Vive La Difference: Amazon EC2 Expands to Europe

In certain circles it is de rigeur to view the US market as more competitive than the European market. The cloud is no exception with the US market leading adoption of the cloud and seeing a proliferation of cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, GoGrid, Mosso, Engineyard, Joyent, Heroku and many more. (Incidentally a fun thing to do is click on all those links right now, and compare them. Plus ca change?)

Proliferation is nothing without competition. And competition is really the heart of the cloud value proposition. Competition means "cheaper". Why bother investing in yet another data center, staffing it, making it reliable, carbon-neutral, and so on, when you can rent resources ‘on demand’ from one that already fits the bill? Yeah ok ... but this argument does not carry much weight when there are only a few clouds to choose from, and hence little competition to drive innovation forward and prices down.

This is also the reason why people are already talking about interoperability and cloud standards. People like Simon Wardley in his already notorious “don’t get bitten in the aaS” call to action (aka "rant") at CloudCamp, and analysts such as Redmonk, have been calling for interoperability as the foundation for a competitive services market. By decoupling service from product (another cloud theme) we the users can force competition based on service quality and not API lock in. In other words: we want differentiation on value.

The excellent Cloud Summit in Tel Aviv last week saw an inaugural gathering of newly formed Cloud Interoperability Forum where a number of "cloud customers", e.g. MDs at major banks, called for more competition on ease of migration and price, so that clouds can be adopted for more systems and sooner. More value - faster.

In this context, it is easy to see why people are so excited about Amazon EC2 launching in Europe. At CohesiveFT we have been delighted to work to connect to the first European cloud entrants such as Flexiscale (with more to come). But customers want more and they want differentiation. Already many customers are using S3 to outsource simple storage needs in the European region. The differentiator is to couple this with Amazon EC2 and EBS in one go. With an integrated approach the customer will get more value faster.

At CohesiveFT have been operating in Europe for two years and if one message has come through consistently it is: I want flexibility but I also want control - give me local resource that is consistent with local commercial constraints. Amazon EC2, and our support for this in Elastic Server, means more customers can have this today. With Elastic Server customers retain control - you can take your application and port it to any of the clouds we support and then move it between them safely.

Because of this pent up demand, Amazon are taking the European opportunity really seriously. It’s not just about EC2, S3 and EBS. Anyone who has been at any more or less any important (EU/UK) web conference this year cannot have missed Martin Buhr and Simone Brunozzi. These guys are the public face of the European Amazon team and have been outstanding in gathering and focussing developers, customers and community. Very often they have been backed up by Jeff Barr, who seems able to be everywhere at once, and the significant presence of Werner Vogels who is not just Amazon’s CTO but also a big driver of AWS.

So who do we think is going to use the cloud in Europe? Well there are still some tricky regulatory and privacy questions that everyone is still figuring out. But even with these concerns there is a big market from banks, telcos and big corporates to offload for example testing and QA to the cloud. "Testing" is a problem. It shows up a classic provisioning gotcha that we see in any big customer - “I cannot bring my service to market without testing it to destruction but I cannot get the machines set up fast enough”. Well, people of Europe, that’s about to change. The era of the machine-hugger is at an end!

It’s not just corporations. Amazon’s recent deal with CapGem sets the scene for what could be a stream of SIs looking to take advantage of shorter time to market using the cloud, around specific value propositions such as collaboration solutions. There are a lot of SIs in Europe - it’s the flip side of localised market fragmentation. Here I am excited about the prospects for our VPN-Cubed product for bridging from enterprise servers to one or more clouds securely, and without moving all your data because sometimes you can’t.

And returning to the theme, this is the week of LeWeb in Paris. (Being asinine, and not French I like to call this "The LeWeb"). It's the ultimate BOF. From around the world, software vendors and web start-ups have gathered to show their latest and greatest to a crowd of big buyers. This is community in action. At CohesiveFT we love community and open source - because they use the cloud too.

So. People like the cloud. Now more people can use the cloud. And - more clouds means more competition and at CohesiveFT we think this is what Europe wants. Vive la difference! Enjoyez-vous!