Another Day, Another Cloud Event - AWS Drops Its Big News, And Its Pricing

Yesterday it was Google that held a cloud event - in their case announcing some interesting new services and some pretty stunning pricing changes - both in terms of all-out price drops but perhaps more interestingly a new take on the Reserved Instance idea. So today it's Amazon Web Services' turn to gain back some of the attention.

AWS SVP Andy Jassy took to the stage in San Francisco and ran through the (frankly pretty amazing when you look at it) AWS portfolio. Indeed there was much chatter on Twitter about the fact that Jassy was beginning to articulate a very broad story - one where customers string together a bunch of different AWS services to build an allover stack. This messaging is starting to sound very much like a PaaS story and, frankly, I've said for many years that AWS essentially provides higher level, PaaS-like service. This change in AWS external messaging was noticed by some eagle-eyed commentators:

Jassy says AWS basically has a PaaS, first I've heard AWS acknowledge that

— Brandon Butler (@BButlerNWW) March 26, 2014

So... given this new messaging, it's interesting to see the substantive announcements from the event.

Perhaps most importantly from a competitive positioning perspective is the news that AWS WorkSpaces, their Desktop as a Service offering, is now in general availability. Sharp eyed users will remember that, unusually for AWS, they were beaten to GA for their DaaS product by VMware. AWS has righted this wrong today and the product is now generally available. Until now it was in limited preview and had some uptake with beta customers including Peet's Coffee & Tea along with a reported 10000 other trial customers. WorkSpaces covers Mac and PC use cases, as well as the plethora of mobile devices (including, not surprisingly, Amazon's Kindle devices).

While I've been dubious about VDI and DaaS in the past, it is undeniably a service that enterprises are demanding - and perhaps more importantly than customer acquisition, by providing WorkSpaces, AWS clearly positions itself as a credible competitor to VMware and Citrix.

Pricing is competitive - in fact half the price of some on-premises VDI offerings. WorkSpaces is available in a range between $35 and $75 per month - depending on specifications. Higher priced offerings include pre-installed software such as Microsoft Office. An interesting addition to the WorkSpaces offering is WorkSpaces Sync, a client side application for PC and Mac that synchronizes data between the desktop and Amazon's S3 storage product - it's kind of like Dropbox for a VDI and is a good example of AWS layering its own services on top of each other to offer incremental and differentiated value.

In other news, AWS was crowing about its new US Department of Defense approval tick - this is in addition to the FedRAMP certification that they'd earned previously.

And then, as expected, came the pricing announcements that everyone expected, especially after Google's news of only 24 hours before. In AWS' case, the pricing changes (touted as the 42nd price reduction to date). AWS lowered prices across a huge variety of its services, touting its passion for taking cost out of its services wherever possible. Of course some suggest that Moore's Law suggests that there is far more potential for pricing cuts from AWS and other IaaS vendors than customers are actually seeing.

All in all it was news as expected from AWS - they had no option but to reduce pricing after yesterday's show. Similarly the GA of WorkSpaces was generally expected. What was interesting however was the subtle shift in messaging that we saw from AWS. Perhaps the growth of Pivotal, and the customer interest in its "operating system for the cloud" messaging has AWS thinking about a broader story that it can begin to tell.