Andy Jassy, Amazon’s vice president of cloud computing, dedicated his entire keynote address at last week’s AWS Summit to the needs of corporate customers and his firm’s efforts to address them. That speaks to how far the online retailer has come in its public cloud journey, which started in 2006 with the launch of what was then a bare-bone infrastructure-as-a-service platform aimed primarily at developers.

Today, AWS has over five times more compute capacity deployed than the 14 nearest competitors combined, Jassy highlighted after stepping up to the podium. A sizable portion of that is in use by enterprise users who are growing increasingly frustrated with traditional on-premise approaches to provisioning IT resources, the first of the four factors Amazon views as the key drivers of cloud adoption.

Faster proof-of-concept

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“Anybody that does a lot of invention will tell you that the two most important things are: you have to be able to try a lot of experiments, and if those experiments fail – and many of them should fail if you’re really pushing the envelope – you don’t want to leave with the collateral damage of failed experiments,” Jassy said.

The cloud, he continued, presents an alternative to handling test and development in-house via an on-demand consumption model that allows users to only pay for the resources that have been used, enabling faster access. “You can spin up thousands of instances in minutes, and then if your experiments don’t work, you can either give them back to us and stop paying for them or you can reuse them for other experiments,” he explained.

Cloud Breadth

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The second reason organizations are moving business processes to AWS is the sheer breadth of capabilities on offer, according to Jassy. For CIOs, the ability to run practically any workload on a single platform that can be managed through a single console is simply too compelling to ignore – and in the wake of the explosion in enterprise use cases for cloud computing, a necessity.

“Whether you’re building an altogether new application or you want to find a way to move large swathes of apps to the cloud, you need very broad functionality to make that happen and to be able to do that in a coherent fashion,” Jassy said. “That’s what we’ve been building here with AWS over the last eight years.”

Amazon’s IaaS portfolio encompasses a uniquely broad spectrum of solutions ranging from bread-and-butter compute and object storage services to a rapidly expanding array of workload-optimized instances, he details. And that’s just at base of the stack.

Up in the PaaS and SaaS layers, the company offers on-demand automation tools and a formidable array of managed solutions for ingesting and processing different types of data. That includes the Glacier backup and archiving platform, the RedShift data warehouse, Elastic MapReduce and Kinesis, a stream processing service that was first unveiled at the company’s re:Invent conference last November. Besides that, there’s the WorkSpaces desktop virtualization service and some 1,400 value-added partner products in the AWS Marketplace, he added.

Although it’s certainly an important part of it, having a wide selection of features is but one aspect of Jassy’s definition of  breadth. “In this world, when you think about having platform breadth, it means you can deploy your applications in any of our 10 regions in minutes and it allows you to have better latency and better customer experience for end-users all over the world,” he said.

Rapid access to new features

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Jassy boasts that Amazon is not just out-scaling competitors, but also out-innovating them. And that is the third reason he believes AWS is gaining so much traction in the enterprise: companies want the latest and greatest in technology without having to commit to large upfront capital investments in infrastructure.

“People are moving really quickly to the cloud because it not only provides them agility but also lets them move all of their workloads in a coherent fashion. But a third reason they’re moving so quickly to the cloud is you get continual evolution, innovation and iteration in the cloud versus what you might do on-premise,” he noted.

Amazon is investing heavily to keep its innovation engine running. It rolled out 82 new services and features in 2011, according to Jassy, a number that nearly doubled the following year and surged to 280 in 2013. Since January, AWS has released another 80 new features. The firm’s aggressive roadmap has succeeded in capturing the attention of CIOs, although the executive admits that its bold price cutting policy plays a big role as well.

Cost savings

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“The fourth reason that people are moving so quickly to the cloud has to do with cost savings and cost flexibility. You get to trade capital expense for variable expense,” Jassy explained. Amazon makes its services under multiple pricing schemes to help companies of different sizes achieve the biggest bang on their cloud buck, while also periodically lowering rates across the board. The vendor has announced a total of 42 price drops since entering the IaaS market, most recently at AWS Summit as a response to the massive reductions Google announced at its own cloud conference a couple days prior.

A finger on the pulse of the enterprise

Jassy wrapped up his keynote with a summary of cloud adoption patterns in the enterprise. Test and development workload and greenfield applications are the most common sight on AWS, he says, but there’s also a rapidly increasing number of hybrid deployments. These divide into two categories: on-premise processes like backup and recovery that have been hooked up to the cloud for increased reliability and scalability, and hosted apps that connect to private environments. More and more enterprises are also moving existing mission-critical systems, typically as part of data center consolidation initiatives, while a handful of companies are following in the footsteps of Netflix and going all-in.