Amid the rolling tide of announcements from Amazon Web Services Inc. this week was a set of enhancements to abstract away infrastructure and make the lives of developers easier. The bigger story was a continued march toward the programmable cloud.

AWS announced the next version of Aurora Serverless, which makes it easier to migrate from SQL Server. In addition, the company also rolled out enhancements for its Lambda serverless offering, further reducing the need for infrastructure management.

“How do you make the cloud programmable for everybody?” asked Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock Management Corp. “Everyone is going to be a developer, and the population of developers is expanding. Whoever owns the programmable cloud model will be the next platform for the next 15 years.”

Chen spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the second day event analysis for AWS re:Invent. They discussed the growing success of companies built on the public cloud, newly announced tools that will help developers innovate faster and how AWS is staking its claim to the edge. (* Disclosure below.)

Opportunity for entrepreneurs

The push for a programmable cloud is one of the many subplots surrounding a set of competitive dynamics currently playing out in the enterprise tech world. AWS’ moves this week highlight its intent to maintain a leading position in the public cloud space, even while major new companies and whole businesses are being built using platforms of major cloud providers.

An example of this could be found in the success of Snowflake Inc., the cloud-based data warehousing company that made its mark this year as the largest software IPO in history.

“Snowflake went public on the back of Microsoft,” Furrier noted. “Breaking the monolith or breaking the proprietary piece of it has always been an opportunity for entrepreneurs.”

Despite the competitive landscape, AWS is not holding back when it comes to providing new tools for developers to build the next Snowflake. Indeed, a case could be made that much of AWS’ focus this week has been to foster new companies and encourage entrepreneurs by offering a plethora of useful tools and services.

One announcement this week involved DevOps Guru, a fully managed operations service from AWS designed to offer intelligent recommendations for fixing problems based on available data.

“The new data paradigm with cloud only opens up new patterns,” Furrier said. “It’s not just moving fast; it’s new capabilities.”

Another new enticement from AWS — Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL — provides a transition layer for companies to switch to AWS relational databases as needed. It promises faster migrations with minimal developer effort.

“Amazon is trying to reduce friction by using Babelfish,” Chen said. “It’s a great move for them.”

The positioning of new products by AWS has more intent than merely streamlining the DevOps world. A key challenge remains staying in front of the technology wave itself and this means a concerted focus on the edge.

A key portion of the opening day keynote during re:Invent was spent defining the AWS strategy behind expansion of its AWS Local Zone network of data centers and a vision for Wavelength, AWS’ service that marries 5G networks with edge compute supplied by AWS. In bringing its cloud stack to the edge, AWS is hoping to claim the higher ground before the rest of the world arrives.

“Edge is both an opportunity for startups and companies, as well as a threat to Amazon,” Chen said. “The edge will be a super opportunity going forward. Hybrid is not going away, on-prem is not going away, but we’re going to see an increase in cloud-only or edge services.”

Here’s the complete conversation, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: AWS