Fewer data centres in the future: AWS CTO

By Lum Ka Kay April 27, 2016

End-customers no longer need to own their own data centres
New AWS office in KL to be led by former VMware country chief

Fewer data centres in the future: AWS CTO

MANY large enterprises are closing down their data centres and moving their data to the cloud.

But this shift is “within expectations,” according to Amazon Web Services Inc (AWS) chief technology officer Dr Werner Vogels (pic above), who also said that data centres will become “dusty” over time.

“There will be fewer data centres owned by companies themselves – which is normal.

“If you look back 100 years, companies used to have their own electricity generators or otherwise would not have had access to electricity. But the moment electricity became available to the public, these [company-owned] generators no longer played a crucial part.

“Perhaps 10 years ago, it was crucial to own data centres to be able to build your own business, but that is no longer the case,” he told Digital News Asia (DNA) on the sidelines of AWS Malaysia Summit 2016 in Kuala Lumpur on April 26.

US icon General Electric (GE) is one company that intends to move over 60% of its global workload to AWS, saying it would be closing 30 to 34 of its data centres over the next few years.

Video streaming company Netflix also shut down its last data centre last year, going 100% on the cloud.

Expanding footprint

Meanwhile in his keynote address at the summit, Vogels also announced that AWS would be opening new data centres in five new geographic regions – Canada, China, India, North America and the United Kingdom – by the end of the year.

The US cloud giant currently operates 33 ‘Availability Zones’ across 12 geographic regions. Singapore is the only country within the South-East Asian region that has two Availability Zones.

Availability Zones consist of one or more discrete data centres, each with redundant power, networking and connectivity, housed in separate facilities.

These Availability Zones offer customers the ability to operate production applications and databases which are more highly available, fault tolerant and scalable than would be possible from a single data centre, according to AWS.

New shop in KL

Fewer data centres in the future: AWS CTO The cloud computing giant also confirmed that it has established an office in Malaysia – first reported by DNA in February – to further support its rapidly growing customer base here.

And as reported by DNA, the AWS Malaysia office will be led by former VMware Inc Malaysia country head Laurence Si (pic).

“Through the 10 years of working with more than a million active customers worldwide, AWS has gained experience in handling almost every imaginable use case,” said AWS Asia Pacific managing director Shane Owenby.

“Choosing to locate the AWS office in Kuala Lumpur speaks to the rapidly growing customer base, the local talent here, and the investment we are making to accelerate cloud adoption across Malaysia.

“We are excited to work with even more local startups and enterprises to save cost, drive innovation and extend their global reach quickly, while maintaining high levels of reliability and security,” he said in an official statement.

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