Andy Jassy, AWS | AWS re:Invent 2019

Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS, sits down with John Furrier & Stu Miniman for AWS re:Invent 2019 at the Sands Expo & Convention Center in Las Vegas, NV.

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https://siliconangle.com/2019/12/11/andy-jassys-leadership-aws-keeps-marching-tune-reinvent-guestoftheweek/

Under Andy Jassy’s leadership, AWS keeps marching to its own tune

VIDEO EXCLUSIVE BY MARK ALBERTSON

Last week’s gathering at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas featured plenty of news about new cloud products and services, but there was also music — lots and lots of music.

In his three-hour keynote address last Tuesday, Amazon Web Services Inc. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy was accompanied by a live band who played a range of selections by well-known artists between presentations, ranging from Van Halen and Freddie Mercury of Queen to Billy Joel and the Dave Matthews Band.

Asked what he would choose for his walk-up music, Jassy had a succinct answer. “Probably ‘Times Like These’ by the Foo Fighters,” Jassy replied. “Because these are unusual times right now.”

Jassy spoke with John Furrier and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed AWS’ new partnership with the National Football League, the history behind the firm’s strategic approach and how it led to a number of new products, a willingness to sacrifice short-term revenue to build customer relationships, support for developers and potential areas of future focus for AWS.

This week, theCUBE features Andy Jassy as its Guest of the Week.

Machine learning to curb injuries
When it comes to cloud computing, the times may be unusual, but they are also definitely competitive. AWS did its best last week to make its case for how it plans to continue dominating the public cloud market, rolling out nearly 30 announcements during Jassy’s Dec. 3 keynote alone.

On Thursday, the company made further news by announcing a partnership with the NFL to leverage machine learning and reduce head injuries in the often violent sport. The NFL is already collecting plenty of data, thanks in large part to Next Gen Stats, the league’s AWS-powered statistics platform.

AWS will take this data and apply machine learning in an effort to create a safer sport. “It’s a hard problem in a sport like football,” Jassy said. “They are really focused on player safety and health. We’re super excited about it.”

Teasing the pieces apart
Whether it’s statistical tools and machine learning for professional sports or a fully managed service to extend the cloud infrastructure to an enterprise data center like Outposts, the AWS approach may look scattershot at times.

But behind the multitude of products lies a clear purpose born in the company’s retail roots as a seller of consumer goods in the online market.

“For the first seven or eight years of Amazon, we basically jumbled together parts of our technology and we were moving really quickly,” Jassy recalled. “It was this big ball, this big monolithic piece. We got religion about that in having to move faster in the consumer business and tease those pieces apart.”

AWS was launched in 2006 in response to the hypergrowth Amazon’s retail business had been experiencing over the previous six years. Amazon addressed the problem by creating application programming interfaces or APIs as an internal standard, which fostered a much more organized way for developers to build much-needed company tools.

This “grow-your-own” strategy led to the deployment of a number of AWS products today, including Nitro, which is the underlying platform for EC2 instances, and Firecracker, introduced last year as a way to operate secure multitenant container-based services.

“Those are very much about us relentlessly working to continue to tease apart the different components,” Jassy explained. “Nitro was a complete reimagining of our hypervisor and virtualization layer to let customers have better performance, but also to let us move faster and have a better security story.”

Willing to sacrifice revenue
There is another part of the AWS philosophy that was nurtured in this period, and it was counter to what many businesses held as gospel. The company was willing to sacrifice revenue in the short term if it meant a more solid and rewarding customer relationship down the line.

AWS Lambda was first introduced in 2014 as a serverless platform to run code in response to events. Instead of a pre-set runtime buy, users would only pay for the compute time they consumed.

This was akin to a cable TV provider charging only for channels a consumer actually watched rather than the 200 channels they were forced to purchase per month. Why kill the golden goose?

Four years later, AWS led the serverless segment with 44% of the market, well ahead if its second-place competitor with 25%.

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