This caught my eye because, 1: I didn’t realize Workday was running on AWS and apparently was not alone in that; and, 2: It’s a pretty big win for HP Cloud, which is trying to gain credibility as a public cloud option — a realm that AWS rules.

The news came the final day of HP Discover and was reported here. I picked it up here, after sending an email to Workday for confirmation. Since it was a Sunday, Workday took some time to respond, but AWS sure didn’t: An Amazon spokeswoman pinged to say that Workday remains a “happy AWS customer,” reiterating what Amazon CTO Werner Vogels had already tweeted:

For those following today’s news, @Workday remains a happy #AWS customer—
Werner Vogels (@Werner) June 14, 2013

When Workday got back to me — again, it was Father’s Day, so let’s cut them some slack — they also said they remain “a happy AWS customer.”

Update: And now HP itself weighs in with an emailed statement:

“During our HP Discover event, HP was very pleased to announce Workday as a customer for HP’s public cloud. However, we misstated the impact of that announcement on Workday’s relationship with Amazon Web Services. We apologize for the mistake,”

It’s always tricky when one company announces a big change by another company. Remember when Mirantis helpfully announced that PayPal was moving from the VMware stack to OpenStack? What PayPal actually said was a lot more nuanced, and I’d be willing to bet there is truth in both camps: That just as Paypal is using some VMware and some OpenStack, Workday will use a couple of clouds.

As big and efficient as AWS is, big customers would be nuts not to hedge their bets and pursue some sort of multi-cloud strategy. Luckily, Workday cofounder and co-CEO Aneel Bhusri and Vogels are both speaking at Structure this week, so we can ask them for ourselves.

This story was updated at 8:23 a.m. PDT with an HP statement.

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Netcraft also said the number of websites hosted on these web-facing AWS workhorses soared 71 percent to  11.6 million in may from 6.8 million in September. Gulp.

In other exploratory forays, just over a year ago an Accenture analyst, using his own methodology, put the total count of AWS servers at 450,000 or so, but that figure included boxes in the guts of the system, not just web-facing servers. In April 2012, researcher Deepfield Networks estimated that a full 1/3 of all internet users touched an AWS-based server at least once a day and that 1 percent of all consumer traffic moved either into or out of the AWS cloud.

Figuring out just what goes on within AWS often feels like the blind men and the elephant parable, with each researcher gleaning some information about the whole but none able to provide the whole picture. But the reason people keep trying is that Amazon itself does not provide details on just how much gear it uses. Only that it adds more and more of it all the time. You’re welcome to ask Amazon CTO Werner Vogels about all this at Structure later this month.

The sheer scope of AWS is freaky — and the fact that most people estimate that AWS is bigger than a $2 billion-a-year business now — is one reason every tech vendor HP,Oracle, IBM, VMware, Microsoft, and Google are fighting for their piece of the public cloud pie.

The more traffic AWS handles, the more it learns about user behavior patterns and the more it can apply that wisdom to tweaking its infrastructure design to reducing cost while also (shocker!) making money on it.  Talk about your virtuous cycles.

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These numbers factor in AWS and Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk on the PaaS side; Google App Engine; IBM’s SmartCloud and SmartCloud Application Services; Microsoft Azure and Cloud Services for Windows Azure; Salesforce.com’s Heroku and Force.com (but not its bigger Software-as-a-Service applications business.)

Key takeaways:

• Amazon Web Services remains alone atop the heap with  27 percent of total IaaS and PaaS revenue in Q1, up from 24.7 percent for the year-ago period.
• Salesforce.com is second largest but it’s revenue share decline year over year to 6.8 percent from 7.9 percent.
• North America accounts for more than half the worldwide IaaS/PaaS revenue.

These figures won’t surprise folks who already see Amazon Web Services at a $2 billion-a-year revenue rate. Morgan Stanley thinks AWS alone will hit $24 billion in revenue in the next decade. While other players — Microsoft, IBM, Google and Fujitsu all saw slight growth.  Some of the major telcos – AT&T, NTT and Verizon — were off slightly year over year.

These numbers beg the question of whether anyone can catch Amazon. Google just made its Google Compute Engine IaaS generally available, and Microsoft launched its Azure IaaS capabilities in April. Those well-funded entries along with VMware’s hybrid cloud service coming online, will pose more competition for the AWS monolith.

AWS  boosters say the company’s 6-year-head start makes it invincible, but many workloads have yet to migrate: IDC estimates that just 5 percent of total IT spend is now in the cloud. That leaves lots of upside opportunity for the companies who delivers the best, most flexible and cost efficient services.

