Where AWS is headed: Every function as a managed cloud service
Amazon Web Services sees automation as a requirement more than a feature so it's not surprising that it is taking analytics and making it a managed service just like it did with servers with Lambda.
Read this
CTO Werner Vogels outlined the company's vision around automation at the AWS Summit in New York. The gist was that cloud infrastructure is moving to a world of processes and functions and away from things like virtual machines and containers. "The world of serverless computing is not one of container files but Lambda functions," said Vogels. To drive the point home, he put up a slide that noted that servers were pets, virtual machines and containers were numbered like cattle, and the herd was serverless.
AWS bolsters cloud platform with real-time analytics, gives more content controls to developers | AWS Lambda garners interest, production workloads as serverless world evolves | AWS, Microsoft seen rated top dogs in IaaS in Gartner's Magic Quadrant
The success of the serverless approach has been documented and AWS is already enjoying an ecosystem of integrators, frameworks, and use cases.
Now if you take the idea that automation is a requirement and not a feature you can connect a few dots to see that AWS is betting everything behind the scenes will be a managed service -- including analytics.
AWS launched Kinesis Analytics, a managed service for processing and analyzing streaming data using standard SQL. The promise is that enterprises won't have to learn programming skills and manage AWS services such as S3, Redshift, and Elasticsearch Service. Kinesis will provision, deploy, and scale resources in the background.
The cloud giant already has companies using Kinesis Analytics such as MLB Advanced Media and JustGiving. If Kinesis Analytics goes the way of Lambda there will be other companies hopping on board too. TechRepublic: AWS vs Microsoft Azure: Understanding the serverless application trend
Kinesis Analytics and Lambda both allow customers to focus on the code they want to run with scale, durability, and availability in the background.
You can see where this is headed. In the future you won't be buying cloud infrastructure from AWS as much as you will functions. Compute was last year. This year it's analytics. When it's all said and done AWS is likely to automate and abstract the infrastructure you initially came to buy and deploy.