AWS Is Pioneering a New Type of Cloud Entity

There's a tendency to dismiss Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a provider of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings that IT organizations invoke on demand like any other. The reality is much more nuanced. Over the last year, AWS has wrapped a variety of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technologies intended to blur the line between IaaS and PaaS. For example, an AWS Lamba is a compute service that programmatically responds to application events. Now AWS is adding an AWS API Gateway to provide an API management service through which developers can invoke a variety of backend services and applications. AWS has also rolled out a Docker container service and a global file system through which the next generation of modern apps can be built. What's more, AWS has made available an AWS Service Catalog through which access to those services can be provisioned and audited. Put all the AWS pieces together, and it appears that solution providers across the channel should take note that AWS is rapidly pioneering the development of a new type of cloud entity that redefines what it means to be a public cloud service provider.