Who that might be is up in the air, but one place you can hear all about the top candidates will be at GigaOM’s Structure where a list of cloud powerhouses including VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and Microsoft Server and Tools group president Satya Nadella will all be on hand to talk up their companies’ cloud strategies.

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Oh, and the researchers project that AWS will hit $24 billion in revenue by 2022. Amazon doesn’t break out AWS revenue, but most pundits figure it passed the $2 billion-a-year mark about a year ago.

The fact that AWS has a huge lead in cloud over the rest of the world is not news to anyone who’s been watching, but these projections could be a wakeup call to investors who think tech incumbents — companies like IBM, Microsoft, HP, VMware, Red Hat, as well as every telco and hosting provider — can challenge Amazon in cloud computing.

“Applying retail economics to the delivery of technology services well positions Amazon Web Services [to be] a Top 5 vendor within the $152 billion TAM [total addressable market], ” according to Morgan Stanley analysts Scott Devitt, Keith Weiss and team.

Nobody’s immune

The move to cloud computing means fewer companies will buy huge numbers of servers and storage arrays for their own use. Over the next five years, Morgan Stanley’s expects that 3 percent to 17 percent of current spending could be sucked up by cloud-based IT service providers. AWS represents a key risk for infrastructure vendors EMC, Brocade, NetApp, VMware and Qlogic, in particular, according to the report.

Other key takeaways:

• “We expect on-premise server growth to remain negative long-term on the back of smaller footprints post the adoption of server virtualization combined with new workloads moving to the cloud. Partially offsetting the decline is 20% growth in servers shipped to cloud providers, though some of the demand is fulfilled by whitebox makers like Quanta and Wistron.”
• “Storage market at risk of decelerating growth that isn’t fully baked into expectations (unlike servers which already declined in 2012). We expect 0-5% storage revenue growth going forward, down from 5-10% historically. EMC and NetApp likely gain share from server vendors, like IBM. We downgrade BRCD to UW, given over 30% of revenue derived from server OEMs.”

AWS as enterprise software power

And then there is enterprise software, where Amazon threatens VMware and Red Hat in the virtualization market. And, as we’ve reported, Amazon is pushing hard for enterprise workloads with its DynamoDB NoSQL database and RedShift data warehouse. Those AWS efforts represent a long-term threat to Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. In content delivery, where Amazon’s CloudFront is a factor, Akamai faces a long-term threat.

Morgan Stanley isn’t the first analyst firm to up the ante on AWS expectations. In January, Macquarie Capital projected that AWS would account for $38 billion of an overall $71 billion cloud services market by 2015. If you don’t like Morgan Stanley’s take on AWS, hold on — there are bound to be others.

The growth of Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure and its push beyond startups into the enterprise,will doubtless come up at GigaOM’s Structure event, where Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will speak.

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Amazon announced identity federation for enterprise users two years ago. That let businesses grant their own employees access to AWS resources based on the users’ current corporate identity management systems. But this new federation capability spreads the net wider.  This federation will let developers authenticate a user with her existing Amazon, Google or Facebook credentials, which then give her access to specific AWS resources using her existing IAM roles.

In his AWS blog post announcing the news, Jeff Wierer, IAM principal product manager, explained a basic use case:

“Imagine you’re developing a mobile app that uses the new Login with Amazon service for authentication, and part of the app’s functionality allows end users to upload an image file as their personal avatar. Behind the scenes, you want to store those images as objects in one of your S3 buckets. To enable this, you need to configure a role that is used to delegate access to users of your app. Roles are configured in two parts:

1. A trust policy that specifies a trusted entity (principal)—that is, who can assume the role. In this case, the trusted entity is any authenticated Amazon.com user.
2. An access policy with permissions that specify what the user can do.”

With services like this one, Amazon continues to push its cloud services as the platform of choice for developers at startups and big companies alike as more public competitors come online. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will be on hand at Structure 2013 in June to discuss this and other topics.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user jaaro

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Here’s why: As Amazon Web Services keeps churning out services, support offerings and certifications to appeal to corporate and government users (the latest being FedRAMP accreditation), other cloud vendors need to show that they offer value above and beyond AWS. Hybrid cloud, which pairs local processing power with outside cloud resources as needed, is one area that they see as a weakness for Amazon.

AWS versus everyone else

While none of these rivals refer to themselves as AWS killers (smart move), they all see Amazon as the #1 cloud player and the top threat to their own cloud ambitions. When pressed, VMware senior vice president Matthew Lodge acknowledged that “everyone is competing for the same IaaS dollars.” Everyone meaning Amazon and the rest of the cloud contenders.

