Observers in the serverless computing community sat up and took notice on Tuesday when Amazon Web Services Inc. announced that four of its cloud-based analytics platforms would become available as serverless services.

The news, delivered as part of the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, encompassed Amazon Kinesis, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon MSK. The latest announcements from Amazon brought further attention to the future role of containers as the public cloud giant shapes its AWS Lambda serverless strategy. One technologist sees a growing bridge between the two technology areas.

“You had the serverless camp, and you had the container camp,” said Stu Miniman (pictured, left), director of market insights, cloud platforms, at Red Hat Inc. “Last year at re:Invent, I really felt a shift in Amazon’s positioning. Many of the abstraction layers and tools that will help you support these environments will now span between Lambda and containers. The container world has been adding serverless functionality.”

Miniman spoke with Dave Vellante (pictured, right), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio at AWS re:Invent. They discussed the convergence of public and private clouds and the importance of AWS ecosystem partners, such as Red Hat, to drive innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Extending the cloud

The difference between private and public clouds is another line that is becoming more difficult to define. As AWS and other hyperscalers build services specifically designed for the datacenter, the definition of cloud is expanding within the enterprise world.

“I’ve always thought that cloud is an operating model not a location,” Miniman said. “We spent years talking about whether private cloud was really a cloud. Today, Amazon is putting lots of things into your datacenter and extending the cloud out to that environment.”

In his re:Invent keynote address on Tuesday, AWS Chief Executive Adam Selipsky highlighted the growing ecosystem of partners and communities that are increasingly leveraging the AWS platform. This includes the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, or ROSA, which is a jointly managed open-source offering designed to help customers build and deploy applications.

“It’s not a single cloud community; there are these focus areas,” Miniman said. “I was happy to hear Adam mention Red Hat as one of the key hybrid partners. For Amazon to get from the $60 billion to the trillion-dollar mark down the road, it’s going to take a village. And we’re happy to be part of it.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS re:Invent. Amazon Web Services Inc. and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE