UPDATED 11:00 EDT / JULY 12 2019

CLOUD

Is AWS solving the customization dilemma or presenting a paradox of choice?

Information technology has become commoditized. Widespread adoption of containers has made tools and services that used to be options only for the rich and powerful available to small and middle-size businesses. Cloud behemoth Amazon Web Services Inc. offers a list of top-level services that is in the triple figures and expanding.

“One of the philosophies of AWS is giving customers building blocks to build things on,” said Aaron Kao (pictured, left), senior manager of product marketing at AWS. “We give customers flexibility and choice.”

But AWS also understands that sometimes minimal choices are better: “[With] things like Amplify, Fargate, [and] AWS Batch … you don’t need to select an instance, you just tell us what your requirements are and Batch makes a selection for you,” stated Deepak Singh (pictured, right), director of compute services at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Kao and Singh spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) during the AWS Summit in NYC. They discussed AWS product announcements and if compute services is addressing customer needs or overwhelming them with choices (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Developers welcome EventBridge and Cloud Development Kit announcements

The big news was the launch of AWS EventBridge, a serverless bus designed to simplify the building of event-driven applications. “Everybody looking at Lambda and the serverless space is asking how are all these pieces going to come together?” Miniman asked.

“AWS services send events to CloudWatch Events; they consume events from CloudWatch Events,” Singh explained. “One of the best ways to do it is through [AWS] Lambda [serverless computing platform], and one of Lambda’s biggest strengths is the number of integrations with event sources, both taking in events and triggering events.”

With EventBridge linking applications using events, customers can access event triggers both inside AWS and from external partners, such as Zendesk, Datadog or PagerDuty. “And the applications that can be built will be really exciting,” Singh said.

Another announcement was the addition of TypeScript and Python to AWS cloud application development tool Cloud Development Kit. Building in the cloud is more complex than “take your code, put it on a server and run it,” Kao said.

CDK aims to simplify and speed developer workflow. “With CDK, you’re now able to use the programming languages that you’re programming your applications with, to model and provision your infrastructure. So it’s super helpful,” Kao added.

Containers are everywhere

The container space has fundamentally changed the way people architect their applications and has had a huge impact on the AWS product line.

“I think, the great thing about containers is, adoption is everywhere,” Singh stated. “Everything is growing like crazy,” he added, referring to the constant growth of Amazon Elastic Container Service and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.

ECS and EKS customers choose to run either on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or on the AWS Fargate compute engine that allows customers to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters.

“Customers find new interesting ways to run applications based on what they know and what they’re comfortable with,” Singh said.

One large customer is Snap Inc., parent of social photo app Snapchat. As a company that is familiar with Kubernetes, Snap has chosen to build a large portion of its new infrastructure on EKS on AWS. “And it basically helped their developer velocity,” Singh stated.

Big-name media mogul Turner Broadcasting System Inc. has chosen a different route, running content properties on AWS Fargate “because they can just stamp them out. … It’s a service that you can just keep expanding,” Singh explained. “It boils down to what are the key things that you’re comfortable with. What are the reasons you pick something. The best part for me is people have choices, and then they pick based on what they need at that point in time, which can be two different teams at the same place picking a different solution.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit NYC event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit NYC. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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