VMware, which saw, um, limited uptake of the vCloud Director that it pushed service providers to use as the basis for their own clouds, said its new vCloud Hybrid Cloud Services will compete with AWS on price, at least in some cases, but offer other enterprise-worthy goodies.

Said Lodge: when you factor in “hidden costs” in Amazon’s dedicated instances, the playing field levels out. “They charge for I/O and we don’t. They charge for VPN endpoints, load balancers and firewalls and we don’t,” he said.

Rackspace president Lew Moorman has a similar message. “Now that public cloud is 3 to 4 years old in reality, applications are bigger and more complex and people are starting to see tradeoffs to using public cloud only,” Moorman told me Thursday.

Structure 2012: Lew Moorman – Rackspace

“When public cloud came out and you could suddenly provision a server in a minute when it used to take 3 months, those were intoxicating advances … you get drunk on them but when things settle in there are tradeoffs,” he said.

For example, what’s great for test-and-dev environments is not always optimal for production workloads, where public cloud costs quickly add up.

Once someone hits the $25,000-a-month milestone, “it’s time to rethink all-public-cloud deployment,” he said.

Joyent trumpeted a similar message this week when it announced a raft of new compute instances it says will be  competitive with AWS.  Joyent, like Rackspace, offers public, private and hybrid cloud options.

Corporate cloud purchases are about more than price and technology

Having said all that, almost every cloud vendor alive will also add that price isn’t the compelling reason to move to cloud. Face it: when it comes to IT-sanctioned technology purchases, it’s not just about the price or the technology. IT departments have established procedures and guidelines for deployment and cloud providers will have to accommodate them.

“Most public clouds — AWS etc. — don’t offer enterprise-class security, compliance or performance SLAs to users,” said Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream, which positions itself as an enterprise cloud provider. ”Some public clouds offer supplemental services that dedicate equipment to enterprises/government, but they are generally not multi-tenant  and so deliver less efficiency.”

That means they remain suited for test and dev, for backup, SaaS apps and apps with no performance criteria, Rogers said via email.

Is Amazon’s head start insurmountable?

Granted all of this is self serving talk, but having sat through a raft of CIO panels this week, it is clear to me that some of these points ring true with this constituency.  But, if we’ve learned anything from the past 6 years of its existence, AWS won’t stand still. It now offers several services of its own and through an alliance with Eucalyptus that break down some barriers between a customer data center and its cloud. But until you can run AWS instances on your own infrastructure, AWS will remain a public cloud provider in a world where more workloads could flow to a hybrid model.

Structure 2010: Werner Vogels – CTO and Vice President, Amazon

AWS has a huge head start and lots of customers. But we’re early in the cloud era. IDC says less than 5 percent of the world’s total IT budget is now devoted to public or private cloud. That leaves a lot of upside for Amazon and its competitors.

There’s time for Amazon to offer more hybrid options and for rivals to catch up. It’ll nothing if not an interesting market over the next few years.

Who wants to bet that this topic of hybrid vs. public cloud deployment will come up at Structure 2013 next month where both Moorman and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will take the stage?

Pretty safe money, I’d say.

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I have no numbers for the AWS event but as of Tuesday night, the count for OpenStack Summit is 2,400 registered attendees up from 1,314 for last year’s San Diego extravaganza, according to an OpenStack source with access to that data. (The data is here and here is a readable, updated count.)

Rackspace, HP pack OpenStack show

Rackspace, one of OpenStack’s granddaddies along with NASA — has registered 199 216 people — a number which one OpenStack member characterized as overkill. Hewlett-Packard, depending on how you count or spell it, has 169 171 people or so on tap. Here’s how that list breaks out: HP (85), Hewlett Packard with no dash (30); Hewlett-Packard with dash (22); HP Cloud Services (21) and HP Cloud (7), Hewlett Packard Co. (4). Seriously, HP, what’s up with that?

Red Hat is on with 74, IBM with 72 and the list goes on. What I’ll be looking for, however will be real, live OpenStack customers which are starting to trickle out. OpenStack Foundation member Cloudscaling (which registered 14 summit attendees) just announced video game publisher Ubisoft as a customer and already has claimed LivingSocial and IBS Datafort as reference accounts.

Structure 2011: Werner Vogels – CTO, Amazon.com

Some other interesting tidbits from the OpenStack Summit attendee list: Controversial foundation member VMware registered a whopping 4 22 people. VMware bought Nicira, a big OpenStack player in software-defined networking. And non-member Oracle registered 14 people. Interesting. Oracle is going its own way with cloud but recently buy bought Nimbula, an OpenStack member.

The new OpenStack Grizzly release will be front-and-center in Portland.

