AWS Boss: Every Large Tech Company In the World Wants To “Copy” Amazon Web Services

The head of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing business, Andy Jassy, has said that his firm sees no threat from Alibaba’s expanding Aliyun cloud service as it simply can’t compete with the functionally AWS provides.

His comments came at this year’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, where Jassy was quizzed by reporters on the progress of AWS’ China business.

“Every large technology company in the world is marching fast now to try and build a copy of what AWS has built,” boasted Jassy.

“That is not a surprise to any of us at AWS or to somebody that has worked on the business from the very start. We always expected there to be a lot of companies pursuing it.”

AWS launched a preview of its Chinese region in Beijing in 2014, but is still working to launch a full service in the country.

“Our business in China is growing really fast, it’s a pretty substantially sized business. We have been operating in preview mode in China as we have lots of partners there,” said Jassy. “We’re very optimistic about both the current business and the future for us in China.”

A Chinese rival

But AWS faces stiff competition from home grown Chinese cloud provider Aliyun, part of Alibaba.

Aliyun has made 2015 a year of global expansion, as the service opens up data centres in the Middle East and a data centre in Silicon Valley itself. Alibaba in July announced it was ploughing $1bn (£640m) of extra investment into its cloud computing division in an attempt to challenge Amazon Web Services.

“Our goal is to overtake Amazon in four years, whether that’s in customers, technology, or worldwide scale,” Aliyun’s president Simon Hu said in an interview at the time.

The announcement came straight after Aliyun made moves to woo US customers to its cloud service with a data protection pact that promised users complete control over their data.

However, Jassy’s view appears to be ‘accept no imitations’. Whilst close rivals Microsoft Azure and Google weren’t named by Jassy, it was obvious he was pointing out perceived flaws in AWS’ competition.

“For us, one of the biggest surprises for us over the nine and a half years is just how long it’s taken for a lot of these providers to come into this space,” Jassy said.

“If you look at a lot of these platforms that are starting to emerge, they’re just very different, functionally, to AWS. They have many fewer services, they have many fewer features within those services. Many of them don’t have SLAs. They have pretty small ecosystems. AWS is by far the largest ecosystem.”

Main image: Andy Jassy on stage at this year’s re:Invent keynote

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