L-R: Iain Rouse, Jeff Kratz (Amazon Web Services)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has revealed serverless technologies is high on the agenda for its partner ecosystem over the next five years.
Iain Rouse, AWS director of Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania, claimed that running a server with an operating system that has to be patched and maintained “isn’t what the next five years is going to be about”.
“The next five years will be about consuming the latest technology on a serverless basis, where you pay per transaction -- you don't pay per hour,” he told ARN ahead of the cloud giant's public sector AWS Summit Canberra event.
“We need partners to think on that level, because government and public sector see that potential; they've experienced that because of the speed of response in the pandemic.
"If I'm a partner thinking about where should I spend an hour a week, [I’m] making sure I've understood the latest technology and then think about serverless as a paradigm shift.”
Rouse also claimed that edge computing was another area teaming with partner opportunities within the next five years, touting AWS' Edge solutions and its Snow family of devices, which provide data processing at the edge in rugged conditions.
“Local Zones are just the start, where we move the cloud closer to a group of customers to provide single digit latency for very, very fast performance and high speed,” he said.
“Then we have our Snow and Edge devices which allow us to take it all the way into specific environments. It could be on warships, it could be in cupboards, it could be in a car; the idea of taking the edge of the cloud offline to do a particular problem, solve it and then bring the data back to the cloud for processing is what's going to … [enable] new opportunities for partners.”
Jeff Kratz, general manager of worldwide public sector partners, programs and activation sales at AWS agreed with Rouse’s sentiments, adding that Australian partners who expand globally are providing inspiration for partners in other countries “to raise their bar”, with one local example being distributor Nextgen Group.
“[Nextgen] are very thoughtfully looking at helping smaller solution providers – ISVs [independent software vendors] -- that don't understand the complexity of doing business and government and they're helping to accelerate their business in particular,” he said.
“I think that there is a market where distribution can be an accelerator for smaller software start-ups that want to do business in the government vertical because given a regulated industry, they don't have the expertise. Nextgen Group is a great example.”
Kratz also noted Nextgen’s efforts in providing education around cyber security and compliance, which he claimed could lead to helping smaller start-ups accelerate faster.
AWS and Nextgen jointly launched the second series of their Security Foundations program, part of the AWS Partner Academy, earlier this month.
“I think there's some distributors around the globe that could learn some things from Nextgen. So, for me, I'm seeing the inspiration and the practical delivery that's there,” Kratz added.
Sasha Karen attended AWS Summit Canberra as a guest of AWS.
