Last week’s gathering at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas featured plenty of news about new cloud products and services, but there was also music — lots and lots of music.

In his three-hour keynote address last Tuesday, Amazon Web Services Inc. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy was accompanied by a live band who played a range of selections by well-known artists between presentations, ranging from Van Halen and Freddie Mercury of Queen to Billy Joel and the Dave Matthews Band.

Asked what he would choose for his walk-up music, Jassy had a succinct answer. “Probably ‘Times Like These’ by the Foo Fighters,” Jassy replied. “Because these are unusual times right now.”

Jassy spoke with John Furrier and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed AWS’ new partnership with the National Football League, the history behind the firm’s strategic approach and how it led to a number of new products, a willingness to sacrifice short-term revenue to build customer relationships, support for developers and potential areas of future focus for AWS.

This week, theCUBE features Andy Jassy as its Guest of the Week.

Machine learning to curb injuries

When it comes to cloud computing, the times may be unusual, but they are also definitely competitive. AWS did its best last week to make its case for how it plans to continue dominating the public cloud market, rolling out nearly 30 announcements during Jassy’s Dec. 3 keynote alone.

On Thursday, the company made further news by announcing a partnership with the NFL to leverage machine learning and reduce head injuries in the often violent sport. The NFL is already collecting plenty of data, thanks in large part to Next Gen Stats, the league’s AWS-powered statistics platform.

AWS will take this data and apply machine learning in an effort to create a safer sport. “It’s a hard problem in a sport like football,” Jassy said. “They are really focused on player safety and health. We’re super excited about it.”

Teasing the pieces apart

Whether it’s statistical tools and machine learning for professional sports or a fully managed service to extend the cloud infrastructure to an enterprise data center like Outposts, the AWS approach may look scattershot at times.

But behind the multitude of products lies a clear purpose born in the company’s retail roots as a seller of consumer goods in the online market.

“For the first seven or eight years of Amazon, we basically jumbled together parts of our technology and we were moving really quickly,” Jassy recalled. “It was this big ball, this big monolithic piece. We got religion about that in having to move faster in the consumer business and tease those pieces apart.”

AWS was launched in 2006 in response to the hypergrowth Amazon’s retail business had been experiencing over the previous six years. Amazon addressed the problem by creating application programming interfaces or APIs as an internal standard, which fostered a much more organized way for developers to build much-needed company tools.

This “grow-your-own” strategy led to the deployment of a number of AWS products today, including Nitro, which is the underlying platform for EC2 instances, and Firecracker, introduced last year as a way to operate secure multitenant container-based services.

“Those are very much about us relentlessly working to continue to tease apart the different components,” Jassy explained. “Nitro was a complete reimagining of our hypervisor and virtualization layer to let customers have better performance, but also to let us move faster and have a better security story.”

Willing to sacrifice revenue

There is another part of the AWS philosophy that was nurtured in this period, and it was counter to what many businesses held as gospel. The company was willing to sacrifice revenue in the short term if it meant a more solid and rewarding customer relationship down the line.

AWS Lambda was first introduced in 2014 as a serverless platform to run code in response to events. Instead of a pre-set runtime buy, users would only pay for the compute time they consumed.

This was akin to a cable TV provider charging only for channels a consumer actually watched rather than the 200 channels they were forced to purchase per month. Why kill the golden goose?

Four years later, AWS led the serverless segment with 44% of the market, well ahead if its second-place competitor with 25%.

“We have learned this lesson over the last 20 years at Amazon,” Jassy said. “If it’s something that’s good for customers, you’re much better off cannibalizing yourself. What really ends up happening is they spend less money per unit of compute, but it allows them to do so much more that they ultimately long term end up being more significant customers.”

Spotting trends

AWS has also become highly adept at spotting and riding trends. The firm’s own experience in untangling its complicated internal compute infrastructure taught it that developers could create a lot of cool stuff if given the right tools and freedom.

AWS certainly did not ignite the DevOps movement, but even as early as 2014, the company already had a number of tools for developers.

AWS continued to roll out new tools for developers at re:Invent in December. Deep Composer, an AI-powered piano keyboard, Wavelength, a way to enable developers who want to build apps over a 5G network, and enhancements to Cassandra for managing workloads were just a few of the solutions unveiled last week.

“One of the big trends that we see with enterprises is that they’re taking more of their development in-house,” Jassy said. “Those developers like to deal with the building blocks, and they have creative ideas on how to stitch them together.”

Asked about what AWS could potentially be focused on in the future, Jassy expressed enthusiasm for a checklist of items, including robotics, edge solutions, and even quantum computing.

“We really want to be the technology infrastructure platform under all the applications that people build,” Jassy said. “We have three to five years of items on our roadmap that customers want us to add, and that’s just today.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

Photo: SiliconANGLE