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Today marks a notable milestone in the history of cloud computing, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) turns 10 years old.

March 14 2006 saw a press release go out on the wire from Amazon announcing “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.” A decade on, AWS continues to hold a significant lead over the competition in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and while moving into other areas, such as gaming with Lumberyard, and virtual reality if a recent job posting is to be believed, its primary cloud operation shows no signs of stopping.

Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, described a few of the various learnings AWS has provided over 10 years in a blog post. Building evolvable systems, expecting the unexpected – everything will fail over time, despite the best laid plans – and building software services for automation are all key, he argued.

“There are hundreds of lessons that we’ve learned about building and operating services that need to be secure, reliable, scalable, with predictable performance at the lowest possible cost,” he wrote. “With over a million active customers per month, who in turn may serve hundreds of millions of their own customers, there is no lack of opportunities to gain more experience and perhaps no better environment for continuous improvement in the way we serve our customers.”

James Hamilton, AWS senior principal engineer, moved to Amazon in 2008 after a “game changing” experience with AWS at his previous employer. Citing Netflix’s decision to go all-in on cloud in 2010 as key, Hamilton wrote: “The best proof of innovation is customer commitment and, without a doubt, the highest form of customer commitment is to decide to run the entire company on cloud infrastructure.”

So how does the rest of the industry see the history of AWS? Ian Moyse, a regular contributor to CloudTech and board member of Eurocloud and the Cloud Industry Forum, argues AWS has not only disrupted the landscape, it has dragged other companies – such as Microsoft – along with it more quickly than expected.

“In recent years AWS has really disrupted the cloud world, driving Microsoft into cloud deeper and quicker than they likely would have done and driving pricing down and functionality up in what has come to be known as the race to zero,” he said. “For providers and customers, AWS has driven more affordable compute, enabled innovation and empowered faster DevOps. Many apps we have today may not have existed if it were not for the change AWS has brought upon the IT sector.”

Research on the state of the cloud infrastructure market has not surprisingly seen AWS as the darling of the industry. Synergy Research offers a quarterly analysis of the market, and the current trend is that while other vendors, such as Microsoft and Google, are growing slightly quicker than Amazon year over year, it is hardly making a dent in Amazon’s 30% global market share.

Yet fellow analyst house Cloud Spectator argues AWS ranks comparatively poorly when compared to smaller, more niche players. “We see many smaller players find an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at a very competitive price,” CEO Kenny Li told CloudTech. “The [larger] providers offer the size and additional services for handling massive customer volume, but the volume also comes with additional performance considerations which may result in lower performance on cloud servers.”

For Moyse, the Cloud Spectator report represents one dynamic of the market, and that there’s room for vendors of all shapes and sizes. “A wide range of cloud providers will continue to be selected by customers, some offering local relationship to the smaller business and feeling the goliath brands leave them uncomfortable, some choosing for support reasons where they lack in-house skills in the new services and are unable to afford them against higher paying enterprises sapping the talent pool,” he said.

“AWS and Azure, whilst very attractive commercially and easy to spin up, do need some knowledge and experience to gain the outcome and quality businesses require,” Moyse added. “Much like Salesforce has done, we can expect a services ecosystem to develop around these platforms to advise and support smaller businesses in utilising them.”

Vogels argued there will inevitably be the occasional bump in the road. But, as he finished his missive, “remember it is still day one.” For AWS, the question now, with a burgeoning ecosystem, is whether the coming decade can be as successful as the first.

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As companies continue to step up the pace of migration to the cloud, many find themselves in the situation of having to bridge the gap between their physical and cloud infrastructures, which brings new challenges. IT has applications it regards as critical but lines of business have different application requirements that they regard as critical. As a result, IT often ends up becoming overloaded with requests, and as they attempt to satisfy demand with more resources, this can lead to over-provisioning of cloud infrastructure and runaway costs.

As more workloads are moved to the cloud, IT management must evolve and adopt a new approach to delivering infrastructure, applications and end user access. Indeed, IT needs to remove its attachment to physical infrastructure and start to present themselves as a service providing internal customers with access to flexible resources on-demand to support digital business initiatives. That however is easier said than done and for many migrating their physical environment into the cloud is extremely daunting.

In our experience, a good way to begin cloud migration is to use cloud for net new workloads. By running new and often non-mission-critical workloads in the cloud, the operational team can grow accustomed to managing the cloud and understanding performance metrics, and even gain confidence by estimating costs. Being able to slowly move workloads to the cloud will help acclimatise to the new way of working and ensure that IT understands the environment that it is working in, before migrating major workloads.

We often get asked what type of applications organisations should move to the cloud. Thisvery much depends on the organisation, but our advice is to take an inventory of your data and applications, and then decide which applications are most important to be hosted in the cloud. You need to assess and tier according to business criticality, considering how much of your environment is virtual and how much is physical, and then identify any critical components, such as specific networking requirements or physical systems. A lack of knowledge and visibility of what assets organisations have and are using is a common challenge for companies due to the complexity of IT infrastructure, so understanding what you have before you consider what to move is really important.

In many cases, migrating virtual and less mission-critical applications first feels like the swiftest path to initial success. However, understanding the full range of applications you’re ultimately migrating will help you select a provider best positioned to address your needs. Using cloud-based disaster recovery services is also a good way to start out and become comfortable with cloud operations – particularly if your cloud service provider enables self-service DR management and testing.

Physical systems are often the most trying when migrating to the cloud. They are usually the remainders of an older time and part of the IT environment because they are necessary and critical to business operations. There are, however, instances when moving these legacy systems to the cloud is beneficial to the business.

Alongside this, moving workloads to the cloud can mean losing visibility into performance metrics, long term history, and even cost visibility. This can greatly increase the burden of managing your cloud workloads and introduce some fear with respect to billing, costs and performance. While migration to cloud is considered to have low set up costs, the ongoing management is equally critical to your cloud decision. Making sure that you work with your cloud provider to maintain the transparency and visibility of these systems is important to keep the business costs and IT budget running as normal.

Your cloud service provider should be providing support and training to help ease cloud migration. Companies considering cloud need advisory and architecture advice and services to help them through this transition. However, many providers fall short on the basic on-boarding and support processes they offer to customers as part of cloud deployments.

You should ensure that you understand the levels of on-boarding training and support and ongoing customer support for your cloud offering. This goes beyond understanding self-help, knowledge based or message boards. Make sure that you understand the additional costs and the SLAs that you are entering into. Equally, as you look to grow your cloud services, look for a provider that provides support over the phone.

In summary,cloud-based applications offer many benefits, including the ability to scale IT resources when needed, quickly launch new apps and ensure a high level of performance at all times – not to mention, if you have a disaster recovery programme in place, keeping the business running if disaster strikes. Having applications in the cloud provides a stable and scalable infrastructure on demand and provides IT employees with the freedom to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive digital transformation across the business.

Read more: Analysing security and regulatory concerns with cloud app migration

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