS data sources and easily connected to third-party and on-premise data sources,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels told attendees in Las Vegas. The pipeline is now in limited private beta, according to Amazon.
Third parties took advantage of the AWS: Reinvent buzz this week as well. Google launched not one, but two, storage price cuts, one on Monday before the show and another on Thursday, the day after Amazon cut its S3 storage prices by 25 percent. Google is hellbent to prove that it’s serious about winning business customers over to its cloud platform. And Greenpeace created a “Green AWS” web site to make its point that AWS is not nearly energy efficient enough for their taste.
So what’s the takeaway? There’s obviously a race to the bottom on one front — storage — but also a race to create of higher-end — and presumably higher margin — services to meet data analysis and transfer needs as well. In other words: stay tuned, this is only going to get better.
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