Cloud computing was supposed to make corporate information technology a lot simpler, and in many ways it has — but as the cloud itself has exploded, so too has the complexity of managing all the pieces.

That’s the problem Amazon Web Services Inc. signaled that it’s attacking in force today. In a wide-ranging series of 22 new services for tackling everything from storing data to analyzing it to employing machine learning, it was apparent that the company hopes to make the technologies easier and more accessible to a larger number of software developers.

That’s key as AWS tries to reach further into large enterprises that have been slower to move their applications to the cloud. One of the gating factors has been a lack of expertise in key technologies such as machine learning, especially in large enterprises outside the biggest internet companies. To that end, the cloud computing company of Amazon.co Inc. debuted a number of services aimed at opening up the burgeoning resources in the cloud to the relative masses.

AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy (pictured) took the opportunity of his morning keynote today to make the case that the transition to the cloud will happen much faster thanks to all the innovation swirling in the cloud than “old-guard” tech companies such as Oracle Corp. want to admit — least of all to the customers they’re trying to keep.

“They are not helping you,” Jassy said pointedly. “This is not about skating to where the puck is. The puck has already dropped, guys. You’re going to have less capable technologies than all your competitors moving to the cloud.”

AWS remains far in the lead in the base-level “infrastructure as a service” layer of the cloud, which encompasses computing, storage and networking services. That’s despite recent concerted efforts by Microsoft Corp., Google LLC, IBM Corp., Oracle and others to carve out larger pieces of the market.

Microsoft in particular, the No. 2 player, has made significant gains, even as AWS has kept adding a bit of market share with a 42 percent annual growth rate. And others such as Salesforce.com Inc. have staked claims to higher layers of the cloud, such as software as a service, allowing companies to move business applications from their own data centers to the cloud.

Machine learning push

One new set of technologies that’s emblematic of this make-it-simple-stupid approach is in machine learning, perhaps the major focus of Jassy’s keynote. That’s no doubt partly because, despite Amazon’s long history of using machine learning in everything from personalized product recommendations to its Alexa digital assistant, Google is seen as the leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and Jassy wanted to drive home the point that Amazon has plenty to offer.

Builders, said Jassy — that’s the umbrella marketing term AWS is using in ads to appeal to leading-edge software developers and entrepreneurs — want machine learning, but “they want it to be easier. We have to solve the problem of making it accessible for everyday developers and scientists. ML is still too complicated for everyday developers.”

To that end, AWS introduced a new service called SageMaker, an easier way to train and  deploy machine learning models. It has prebuilt “notebooks” for common problems and built-in algorithms, as well as what it says is “one-click” training of the models after specifying data sources to draw from. “There is no other solution out there that lets you do close to as easy as this,” Jassy said.

In a surprise product, Jassy also introduced what it calls the first wireless, deep learning-enable video camera, called AWS Deep Lens, that helps developers build and test new services enabled by deep learning, a way of letting machines learn from data rather than being explicitly programmed.

Matt Wood, AWS’s general manager of AI, demonstrated how to build a music recommendation service in part by taking a selfie holding up a copy of one of his favorite albums, Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” alongside his happy face, to suggest he would like music like that. Deep Lens will ship early next year, but Amazon is taking preorders on its site today.

Amazon also introduced a series of other new AI-related services and features, such as allowing its Rekognition services for searching and analyzing images and its Kinesis data stream processing service to be used with video too. In addition, the company introduced audio transcription and language translation services using machine learning. Not least, he debuted the preview version of Amazon Comprehend, a managed natural language processing service that can extract information about people, places, brands and sentiment from text.

Going serverless

In another bid for cloud simplicity, Jassy also embraced the emerging “serverless computing” trend. The unfortunately named set of technologies essentially allows cloud customers to dispense with the hassle of provisioning servers and storage in the cloud — not stop using servers entirely as the name implies — and instead specify functions they want accomplished, and let AWS and other cloud providers do the heavy lifting under the covers.

For one, Amazon announced a serverless way called Fargate to run containers, which allow virtualized workloads to be run in multiple computer environments, in a serverless fashion. Now, said Stu Miniman, an analyst with SiliconANGLE sister company Wikibon, said it’s a big shift from managing servers to managing containers. Now, he said, “The container is the atomic unit of management.”

The company also announced a preview of a serverless version of its Aurora database that customers can pay for by the second, so they don’t need to keep paying for it when their database load drops.

In a similar vein, Jassy also announced that it’s offering to make its container service work with Kubernetes, the container orchestration service that has taken cloud developers by storm since Google open-sourced it awhile back.

Jassy had flagged the importance of the serverless trend in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE last week, saying that were Amazon.com starting today, it would build the company on serverless. Miniman said the kinds of computing workloads that can be done with serverless is still limited. But Jassy implied the potential is much broader, saying, “Event-driven serverless compute is so generally useful everywhere.”

In a sense, all those new technologies, even the new ones aimed at simplicity, could serve to make the cloud even more complex. Jassy hinted recently, however, that in tomorrow’s keynote, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels would spit out fewer product announcements and instead focus on how AWS will leverage serverless and related technologies to simplify the trees into a forest.

The announcements followed a series of hardly smaller new products and customers unveiled Monday and Tuesday. On Tuesday evening, the company introduced a so-called “bare metal” server in the cloud that gives customers access to raw computing power to run any software they wish. This morning, AWS announced three marquee customers, The Walt Disney Co., Expedia Inc. and the National Football League, on top of two other new or expanded customers on Monday, Turner Broadcasting System Inc. and Intuit Inc.

Photo: Robert Hof