A friend asked me a month or so what is the next thing Amazon Web Services is going to do. I spent a bit of time researching ideas, then it hit me AWS will eventually be in major markets within the countries borders.
A couple of months ago I was chatting with a journalist from Spain and we discussed the cloud, hosting, and AWS. Here is a post that ail give you an idea of the protectionist practices in Spain.
Hedge funds and private equity groups have raised concerns about the risk of creeping protectionism in proposals made by Spanish diplomats to re-write European Union legislation to regulate their industries for the first time.
He believed that a threat to IT jobs by moving to a public cloud outside the country would be met with protectionist enthusiasm to keep jobs in the high paying IT industry.
The cloud is a disruptive force that will challenge current IT operations, bringing automated standardized environments that require a small fraction of IT hardware and staff. Requiring nationalized citizens to operate the IT environment is an easy impediment for moving to a cloud in another country in the USA or other places that are the cloud hubs. This still leaves opportunities for the hosting companies in the country to provide IT services within the borders.
Now imagine this. AWS gets 200kW of colocation space. Ships in 4 cabinets of optimized cloud gear with room for another 16. Ships the bits uninstalled on storage. Has nationalized citizens run scripts that create the environment. And launch a country specific AWS instance. Local sales force drive sales and gets feedback on what needs to be added to remove barriers for companies to move into AWS.
What in this seems like it hard for AWS to do?
AWS's price point would be substantially lower than the local hosting company. It is kind of like the infamous Wal-mart effect for retailers unable to compete with the low prices and selection. Amazon.com can apply the same to hosted IT services in a country.
An example of markets that AWS mini-me could go are the locations that have edge locations.
EU (Ireland) Region
EC2 Availability Zones: 3 Launched 2007
AWS Edge Locations
- Amsterdam,
The Netherlands (2)- Dublin, Ireland
- Frankfurt,
Germany (2)- London, England (2)
- Madrid, Spain
- Milan, Italy
- Paris, France (2)
- Stockholm, Sweden
I have tested this idea on over 2 dozen people and they all say this makes total sense.
And GigaOm's Barb Darrow has shared the idea with the rest of the industry.
Coming from Amazon — lots of Mini-Me clouds for government work?
by Barb DarrowJUN. 6, 2013 - 10:29 AM PDT3 Comments
SUMMARY:Amazon’s GovCloud targets U.S. state, federal and local government workloads. Here’s betting AWS will replicate that model abroad.
With my opinion added.
Right now, I should note that AWS had no comment on this story which is, after all largely speculation. But others who know data center technology and customer requirements agree this game plan makes sense. “There are lots of government workloads out there that require special handling — to protect citizen information etc. There’s a market for this,” said David Ohara, GigaOM Pro analyst and founder of Greenm3.