Amazon to tout OpsWorks, other enterprise-class services

Meanwhile, on the other coast, AWS CTO Werner Vogels will probably talk up AWS’ value to the enterprise and tout its new-and-improved cloud management features and services including OpsWorks lifecycle management offering and RedShift, Amazon’s inexpensive data warehouse alternative to Teradata, Oracle, IBM and HP products.

AWS, a favorite among developers at startups and big companies alike, still needs to persuade  financial services companies and organizations in other heavily regulated industries that its public cloud infrastructure can be trusted for sensitive workloads — things beyond archival storage. And, there are indications — including the private cloud it’s allegedly building for the CIA that it’s getting over its aversion to private cloud deployment as well.

OpenStack clouds are starting to gel — at least at some customer accounts. What remains to be seen is which of the many OpenStack cloud providers will gain traction. And meanwhile, AWS continues to chug along.

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But even without a cute name, the distributed infrastructure that underlies the web services that we turn to day in and out is just as important. And this year as we gear up for our sixth Structure event (June 19 and 20), dedicated to the infrastructure that serves both the internet and the cloud, we’re thinking about what’s changed in the last year and what’s ahead.

Last year, we spent a lot of time discussing software-defined everything — broadly, the abstraction of the physical hardware from the applications and even operating systems running on top of them. We had tiffs and debates over different platforms and whose APIs are really open. We even had a group hug.

Structure 2012: Marten Mickos – CEO, Eucalyptus Systems, Chris C. Kemp – CEO, Nebula and Co-Founder, OpenStack, Sameer Dholakia – Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix

This year’s focus: The physical cloud

Looking ahead, we’re peeling back some of the software-defined abstraction to focus on the physicality of the cloud. Like how do we build special-purpose architectures for our apps? What happens when we scale beyond the confines of the data center with dark fiber or other distributed resources?

We’ve got some amazing speakers signed up already: from Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who will undoubtedly hit upon the business side of the cloud, to Adrian Cockroft of Netflix, who will talk about some of the practical issues associated with supporting a giant movie streaming service on Amazon’s cloud. And of course, we’ll have Amazon’s Werner Vogels back for his sixth appearance onstage, where he’ll defend the online retailer’s title as the king of the cloud. Just kidding, this isn’t a boxing match, it’s an infrastructure conference. So please, no wagering.

Structure 2012: Christofer Hoff – Chief Architect, Security, Juniper Networks, Simon Crosby – Co-Founder and CTO, Bromium, Stacey Higginbotham – Senior Writer, GigaOM

Meet the people getting their hands dirty with deployments

And for those who have moved beyond the public and private cloud debates, or the “Is the cloud secure enough?” worries, we’ll have several practitioners discuss how they operate their businesses in the cloud. The CIOs of The Clorox Co., Revlon and Pabst Brewing Co. will all be onstage. We’ll also have tips for making sure your software is built to scale without breaking the bank, and processes for building out IT infrastructure in a more flexible manner.

One of the emerging trends we’re seeing in applications is that their architecture is no longer this static set of code, but is actually evolving not just with little tweaks, but with wholesale architectural rewrites. Speakers including Kevin Scott, an SVP of engineering at LinkedIn and Sam Schillace, a VP of engineering at Box will share their experiences building new application architectures to meet both scale and business needs. It’s not enough to keep your application from breaking. It needs to run efficiently for the business too.

So join us on June 19 and 20 in San Francisco at our Structure conference. We’re going to have something for everyone, from the business team to the developer community. Register now and get $500 off the regular ticket price with our earlybird discount. See you in San Francisco.

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Remember last July when our own Om Malik and Stacey Higginbotham reported on VMware’s plan to take on Amazon with a cloud of its own?  Remember VMware denying it?  Well, last Wednesday it all became official with the announcement of VMware Hybrid Cloud services — in which VMware will host its own public cloud that will be sold by existing VMware partners.

Gartner’s Chris Wolf has an interesting take on his blog here.

Now, there is some wiggle room for VMware here. Our original story showed the big cloud coming out of the then-unannounced spin-off of VMware and EMC That spinoff — the Pivotal Initiative — did happen, but it appears that it’s VMware, not Pivotal, that’s running the big cloud. Paul Maritz the former CEO of VMware and now the head of Pivotal, will be speaking this week at GigaOM’s Structure: Data in New York.

Amazon beefs up Virtual Private Cloud

It was an even more busy week than normal for Amazon itself which unveiled new Virtual Private Cloud capabilities for AWS users. Launched 4 years ago Amazon VPC lets users create “a virtual network of logically isolated EC2 instances and an optional VPN connection to your own data center,” according to the AWS blog. what’s new now is that soon, when a new customer launches EC2 instances, they will do so in the ”EC2-VPC” platform.

