UPDATED 13:23 EDT / AUGUST 14 2017

CLOUD

With Hulu and FICO as new customers, Amazon aims to keep its cloud flying high

Aiming to cement its big lead in cloud computing, Amazon.com Inc. today said it has bagged two prominent large customers, video streaming service Hulu LLC and the credit analysis firm FICO, to use its cloud service.

Amazon Web Services Inc., the leader in the base level of cloud computing and storage services, also announced a few new services and a raft of updates to existing services at its AWS Summit today in New York City. The new offerings include Glue, a service to automate preparation and loading of data into AWS’s Simple Storage Service, and Macie, a security service that uses machine learning to automatically find and protect sensitive data in AWS.

AWS started more than a decade ago by attracting startups with new services that never started in a private data center. Adrian Cockcroft (pictured below), who joined AWS last October as vice president of cloud architecture, cited “millions” of active customers a month using AWS now.

“We have just about everybody on AWS,” he said. However, it’s apparent lately that Amazon aims to get more large enterprise customers, which still do the vast majority of their computing in their own data centers. The announcements today are intended at least in part to prove AWS has the means to help those customers migrate to the cloud. That’s becoming more critical as AWS’s revenue growth from those startups looks to be reaching a limit at some point and large enterprise software and hardware providers from IBM Corp. to Oracle Corp. have stepped up efforts to move their own huge customer base to their clouds.

cockcroftawssummit1Hulu is running its new Live TV service with more than 50 channels that it launched in May, including ingestion of streams, DVR storage and serving streams partly through AWS’s CloudFront content delivery network. Rafael Saltanovich, Hulu’s vice president of software development, said at the conference keynote that Hulu had to rebuild its entire technology stack for Live TV, so it chose to go with AWS’s S3 storage service.

 

Fair Isaac Corp., or FICO, known best for its credit scoring service, also has started using AWS to run analytics for its MyFICO.com consumer services as well as its flagship analytics platform. It also said it plans to go live soon with a large Australian financial services firm and also add other services to AWS in coming years. Using the cloud, said FICO Chief Information Officer Claus Moldt, allows the company to “innovate at a speed we couldn’t before.”

AWS also added two new services available today. Amazon Macie automatically recognizes sensitive data such as personally identifiable information and intellectual property and monitors access to the data. Using machine learning, it provides alerts when it detects anomalies that suggest unauthorized access or accidental data leaks. Among the early users are Netflix, Edmunds.com Inc. and Autodesk Inc. For now, it’s offered only in AWS’s U.S. East and U.S. West regions, though that likely will expand soon.

Amazon Glue, whose general availability to customers was also announced today, is aimed at automated so-called extract/transform/load or ETL operations that prepare data for use in a variety of databases. In this case, it works with S3 and other Amazon data stores such as Redshift, its Relational Database Service and other databases running on the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, so data can be queried for analysis.

Matt Wood, AWS’s general manager of artificial intelligence, noted that it’s a serverless service, which means users don’t have to provision and manage virtual services manually. Among the users so far are Herman Miller, which allows customers to do analysis on its Internet-connected furniture to suggest better ergonomics, as well as News Corp. and online trading platform OLX Group.

Yet another new service, called Migration Hub, finds what apps are running in a corporate data center and groups them together into types such as databases and other services so they can be migrated into Amazon’s cloud more easily. It also determines what tools are needed to do the migration and provides ways to track the migration as it’s happening.

AWS faces potent competition from Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc., among others, but it remains atop the infrastructure as a service cloud business and is extending steadily into the platform as a service software development and software as a service applications markets. Although AWS’s revenue growth has been slowing somewhat, it still stood at 42 percent in the second quarter, implying an annual run rate of more than $16 billion.

Still, Amazon has kept up a steady stream of new services and improvements, more than a thousand last year. “They’re the cheetah,” Stu Miniman, a senior analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, said in an analysis today on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s video unit. “They move really fast, they’re really nimble.”

Featured photo: Robert Hof; inset: AWS Summit screenshot

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