When a company innovates at the speed of Amazon Web Services Inc. and generates an impressive amount of revenue in the process, there’s a lot to discuss. One conference in a given week just simply won’t do.

AWS is holding two events in the U.S. this week. One is AWS Summit in New York City, headlined by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels (pictured), and the other is AWS Imagine in Seattle. It’s yet another sign of the firm’s significant position at the center of the public cloud universe.

“Amazon has a $30 billion run-rate business growing at 40% per year,” said Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “That means they’re putting $9 billion of incremental revenue every year into the cloud business. That’s roughly as large as the entire Microsoft cloud business, and that’s astounding.”

Vellante spoke with Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston. They shared their expectations for the coming AWS Summit events and discussed the state of the AWS ecosystem (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Integrated hardware approach

Last month, AWS released a video that demonstrated an early version of Outposts, the firm’s integrated data center hardware product announced at re:Invent in November. It’s an on-premises data center system that will be an extension of VMware Cloud on AWS or a native AWS environment, and analysts will be looking for more details later this week in New York City.

“That line between the public cloud and the on-premises environment is blurring,” Miniman said. “I can have the Dell hardware with the VMware code, or I can have the Amazon hardware with the VMware code coming later this year with Outposts. Everyone wants to see where Amazon is going.”

In advance of the AWS Imagine gathering this week, the company has released a set of announcements around its evolving work in the education field. AWS created a qualification in cloud computing course at universities in the United Kingdom, launched an EdStart program in several Asian countries, and said it would finance cloud hardware purchases by Latin America startups in the educational technology arena.

“It is impressive how deep Amazon is going into these spaces, the affinity they have,” Miniman said. “We’ve seen Amazon going into subsegments of the market, going into verticals and going really broad and really deep. I don’t see anything slowing Amazon down.”

Here’s the midyear analysis on AWS from Vellante and Miniman, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. (* Disclosure: AWS Summit is sponsored by AWS. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE. AWS Imagine is not sponsored.)

Photo: Amazon