the business of cloud computing continues to grow. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is since years one of the core businesses of Amazon. Today it provides the company with a 70% of operating profit. In this context, the giant of e-commerce remains focused on expanding its infrastructure. Its next target is Spain. The company has announced this Thursday that it will open up in late 2024 or early 2024 three data centers in the country. These infrastructures, which will be at Aragon, will allow any customer to have a low latency (waiting time between carrying out an action and run) and storing its contents in Spain if you so wish.
Miguel Alava, head of Amazon Web Services for Southern Europe, explains that the data belongs to the customers “and they choose the area or the geography where you want to stop these data”. Despite the fact that right now do not have the possibility of doing so in Spain, this will change with the new facilities: “In the same way that now a Spanish client you can use the region of Seoul, Singapore, or Brazil, once the region of Spain is listed, any client in the world can use it. For example, a start-up that you see Spain as a potential market and that you are interested in your technology infrastructure and applications in the country.” Alava, which has not finalized how much money it will invest in the implementation of these centres, expected that this project will create “hundreds of jobs”.
In Europe, Amazon Web Services has the infrastructure in five regions —Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris and Stockholm— and soon plans to open a new centre in Milan. “A region is composed of three availability zones. An availability zone is a data center that have a risk profile different in terms of network socket, socket communication, geological feature, air crash, floods, etc. These availability zones are so close as to have a very low latency, and viewed as a logical entity only. But also so far as to have a risk profile different,” explained Álava. In this way, if a problem occurs in one of the data centers, the other two “the service can continue to offer without any impact to the end customer”.
The aim of Amazon is to offer to any company with a cloud infrastructure, high performance and low latency with a virtually unlimited capacity. The AWS cloud includes 69 data centers in 22 different regions throughout the world. For example, in the united States has centers in Ohio, Oregon or Northern Virginia. In Asia, in countries such as India, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan and South Korea and will soon open new centers in Jakarta (Indonesia). His presence is noticeably lower in Oceania and South America, where it is found only in the region of Sydney, and São Paulo, and in Africa, where for the moment there is no data center. Amazon plans to build infrastructure soon in Cape Town (south Africa).
From the storage to the artificial intelligence
Amazon Web Services began to build and operate cloud services in 2006. Since then has not stopped growing. The revenue of Amazon Web Services increased by 35% in the third quarter of 2019 —in front of the collapse of 26% in the same period of the benefits of Amazon—. Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing power, databases, storage and applications over the Internet with a pricing system based on consumption. The technology giant has all kinds of tools for systems administrators and developers. Offers more than 165 services —from calculation and databases to storage, network services, services of artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality—.
The company, which has not finalized how much money it will invest in the implementation of these centres, expected that this project will create “hundreds of jobs”
Companies around the world are migrating to an infrastructure based in the cloud. In the past year the global market for it infrastructure in the cloud grew 46.5% to 80.400 million dollars (about 72,000 million euros), according to a report from Canalys. There are different services on the market: from Microsoft Azure, or IBM Cloud to Google Cloud. But Amazon is the leading storage services. AWS controls 32% of the entire market of cloud computing in the world, according to the same report. The company recorded in 2018 revenues of 25,400 million dollars, 47% higher than in 2017 and almost triple the number five years ago.
For example, on their servers is almost all the content of Netflix. They also use AWS big companies like Expedia, General Electric, Airbnb, Coursera, the Food and Drug Administration of Usa (FDA, for its acronym in English) or the Apple. The company from Cupertino, it spends 30 million dollars a month in the Amazon cloud, according to the television network CNBC.
In Spain, some of the AWS customers are Infojobs, Fotocasa, BBVA, Banco Santander, Meliá and Mapfre. “More than two-thirds of the IBEX 35 using Amazon Web Services”, underlines Alava. In addition to companies, there are also public entities that use its services such as the town Hall of Alcobendas or the library of Catalonia.
According to Alava, this trend will continue: “I have been working since 2012 on Amazon. Then I heard that cloud would be only for work loads of development or testing. Then evolved the speech and said that the best thing any start-up or small company could have a load of more interesting work. Later, began to come in larger companies like Netflix. Has been a rapid evolution and continues. But despite the fact that there are millions of active customers in the world, I believe that we are only at the beginning of what is going to be this transition to the cloud. More and more companies are going to benefit”.
Microsoft beats Amazon a big contract with the Pentagon
The Pentagon awarded a few days ago that a contract of 10,000 million dollars (about 8.971 million euros) to Microsoft. This company had competed for a year with Amazon, IBM, Oracle, and Google to move to the cloud for Defense information. The final decision of the Pentagon to choose to Microsoft was a surprise to the market, as Amazon started as the favorite.
“it Was a decision surprising to us because having been the first to draw this type of services gives us an advantage both in the number of services, such as the depth and quality of the sameos,” says Alava. The announcement comes a few months after that the president of the united States, Donald Trump, was interested personally for this huge contract. The mogul started over a year ago a personal crusade against the owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who is also owner of The Washington Post. In July claimed to be thinking “very seriously” to intervene in the competition” and explained that he had “tremendous complaints about the Pentagon contract with Amazon”.
