Amazon has extended its recently introduced code deployment service to work with on-premise machines in a small but significant expansion signaling a strategic change of focus toward hybrid clouds. It’s among the last of the major providers to have seriously embraced the paradigm.

The retail-turned-cloud-giant spent the better part of the last few years advocating the view that only a handful of large organizations will maintain their own private data centers in the future and the rest will switch to renting hardware. That stance only changed last November at its annual infrastructure summit, which is also where CodeDeploy made its debut.

The new update to the service reinforces the position that Amazon infrastructure boss Andy Jessy took during his keynote at the event when he told attendees that the choice between on- or off-premise environments is “not a binary decision.” Organizations can now manage updates to their private servers in the same place as their cloud instances.

CodeDeploy provides the ability to group nodes based on their roles in the application lifecycle and to coordinate the propagation of updates accordingly. Modifications are implemented in successive order on each machine to prevent a failed patch from obstructing the next changes and creating even more errors for the administrator to have to clean up later.

When an update fails to install correctly, CodeDeploy simply stops the process on the affected  machine and displays the logs generated from the incident interface to enable quick identification of the problem. The service works the same for instances running in Amazon’s public cloud and on-premise hardware, but each update made to a server in the latter category costs an extra $0.02.

The decision to charge organizations a premium for using the service to patch their private environments reflects the fact that Amazon is still very committed to pulling as many as in-house workloads as possible into its public cloud. The company  even released a dedicated migration utility for VMware Inc.’s ubiquitous hypervisor to that end last year, but its quest for enterprise dominance has now settled into a more mainstream path.

Photo by Kevin T via Flickr