Amazon Web Services Inc. keeps charging through the cloud computing market in a thick dust of service releases. It’s getting tough to keep up with all the new products, but AWS’s throngs of customers seem to believe that more is more. Is it spreading itself too thin, and can competitors bump AWS out of some market spaces by going deeper into areas like machine learning and serverless computing?

“Why look in the rear view mirror when you’re the top dog?” asked John Furrier (@furrier, pictured, right) host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in a discussion with industry analysts today. Furrier, along with guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor, pictured, left) and Justin Warren (@jpwarren, pictured, center) discussed AWS’s seeming invincibility at re:Invent 2017 in Las Vegas. (* Disclosure below.) 

Folks at AWS have always credited the company’s success to laser focus on customers. It did not win the cloud market lead by worrying about what competitors were doing, so why start now?  Its competitors, on the other hand, can’t afford to make a move without measuring it against AWS’s weight in cloud, says Warren. “I reckon the competitors to Amazon are actually distancing themselves from AWS,” he said. “They’re trying to find their own way of doing things, because you can’t out-AWS AWS.”

Who are AWS’ competitors? Not the plethora of self-described cloud companies who are really more like managed service providers, Warren said. There are really just two competitors, if Townsend’s discussions with Fortune 500 companies are an indication. In talks with internal customers, “when they describe what they want, they’re describing AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and everything else is just not even part of the discussion,” he said.

Competitors go deep for the end zone

Does Google’s competing Compute Platform and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure have anything AWS doesn’t? Google is going deep in machine learning tools for big data, which may appeal to customers with intense need in that area. And Microsoft is a well-rooted brand in the enterprise software as a service market. “Enterprise customers still, I think, are struggling to this date on how to interact with AWS,” Townsend said.

AWS and its competitors would be wise to keep an eye on an emerging trend in information technology departments. “Developers are shaping the agenda,” says Furrier. “I can see early signs of a cult here where all the innovation that’s come in the field is from customers saying, screw it.” These customers, instead of waiting for direction from the chief information officer, simply spin up their own protocols with AWS or other cloud services. Serverless computing plays very well into this new culture. AWS, Google and Microsoft all offer serverless capabilities, so this should become an increasingly heated competition among the three.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent.

Photo: SiliconANGLE