“You don’t need to create a VPC beforehand – simply launch EC2 instances or provision Elastic Load Balancers, RDS databases, or ElastiCache clusters like you would in EC2-Classic and we’ll create a VPC for you at no extra charge.  We’ll launch your resources into that VPC and assign each EC2 instance a public IP address.”

At that point you can assign multiple IP addresses to a single instance, change security group membership on the fly, and add egress filters to those groups.

One of Amazon’s weak points when it comes to the enterprise accounts it wants to attract is the unwillingness of IT pros — especially in heavily regulated businesses — to put mission critical workloads on shared public cloud infrastructure. This new VPC capability might make them more amenable to using AWS at a time when more and more “private” cloud options — from competitors Rackspace, HP, and others are coming on line. GCN has more on VPC.

Also new his week: AWS tripled the amount of storage that can be associated with each RDB (Relational Database) instance.

“You can now create DB instances (MySQL or Oracle) with up to 3 TB of storage (the previous limit was 1 TB) and 30,000 IOPS (previously, 10,000). SQL Server DB Instances can be created with up to 1TB of storage and 10,000 IOPS.”

And, Amazon also launched a version of its mobile AWS console for iPhone so It types can see what’s going on with their Amazon cloud when they’re not at their desks. An Android version of the console debuted in January.

This public cloud war will only get more interesting if, as has been reported here and elsewhere, IBM is in the market for SoftLayer and/or Rackspace.  If IBM ends up making either of those rather substantial purchases — Reuters put a $2 billion price tag on SoftLayer and Rackspace would be much more — it would only show how critical IBM sees this market that it would spend that kind of dough after already investing billions in its own cloud infrastructure. Of course, no one — from IBM, from SoftLayer, from Rackspace or from EMC (which was also reportedly in the hunt for SoftLayer), is commenting.

Working with your Frenemy: Newvem debuts AWS heat map

Newvem is the energizer bunny of AWS watchers. Amazon keeps “totally copying” Newvem’s capabilities (in the words of Newvem CEO Zev Laderman) and Newvem just keeps on adding more capabilities.

Newvem, the Israeli company obsessed with showing you more about your Amazon Web Services use than you know, was at it again this week, unveiling its Cloud Utilization Heat map that shows AWS users their utilization over multiple regions by time, machine type and availability zone.

Newvem CEO Zev Laderman (left) and AWS CTO Werner Vogels.

The sales pitch?A substantive portion (15 percent) of the clouds Newvem analyzes now are underutilized. That means “$30 million of $200 million EC2 spending tracked is wasted,” says Newvem spokesman Cameron Peron. Presumably if you know what resources are being wasted you can make moves to streamline operations and run things optimally. Sell off reserved instances you’re not using, for example.

Here’s my guess: Newvem has focused 100 percent on AWS to this point. But as Amazon keeps adding more of its own dashboard and monitoring alerts, I would bet Newvem, like other monitoring companies, will soon turn its eye to other clouds as well. After all, multi-cloud deployments are one tactic large companies are looking at to avoid locking into a single provider.

That Amazon competes with its own partners is certainly not new. It’s been going on for years as we’ve reported. The company, like Microsoft or IBM before it, treads a fine line between relying on smaller, nimbler partners to come up with innovative new services, and then adding more value-added services itself. Amazon launched a partner program last year to help navigate this terrain.

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The streaming video company, famous for its use of cloud services, is putting up $100,000 to urge developers to come up with new features or “improve usability, quality, reliability and security of computing resources delivered as a service over the internet.” The company’s not new to contests: In 2006 it launched The Netflix Prize for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to aid in personalized film ratings. That prize was discontinued a few years later.

As for the new challenge, Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt said in a statement:

“Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging … No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored, and developed. The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to attract and focus the attention of the most innovative minds to create the advances that will take cloud to the next level.”

Prizes will be offered in 10 categories and winners will be judged by a panel including Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon; Martin Fowler, chief scientist of Thoughtworks; Simon Wardley, cloud strategist; Joe Weinman, author and Telx SVP; Aino Corry, developer training expert at University of Aarhus; and Yury Israilevsky, VP of Netflix Cloud.

Deadline for entry is September 15, 2013 with winners to be announced at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Re:Invent conference in November. There’s more information on the prize at Github.

AWS already hosts a startup challenge, but contests like this might bring in some fresh thinking from new and exciting sources.  I look forward to seeing what comes of this contest.

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