At their regional AWS Summit in New York City today,
AWS isn’t the first vendor to offer real device testing in the cloud – Keynote (now part of Dynatrace) is a notable competitor – but Amazon’s dominance in the public cloud marketplace heralds a significant move toward establishing real device testing as a must-have for all mobile development.
Perhaps the most important subtext to Amazon’s announcement is their rapid turnaround regarding support for digital technologies. In November 2014, I wrote an article for Forbes criticizing them for their digital blind spot.
What a difference eight months can make. AWS CTO Werner Vogels credited AWS’s sudden focus on digital to the Amazon retail site’s experience from the 2014 holiday season, where 60% of all orders came from mobile devices.
The digital story is not solely about mobile, of course. Digital means connecting customers to the value a company can provide them, which requires an end-to-end technology solution. The cloud, therefore, plays a central role for most digital efforts in modern enterprises today.
Supporting Amazon’s digital story is Keith Homewood, Cloud Product Owner, Nordstrom. Nordstrom’s stock in trade is its customer relationships, so their digital efforts must rise to the challenge.
“Our goal is to move at the speed of business,” Homewood says. “Nordstrom’s social media and mobile team leverage AWS for continuous delivery. This full-stack team has leveraged ‘infrastructure as code’ and they know code. As a result, Nordstrom deploys several times a day.”
Continuous delivery of software is a core principle of devops – and devops was also top of mind at AWS Summit. Amazon is a devops leader itself, deploying code for their retail site more than once per second. It’s no surprise, therefore, that devops services CodeDeploy, CodeCommit, and CodePipeline are also on Amazon’s list of new or recent offerings.
Rounding out the Amazon news: new API management and machine learning services, music to the ears of the crowd of AWS fans at the summit as well as developers around the world. Any one of these new offerings would be news in itself. Rolling out so many exciting new products at once shows why AWS is, and will remain, the cloud leader for the foreseeable future.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
