Amazon Web Services Inc. is no stranger to virtualization. But even the cloud giant admits to “figuring it out” as one of its major events spins out of the physical realm.

AWS Summit was originally scheduled to be held in San Francisco in April. Now, the event is retooled as a free online event, open for remote attendance around the globe. Joining AWS for the online event, just as it would have for the physical one, is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

“It’s all virtual. There are no boundaries,” said John Furrier, host of theCUBE, introducing a special kickoff segment for the AWS Summit Online event from theCUBE’s livestreaming studio in Palo Alto, California. Furrier was joined remotely by theCUBE co-host Stu Miniman, who called in from theCUBE’s Boston studio. They discussed current news from AWS and the current state of business in the global information technology community.

The battle of the JEDI

“This is an absolute bloodbath between AWS and Microsoft,” said Furrier, starting the conversation with the news that Amazon had filed a second bid protest with the United States Department of Defense. The company is claiming that the award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract to AWS rival Microsoft was “fatally flawed.”

Although Furrier believes that the DOD will eventually award the contract to Microsoft again, albeit for no other reason than lack of motivation to change, AWS has the ammunition to maintain the battle.

“Microsoft failed to meet the criteria of the contract, and they’re deficient,” he said. “They still can’t host top-secret content even if they wanted to.” And with government contracts, he added, “when you’re deficient, you’re ineligible.” Furrier predicted a “huge tech scandal” if Amazon’s claims about the DOD prove to be true.

COVID-19 makes cloud indispensable

There has been a lot said recently about how COVID-19 has highlighted the haves and have-nots when it comes to cloud. Cloud-native companies have an obvious advantage as their business operations and workforce go remote. But even those prepared for the online economy have discovered that not all public clouds are equal.

“There have been some of the cloud providers that have had performance issues, have had to prioritize which customers can get access to things,” Miniman said. “AWS is standing strong. They’re meeting their customers, and they’re answering the call of cloud.”

Cloud providers need to be there for customers during this time more than ever, according to Miniman. “You will either make a customer for life or you will have somebody that will not be saying good things about you for a long while,” he said.

And if providers aren’t stepping up to the plate, customers should demand that they do. “If you need help. If you need to adjust something, push back on them because they should be responsive,” Miniman said.

What’s the buzz from AWS Summit?

“The big story here is the Kendra availability and the Augmented AI availability,” Furrier noted, discussing the release of AWS’ Kendra natural language enterprise search service and the human review capabilities of A2I in SageMaker.

This builds on AWS’ focus on artificial intelligence and large-scale capacity, “whether it’s building on top of EC2, Serverless, Lambda, AI … all this is kind of coming together: data, high capacity, operational throughput and added value,” said Furrier.

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit Online event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Summit Online event. Neither Amazon Web Services, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE